SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Salvage of the U-864

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Salvage of the U-864

The Norwegian Coastal Administration (NCA) has decided to award the contract for the possible salvage of the U-864 submarine and its cargo of mercury to Mammoet Salvage B.V.

Two options have been proposed to deal with the environmental hazard formed by the mercury in the U-864 submarine: (a) to encase the wreck and cover the seabed to prevent the spread of the pollution, and (b) to recover the wreck (salvage) and remove all the pollutants from the marine environment. Mammoet Salvage has proposed a safe and innovative salvage solution.

The U-864 time bomb
On 9 February 1945, the German submarine U-864 was torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Venturer. The U-864 sank about two nautical miles west of the island Fedje, just north of Bergen, with the loss of all 73 on board. The submarine's cargo included approximately 67 tons of metallic mercury which is highly toxic. As the U-864 was on a mission it was also carrying a full load of weapons. The vessel's wreckage is considered to be a potential long-term threat to human health and the environment.

Two alternatives
The Norwegian Parliament has to decide if the wreck and its cargo should be raised to the surface, or be encased on the seabed and the contaminated sediment capped to prevent the spread of pollutants. Mammoet Salvage has proposed a method to raise the wreck which satisfies the environmental requirements. If the Norwegian Parliament approves this method then the salvage operation is likely to take place in 2010. This decision will probably be taken before the end of 2008.

A solution
The NCA selected Mammoet Salvage B.V. for the potential salvage of the German submarine because of the company's innovative engineered solution. This together with the experience gained on the remote control salvage of the Runner 4 in the Baltic Sea last year, has resulted in a safe, fully remotely-controled operation. With this system Mammoet will raise the submarine and take away the source of pollution without the need for anyone working under water. Mammoet Salvage has found a solution to overcome one of the specific challenges: lifting the wreck from the unstable seabed.

Decision
The Norwegian Parliament now has to decide if the wreck and its cargo should be salvaged forever or be left in place and encased and capped.

Mammoet Salvage B.V. and affiliated company Mammoet Norge AS are part of the Mammoet Holding B.V. (heavy transport and lifting specialists) which was awarded the contract of the salvage of the Kursk Russian nuclear submarine in 2001. Since then Mammoet Salvage has carried out a range of salvage projects throughout the world.

I'd have thought it would be best to seal the wreck off....seeing as how it's a war grave.

Well, sealing off just postpones the problem. Someday even the best seal will be destroyed by the constant forces of the ocean. Plenty of people have died in that thing, lets make sure no one else is getting hurt by it.

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Originally Posted by Schroeder

I full agree... :yep:

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Originally Posted by Schroeder

Your probably right, but I still get a sense of unease at the thought of disturbing the dead in that thing. :hmm:

Anybody any idea why this submarine had that cargo on board and what the uses were of mercury at that time??

i think the sending of frog-men to evaluate the erosion status of the shell should be a first sensed step . don't know the mercury lifetime but i think the shell encaping solution should be a viable solution only if the encaping material as a higher lifetime than the mercury as toxic substance

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Originally Posted by Uncle Goose

Anybody any idea why this submarine had that cargo on board and what the uses were of mercury at that time??

I'm discovering the thing , the operation involving the u-boot was called operation Caesar (cargo for Japan) but if the operation's described on Wiki nothing about what the mercury would have been used for , any info .. someone

I'm pretty sure there isn't much Red Mercury in the sub, but this kind of mercury: Mercury(element) in Wikipedia

You are totaly right...thanks for your correction!

What an irony...the commander of an U-Boat loaded with mercury has as family name...Wolfram :-?

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Originally Posted by Hitman

What an irony...the commander of an U-Boat loaded with mercury has as family name...Wolfram :-?

Ironic...isnt it?
Mercury and Wolfram deadly united in fate! :eek:

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Originally Posted by Red Heat

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hitman

What an irony...the commander of an U-Boat loaded with mercury has as family name...Wolfram :-?

Ironic...isnt it?
Mercury and Wolfram deadly united in fate! :eek:

The same name as the guy whose stretched limo I hijacked on arrival at Houston for last months SS Meet :rotfl:

I just get the uneasy feeling that trying to raise a wreck that has been decaying on the ocean floor for over half a century will cause an even greater catastrophe than the slow leak from the wreck as it stands now.

Imagine how much more damage sixty-seven tons of mercury set free at once would do.

Let the dead rest and leave well enough alone.

I don't get the connection between mercury and the name Wolfram. If you're referring to wolframite, that's the most common, naturally occuring ore of tungsten.

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Originally Posted by PappyCain

Sixty-one years ago a U-boat slipped out of the Baltic port of Kiel, sent by Hitler on a secret voyage to Japan in a mission to avert Germany’s looming defeat.
U864 never reached her destination. She was sunk by the British in the only known case of one submarine destroying another while both were submerged. It is a remarkable tale of wartime derring-do — but one with a sting in the tail.

The wreck now lies, in two pieces, 152 metres (500ft) beneath North Sea waters off the Norwegian coast, and contains 65 tonnes of mercury in 1,857 corroding canisters. It is a toxic timebomb.

“The potential for pollution is unlike anything we have seen in Norwegian history,” said Ane Eide Kjaeras, spokeswoman for the Norwegian Coastal Administration.

