Kolkata, Dec 22 (IANS) Nearly a month after it suffered extensive damages in a collision with another ship in West Bengal’s Hooghly river, a stranded container vessel has been brought to dry dock at Diamond Harbour near here for repairs, a port official said Wednesday.
The Gibraltar-registered vessel Tiger Spring was grounded on the sandbar beside the navigation channel in the South 24 Parganas district after the collision, awaiting repairs as the containers could not be unloaded with the infrastructure available with the Kolkata Port Trust (KoPT).
‘Some of the containers were unloaded Tuesday with the help of a large crane hired from a Singapore-based firm. With the unloading of the containers the vessel came up slightly and it was then taken to the dry dock at Diamond Harbour for repair work Tuesday night,’ said Arun Kumar Bagchi, director marine department of KoPT.
‘The unloading of containers would be completed by Wednesday and then the repairs will be initiated as per the experts’ suggestion,’ Bagchi told IANS over phone.
Earlier, the experts from the Netherlands-based salvage firm engaged by the ship’s owner suggested that they could carry out welding to repair the damage only if the ship was lifted out of the sand into which it had settled, he said.
‘The vessel could not be lifted then as we are facing difficulties in unloading the containers,’ added Bagchi.
The Colombo-bound container vessel was manoeuvering through the Rangaphala navigational channel when it was hit by the Bahamas-registered ship Green Valley, at the confluence of the Hooghly and the Rupnarayan rivers at Nurpur. Since then it was grounded on the sandbars beside the river channel.
