Bulker Operator Claims Proof That Subsea Cable Damage Was Accidental

 

Bulgarian shipping company Navibulgar has released images of the anchoring system aboard the bulker Vezhen, which has been boarded and detained on suspicion of dragging its anchor and damaging a subsea cable between Gotland and Latvia last weekend. According to Navibulgar CEO Capt. Alexander Kalchev, the photos show that the chain stopper failed in a gradual way that allowed the chain to "leak" out slowly under tension, without a runaway. 

The Vezhen was seized by Sweden on Sunday on suspicion of aggravated sabotage after a cable outage between Gotland and Latvia. Sweden's coast guard intercepted the vessel as soon as the cable breach was identified, and a police boarding team deployed to the ship by military helicopter. The crew agreed to divert to Swedish territorial seas, where the ship was detained. A senior Swedish prosecutor and a senior police official have both declined questions about whether the diversion was voluntary. 

Navibulgar's Kalchev insists that the incident was an accident, and has opened an internal investigation. He told Bulgarian business outlet Economic that as Vezhen approached Gotland on Saturday, weather conditions were rough, with waves of 10 feet and winds of 40 knots. Surveillance footage from the bridge shows that the Vezhen's bow took a pounding. In these conditions, the wave action worked the port anchor back and forth until the wire stopper on the chain failed, he said. After that, all the weight of the chain and anchor hung on the guillotine stopper. The stopper failed gradually under tension, letting a few links slip underneath the bar at a time, he said.  

"[The guillotine stopper] bore the blows of every wave that crashed into the axis of the ship, which little by little led to its wear and tear and the gradual 'leakage' of the chain into the sea," explained Kalchev. He said that such incidents had happened before, but never causing subsea cable damage. (Guillotine stopper failures have been reported previously in the near-miss literature.)

According to Kalchev, the wear on the stopper bar proved that the anchor drop was accidental, even if expensive and politically ill-timed. "There is no way to calculate at what point the wire and guillotine would give way and drop the anchor at the exact moment when the ship is next to the cable in order to deliberately cause an incident," he said. 

For now, the ship's crew have been neither detained nor questioned, Kalchev said. "The investigation is probably ongoing, but there are no investigators on board the ship and no interviews have been conducted with the crew," he told the outlet.