M/V Rena Grounding

Maritime New Zealand mobilised Ambipar Response from the UK to New Zealand to assist in 3 key areas of operation in relation to the grounding of the M/V Rena, these were:

Marine Recovery, provide marine assets and anchorage to recover containers that are in the water outside of the 1km safety zone;

Shoreline Clean-up, provision of all resources to respond to container/cargo recovery from the shore;

Container, cargo and waste handling, provide all resources to ensure correct handling, storage, transportation, segregation and treatment of recovered product.

Ambipar Response were mobilised by Maritime New Zealand due to the company’s vast experience dealing with similar projects including the MSC Napoli in the UK. The MV Rena was the largest maritime incident in New Zealand’s history with significant impacts to wildlife, local communities and the environment. The vessel in total had 1368 containers on-board including 31 dangerous cargo, 1713m3 of heavy fuel oil (HFO) and 68m3 of marine gas oil (MGO).

Project Works:

The project was significant with Ambipar mobilising an incident response team of 12 from the UK within 6 hours of the initial notification. Over the following weeks Ambipar scaled up to provide in the region of 400 response personnel to provide a range of services including but not limited to:

Marine recovery operations including the provision of vessels and divers;

Shoreline recovery operations, at its peak this covered 400km of New Zealand coastline;

Decontamination operations, this included the development of central reception waste facility;

Community liaison, due to the remote nature of some of the recovery operations this involved training and employing local community members to assist with the recovery operations;

Develop environmental protection measures, this was of particular importance when creating access points to certain areas of shoreline due to endangered species being present;

Haulage and transportation services, particular emphasis on the transportation of damaged containers and debris from the port reception facility to the central reception waste facility;

Post Clean-up environmental monitoring, develop and engage in a long-term environmental monitoring process to ensure no further contaminants present.

Results:

Incident response team on the ground within 48hours of initial notification from the UK to New Zealand;

Scaled up to 400 responders withing 4 weeks of being on the ground;

Building of a central wate reception facility within 6 weeks of arrival in country;

Marine recovery operations successfully located and recovered over 850tonnes of debris;

400km of shoreline clean-up operations manged effectively and safety for the duration of the project;

Oil spilled from the vessel recovered within 8 weeks;

No lost time safety incidents throughout the duration of the project (19 months).