Fraught with challenges: Ship salvaging industry rides on rough waters

The rescue of the cargo ship that choked the busy Suez Canal has put the spotlight on a sector

Cochin Shipyard, which has one of the largest dock capacities in the country, started work on building a new dry dock in 2018.

This was to enhance existing capacity to build and repair large vessels, including aircraft carriers for the Indian Navy. But a few months down the line, the company encountered a problem.
 

A dock flap gate, which had sunk years back at the northern side of the quay, was hindering work. And the large construction major, which had been engaged to build that dry dock, couldn’t proceed till the sunk gate was removed.
 

It was no easy task. The gate weighed 530 tonne, had 6-8 metre of silt and mud clinging to the body besides at least a dozen ruptured buoyancy tanks. The scale of salvage brought in Sealord Diving & Salvage to the rescue. This Navi Mumbai-based company is one of India’s largest in the ship salvaging and underwater repair/construction business. It was established by a former Navy man with a keen interest in underwater diving, who took an early retirement and then trained under global salvaging majors before launching the company in India.
 

The closely watched rescue of MV Ever Given that choked the Suez Canal, one of the world’s busiest waterways, has turned the spotlight on companies that offer ship salvaging services. The M V Ever Given was a rather large ship, loaded with container cargo. The ship’s owner had to call in one of the world’s largest salvaging companies from Singapore to retrieve it and float it back in the waters. All in all, it was six days before the ship was freed.

 

At Cochin Shipyard, the operation to clear the dock flap gate last year took two months, 24 people (including expert divers) and a lot of patience.
 

“The gate was large and it was also sunk in soft silt so we had to desilt it first,” says Narendar Khambra, director of Sealord Diving. “Divers had managed to reach the top of the gate early in 2020 when Covid-19 halted work and we could resume it only in August.” After desilting, suction pumps and divers were used to clear the gate of all mud. This took 20-25 days. “Then we cut open the buoyancy tanks inside the gate, removed water inside those tanks and filled them with air. The tidal chamber inside the gate had 28 windows, which were also sealed,” he adds.
 

Ship salvaging is a specialised business, requiring expert divers and complex dredging equipment and, at least in India, it largely operates on what is termed as the “no cure, no pay” basis. This means no payment is received by the salvage company unless the salvage operation has been successful.
 

No wonder then that there are just a handful of ship salvaging companies in operation.
 

During a salvage operation, divers are expected to salvage and conduct repairs 35-40 metres from the surface. Since the usual time limit for a diver to stay underwater is about half an hour, multiple divers are needed for each project.
 

In case a sunk ship needs to be removed from the sea bed — a ship can weigh up to 1,600 tonne or more — the salvaging company has to figure out how many pieces to break it into, equipment needed to lift those pieces and whether the ship needs to be emptied of cargo first.
 

Yogendra Choudhary, promoter of Mumbai-based IDA Underwater Services, another Indian firm conducting salvaging and underwater repairs, says such projects are not large in number in India but queries come to him from around the world.
 

He recently received one from Nigeria, to retrieve about 15 ships of various sizes that had capsized over a period of time.

Choudhary claims to be one of the top underwater divers in the country. He gave up diving because of a road accident in 2009 and subsequently set up this company. IDA offers services like retrieving sunk ships from the seabed and carrying out underwater repairs for pipelines etcetera.
 

Both Sealord Diving and Salvage and IDA Underwater Services operate in a market that has been facing challenges due to lack of salvaging instances and the need for large working capital to fund equipment and manpower. (Neither Sealord Diving nor IDA wanted the value of the contracts they handle revealed.)
 

Globally, too, the salvaging industry faces similar challenges. According to the International Salvage Union, the challenges come in the form of increasing vessel size — the bigger the ship, the harder it is to salvage — and the decline in the number of salvage situations in recent years.