One crew member from a container ship was missing after the vessel collided with a U.S.-flagged oil tanker off the northeastern coast of England on Monday, causing multiple explosions and forcing the crews of both ships to abandon their vessels.
The Stena Immaculate, a 600-foot long oil tanker, was anchored in the North Sea when it was struck by a container ship called the Solong, according to Crowley, the Florida-based company that manages the tanker.
The collision caused a cargo tank containing jet fuel to be ruptured and “fuel was reported released,” the company said in a statement. “The Stena Immaculate crew abandoned the vessel following multiple explosions onboard,” it said, adding that “all Crowley mariners are safe.”
Ernst Russ, a Hamburg-based shipping company that owns the Solong, said in a statement that both ships had sustained serious damage and that one of its 14 crew members was missing.
“Efforts to locate the missing crew member are ongoing,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Later on Monday night, Britain’s coast guard said in a statement that “after an extensive search for the missing crew member, sadly they have not been found and the search has ended.” It added that both vessels remained on fire.
Tracking data from Marine Traffic, a website that monitors the movement of vessels, showed that the Stena Immaculate was anchored just off the coast of the mouth of the River Humber, near Hull, when it was hit, while the Solong, sailing under the Portuguese flag, was on its way from Scotland to the Netherlands.
The incident happened during daylight hours, raising questions about how the two ships had collided.
Graham Stuart, a local lawmaker, said in a video statement that one person had been hospitalized but said he believed that the remaining crew members from both vessels were safe.
He noted that if the jet fuel leak was able to escape from the tanker in large quantities, “it could have a devastating environmental impact.”
“I’m calling for a unified command structure to be brought in to make sure there is proper accountability for both the human and ecological impacts of this collision,” he added.
Initial images shared by the BBC showed fire and thick black smoke rising from the ships, and local authorities said that in the immediate aftermath, a number of people had been taken to area hospitals.
The British coast guard said it was “coordinating the emergency response to reports of a collision between a tanker and cargo vessel off the coast of East Yorkshire,” and that an alarm was first raised at 9:48 a.m. local time.
Rescue helicopters and lifeboats were deployed, as well as vessels with “firefighting capability,” the coast guard said in a statement.
The coast guard added that it was assessing “the likely counter pollution response required.”
Martyn Boyers, the chief executive of the port of Grimsby East, spoke to Sky News, a British news channel, and said that the area had been foggy on Monday morning, which may have contributed to visibility issues.
“This morning, it’s been very foggy, and the fog has never lifted,” he added.
Crowley, a U.S.-based logistics, marine and energy company, serves both government and commercial contracts. The tanker had been previously approved to be chartered on a short-term basis to serve U.S. government operations. The Solong was carrying mixed cargo that included alcohol and 15 containers of sodium cyanide, according to Lloyd’s List intelligence, which provides shipping insights. The size of those containers was not immediately clear.
Sodium cyanide, a white powder, is a highly toxic material that can be a deadly poison but also has variety of industrial uses, including in mining, metal extraction and chemical manufacturing.
A spokesman for the East Midlands Ambulance Service, which covers the local area, said that 36 patients were assessed at the Grimsby port by its ambulance crews and that “none required transporting to hospital.”
Jonathan Roach, a container shipping analyst at Braemar, a London ship broker, said that the Solong was a relatively small ship — 140 meters, or around 460 feet long — doing short runs from Rotterdam down Britain’s east coast in the North Sea.
The Stena Immaculate was in a well-known anchorage off Hull, and in a situation like that, the rule of the sea is “the vessel not at anchor has to give way,” he said, because it is much more difficult for the anchored ship to avoid a collision. He noted that the area was relatively busy with a variety of ships, including ferries, adding, “We have to be thankful no one was killed.”
Experts who are looking at the potential environmental impact of the incident noted that it was too early to fully understand the fallout from the crash.
David Slater, an honorary professor in the School of Engineering at Cardiff University, said that if jet fuel had leaked from the Stena Immaculate, that made it more likely that the crash site would catch on fire.
“The upside is it’s less of an environmental problem than black crude oil,” he said in a statement. “In some cases like this, it’s better to leave it to burn, but that depends on how much fuel is leaking.”
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