Savannah River reopens to commercial traffic

Savannah River reopens to commercial traffic The Savannah River reopened late Tuesday after a Mediterranean Shipping Co. containership went aground in the early morning hours.
   U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Lynn said the river was reopened to commercial traffic at 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, about 15 hours after the MSC Korea, a 796-foot Panamanian-flagged containership, lost power during its outbound transit. The ship’s stern went aground in mud on the South Carolina side of the river near Elba Island.
   Four tugboats were able to move the ship into safe water within the navigational channel, and a check by the ship’s crew of all tanks on the vessel found no indication of an oil leak or flooding. Coast Guard personnel report no sightings of oil in the water.
   But because the ship had dropped anchor, and engineers on the ship were unable to restart its engines, the ship eventually had to cut its anchor before being pushed by the tugs to a berth.
   That left the Coast Guard with another problem — determining whether the anchor at the channel bottom might pose a hazard to other vessels transiting up and down the river.
   It called on the Army Corps of Engineers to survey the bottom of the river to locate the anchor. The Coast Guard determined it would not pose a significant hazard to passing ships, but took the temporarily precaution of requiring ships to have a minimum of four feet of clearance over the area where the anchor is located — a maximum draft of 38 feet at low tide.
   The channel in the area has a draft of 42 feet at low tide, Lynn said, and while he did not know the exact tidal variance where the anchor was located, he said the rise at some places on the river is six feet. He said the incident was not preventing from coming or going fully loaded.
   The Coast Guard also required ships to reduce speed when passing the berth where the MSC Korea is located and for the MSC Korea to be accompanied by a tug since it has no power of its own.
   Lynn said a contractor is expected to recover the anchor from the channel bottom later today.
   The incident ended up delaying three inbound ships and seven outbound vessels.
   The cause of the power outage is still under investigation.
   The 1996-built MSC Korea has a container capacity of 3,400 TEUs and is deployed independently by the Geneva-based carrier on a service connecting the U.S. East Coast with ports in the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.