AprilMay2015 FREE!
WHY WAS SHE JUST LEFT TO SINK?
Just as we were going to press this month, reports started coming in about a ship having caught fire in the port of Las Palmas, filling the capital with smoke. Multiple fire crews were called to tackle the blaze both from the quayside and from boats in port. The emergency services were unable to get it under control.
At some point, someone made the decision that the fires on the Russian Fishing trawler, Oleg Naydenov, could not be put out safely, and that her fully laden fuel tanks posed a threat to other vessels and so ordered the ship out to sea. She was towed first east, toward the southern tip of Fuerteventura, and then when the
fires had been extinguised, she was towed south until she sank 2 days later just 15 nautical miles off the point of Maspalomas. Despite repeated assurances that she posed no threat to the marine environment, the stricken vessel started to leak some of her 1,400 tonnes of fuel, diesel and lubricants in to the sea.
Ministers seemed satisfied that the slick would be simply blown away from the islands, but as blobs of oil pollution started to come ashore everyone wants to know why, once the fire was out, she was left to sink and not towed back to safe port, where she could have been dealt with properly.