The Suez Canal Authority has successfully recovered the sunken tugboat Fahd which sank following a collision with an LPG carrier.
The tugboat sank in the Suez Canal on Saturday after colliding with the LPG carrier Chinagas Legend resulting in one fatality.
resulting in one fatality.The Hong Kong-flagged gas carrier was unscathed in the incident which took place around the 51 km point in the Al-Balah bypass.
Ossama Rabiee, chairman and managing director of the Suez Canal Authority said that the sunken tugboat was recovered by the Authority’s Inkaz salvage crane and that the waterway was clear.
The salvage operation was completed without affecting the traffic through the Canal despite strong water currents, zero visibility underwater, and deep diving to depths of 27 meters.
Before retrieving the Fahd, a survey was carried out to locate the tugboat, followed by securing the location using warning and guiding buoys to enable safe transit for vessels to transit. The recovery site was also secured environmentally against potential oil spills.
At the time of the collision, traffic along the waterway was briefly halted while salvors removed the tug’s wreck.
Rabiee noted that traffic through the Canal was now running normally in both directions and it wasn’t affected by the salvage works. On Monday and Tuesday, the Canal registered 146 transits in both directions at a total net tonnage of 8.4m tons.
The canal has had an eventful year in terms of the number of accidents with groundings far more numerous than in previous years.
