UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: The Hoegh Osaka, a giant car-carrying ship bound for Dubai via Bremerhaven in Germany, left Southampton in the UK and after suddenly listing to one side was run aground on a sandbank in a desperate attempt to save it.
Salvage efforts are under way to right the ship by pumping out water from its hull, with hopes that the Hoegh Osaka can be refloated and towed back to port tomorrow.
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Such incidents are rare. But that will be small consolation to the owners of the 1,100 Land Rovers and Minis on board, many of which, along with the Wraith, were bound for Dubai. No one knows how long they will now have to wait for their cars.
Some of those on the lower decks “may well have been washed by seawater but we won’t know until the salvor can get right inside”, says Mark Clark, a spokesman for Norwegian shipping company Hoegh Auto liners.
The Rolls, at least, appears to have kept its tyres dry.
“She’s sat on car deck 12 and she’s not been touched by any water, though of course she is still at a 52-degree angle,” says Mr Clark.
It remains to be seen whether all or any of the cars on board “will be just driven off and sold as new or whether they’ll go into the used-car market, or the manufacturers will just write them off”.
Regardless, the delay for the customers eagerly awaiting their new cars in Dubai serves as a reminder not only of the dependence of the UAE and other economies on the world’s maritime trade network, but also of the potentially fragile nature of that economic lifeline.
Specialist ships aside, that lifeline is almost exclusively composed of the vast container ships that ferry goods constantly between Asia and Europe, and all points in between. Again, it would be unfair to characterize the global container industry as being at the mercy of the oceans. According to the World Shipping Council, in 2013 it successfully delivered about 120 million cargo containers, with a total value of more than US$4 trillion.
