A gust of wind drove the cruise ship “Mein Schiff 3” into two container ships as it was leaving Bremerhaven harbour, damaging three ships. No one was injured, as the police told tagesschau.de. The 20-day cruise to the Canary Islands, planned for the evening, was cancelled by the shipping company Tui Cruises on Monday, 26 October.
The accident happened late on Sunday evening. According to the police, the ship was being assisted by tugs as it left when a gust caught it. It then drifted towards two container ships that were moored at the so-called Stromkaje. The smaller container ship suffered slight damage, the larger one considerable damage. The Tui ship was also significantly damaged; images showed destroyed lifeboats.
“The collision tore open the port side of the large container ship over several metres and deformed container guides,” the police said. The damage was in each case several metres above the waterline. None of the ships suffered a water ingress. The water police are investigating. The Ship Safety division imposed a sailing ban on all three ships involved.
First one container ship, then three
Initially there was talk of a collision between the cruise ship and one container ship. Later the police said that three ships in total were affected. According to sat1regional.de and morgenpost.de, the “Nordsee-Zeitung” reported that the hull of a container ship had been torn open over a length of around ten metres.
At the time of the accident, according to a Tui spokeswoman, there were 2,428 guests and 922 crew members on board. All were initially able to stay on the ship while experts examined the situation on site. After the accident the cruise ship returned to the cruise terminal. “The damage found makes short-term repair work in a shipyard necessary,” the spokeswoman said. “We will provide further information as soon as we have confirmed findings.”
A eyewitness video verified by the Deutsche Presse-Agentur shows the ship leaving in a significant swell, the distance to a container ship lying at the harbour wall becoming ever smaller, and the cruise ship finally colliding with the container freighter. “I think that’s it for the trip,” a woman says in the video. The German Weather Service had issued an official warning of wind gusts for Bremerhaven for Sunday.
No all-clear on the coast
The stormy weather goes back to Storm “Manja”, which kept the north on edge in the night to Monday. The East Frisian North Sea island of Norderney was hit by a storm surge. Around 23:00 it reached its peak, with a level of 8.20 metres the water level was around 1.75 metres above normal high water. In Hamburg the Altona fish market was flooded; in Bremerhaven, Wilhelmshaven and Cuxhaven too, car parks stood under water. In Hamburg’s HafenCity a woman driver got stuck in a flooded railway underpass and had to be rescued by the fire brigade.
Off the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog a heavy-lift freighter of a German shipping company was temporarily unable to manoeuvre. Three of the 25 crew members were injured, the news agency ANP reported; two of them were taken by helicopter to the university hospital of Groningen, according to sueddeutsche.de. Initially there had been talk of five injured. The anchoring mechanism of the “UHL Freedom” had not withstood the storm almost 30 kilometres north of the island, and there had also been problems with engine power.
The police control centres in the north reported only a few larger operations in total; serious accidents and personal injuries did not occur according to their assessments so far. The storm also had consequences abroad: according to the BBC, tens of thousands of households in England were without power on Sunday, 6,000 more in Scotland, and in France the power failed in almost 60,000 households according to the local supplier.
There is no all-clear yet. For Monday midday the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) again issued a storm surge warning for the North Sea. The midday or afternoon high water will run up about 1.5 metres higher on the East Frisian coast and in the Weser area, and 1.5 to two metres higher than the mean high water on the North Frisian coast and in the Elbe area. For the “Mein Schiff 3” and its passengers, for now only the shipyard remains – when the trip will be made up is open.
