2022 Anchor-Drag Incident May Have Severed Another Baltic Subsea Cable
After a series of four subsea cable damage incidents involving suspected anchor-dragging in little more than a year, NATO members in the Baltic suspect that Russian "hybrid" sabotage operations could be to blame. But investigators can add at least one more recent incident to the list: in January 2022, a Turkish ship may have dragged anchor under way and severed a subsea power cable in the Kattegat, between Sweden and Denmark. On January 20, 2022, the Konti-Skan 2 cable - a decades-old HVDC link between the Swedish and Danish grids - went out of service when it "suffered a fault due to external impact." Swedish utility Svenska Kraftnät found evidence of an anchor-drag track on the bottom, and it appeared to line up with the AIS trackline of the product tanker Selin D. The vessel slowed down for nine minutes in the same region and same timeframe as the cable break, according to Kraftnät.
The utility filed suit against the owners of the Selin D, alleging that the master of the vessel "caused the damage through gross negligence and with the knowledge that such damage would likely occur." The owner's lawyers assert that the Selin D did not cause the damage, or - if proven otherwise in court - did not cause any alleged damage intentionally.
Kraftnät's lawsuit seeks nearly $6 million in compensation. The case was filed in late 2023, but was little-known to the public until this week, when Dagens Nyheter covered the story.
Selin D is a 2003-built product tanker with a checkered inspection history. It has since been resold to an Italian operator, and has been renamed Ievoli Star. As for the Konti-Skan 2 cable, it will soon be replaced with a new modern HVDC link. The existing Konti-Skan 1 and 2 are expected to age out of service by the 2030s, and the new cable will have nearly 50 percent more power transmission capacity.
Subsea cables do get severed in accidental anchor-drag and trawling incidents every year, but the rapid-fire cluster of cases in the Baltic is unusual. One vessel, the Russia-linked "shadow fleet" tanker Eagle S, has been detained by Finnish police on suspicion of severing multiple cables on Christmas Day; nine members of the tanker's crew are under a travel ban and could face criminal charges.