The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has entered into a contract with local marine services company Subsea to conduct an additional search for the 16 remaining containers which fell from Yang Ming Marine Transport’s 4,250 teu containership YM Efficiency.
.YM Efficiency lost 81 containers overboard into Australian waters off the Newcastle-Port Stephens coast in June 2018. The cleanup contractors removed around 1040 tonnes of pollution from around 400 km of shoreline including plastics, furniture, tyres and paper products in the initial search, while there are 16 containers yet to be located.
The search area has been defined based on an analysis of the ship’s track and previous data collected through subsea scanning.  Work commenced this last week and will continue until the first week of April.
AMSA said the timing should allow it to negotiate a possible contract extension to remove any newly identified containers during the current project, with recovery vessel MV Pride expected to arrive in Newcastle early April.
In February, AMSA detained a Yang Ming Marine boxship over disputes related to the cleanup expenses resulting from the incident. The vessel was later released.