The mercury, which was used in weapons production, was U864’s secondary cargo. Her most important load when she left Kiel on her maiden voyage on December 5, 1944, was made up of advanced Messerschmitt jet engine parts, for use in Japanese aircraft.

Hitler apparently believed that if Japan could regain air superiority in the Pacific the United States would have to divert resources from Europe.

British codebreakers at Bletchley Park learnt of Operation Caesar in time, and the Allies dispatched HMS Venturer, a V-Class submarine commanded by Lieutenant Jimmy S. Launders, 25, from the Shetland Islands to intercept U864 as she headed south from Bergen.

Venturer could not use sonic waves to hunt her quarry for fear of betraying her own position and U864, commanded by Captain Ralf-Reimar Wolfram, was able to slip past, only to suffer serious engine trouble later.

Shortly after 9am on February 9, 1945, Venturer detected U864’s engine noise using hydrophones and then spotted her periscope.

The hunt was on.

“We felt a bit shaky because it could sink us the same as we could sink them,” Harry Plummer, an able seaman on Venturer, told a forthcoming BBC Timewatch documentary on the subject.

For three hours Venturer stalked the 87-metre U864 as the German submarine zig- zagged to make herself a harder target. Then Launders gambled, deciding to fire all four of Venturer’s torpedoes even though this would leave her defenceless if they missed.

He calculated U864’s course as best he could, then fired at 17 second intervals. Each torpedo took more than two minutes to reach its target. The first three missed but the fourth broke U864 in half. There was a “loud, sharp explosion followed by breaking-up noises”, Launders wrote in the ship’s log at 12.14pm. Mr Plummer said that it sounded like someone crushing a box of matches.
“It was a relief,” he recalled. But “the next minute we realised it was another submarine and more submariners had been killed . . . When you reflected afterwards you think to yourself, ‘Poor bastards’.”

U864 lay undisturbed on the sea bed, about two kilometres off the island of Fedje, until discovered by the Norwegian Navy in 2003. Underwater pictures show the ghostly wreck covered in seaweed, her bow and stern lying 40 metres apart, her rudder locked in an emergency dive position.

What alarmed the Norwegian authorities were the dangerous levels of mercury contamination on the surrounding seabed, and the discovery of documents indicating that U864 had 65 tonnes of mercury on board. Traces of mercury were also found in fish, raising fears that the cargo could contaminate the food chain.

The Norwegian Coastal Administration monitors about 2,500 wrecks, 400 of them from the Second World War, but this is the most threatening, Gunnar Guellan, the project manager for U864, said. Fishing and boating in the immediate area have been banned and islanders have been told not to eat local seafood.

The Norwegian Coastal Administration has dug up near the keel a single mercury canister. Its 5mm-thick steel wall has been eroded in places to less than a millimetre. The administration can only guess at the condition of the other canisters still inside the wreck

the U-boot seemed to suffer mechanical failures which forced it to go back to port (its engines were abnormally noisy too) , when it was detected by the Venturer the U-boot was waiting for its escort arrival

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Originally Posted by PappyCain

For those who may be interested in a high tech undersea salvage operation you can click on links to images, PDF documents on salvage planning, specialty tooling, animations etc. in below link.

http://www.smit.com/kursk/photos/index.htm

S'
PC

impressive especially when we know the size of a Typhoon

to come back to the u-boot obviously it would be better if the wreck could be taken out of the sea but the problem it's that the u-boot doesn't have the same level of erosion than the Kursk

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Originally Posted by jpm1

Actually mercury is a natural element so i would assume it would not really degrade over time very much if at all.

The stuff itself is pretty nasty and exposure to even a small amount of mercury can cause medical problems. Over a longer timespan it has the ability ( apart from a lot of other medical problems ) to damage DNA in living cells which will cause a lot more problems down the line.

Can you imagine sitting on top of 67 tons of that stuff :doh: let alone it posioning the marine life in that part of the seas ?

And even if they were to encase U-864 i don't really see how they could prevent the mercury from entering the very seafloor this submarine is now resting on. The surrounding soil would get poisoned & eventually mercury would work it´s way into the foodchain again. So, I can understand their desicion to salvage the wreck. It's basically a timebomb waiting to blow.

Having said all that...............

Even with it being a wargrave i don't see why it couldn't be treated with respect. Any remains found onboard could either be laid to rest somewhere ashore or perhaps be given a new burial at sea somehow, somewhere.

Just my $0.02

I really wouldn't be that concerned about it. The oceans are still fine even after we've dumped all sorts of crap into it, ranging from sewage to toxic waste. A little mercury isn't going to help anything, but it certainly isn't going to destroy everything. Don't get me wrong. I hate it when people litter the sea, but I think they're making a big deal out of nothing here, and with the said, is it really worth spending millions to tamper with the wreck of a World War II submarine with a small cargo of mercury entombed inside its hulk?

Stealth Hunter, I'm not willing to offend anyone here but i do think you should take a bit more time to look at what you are saying here.

I've seen a documentary on Discovery about a team investigating a part of the sea somewhere in Asia where, due to vulcanic gasses being released from the oceanfloor, the water had higher concentrations of mercury in it.

As a result it killed off a lot of life and corals in the area. Sure, life did adapt to it over the hunderds of years this was going on but was nowwhere near the level of what it could have been.

Intresting sidenote, for the people in that area fishing to provide them with food for their communities was impossible as the concentration of mercury within fish was so high it would be suicide just to eat anything from it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stealth Hunter

Is it really worth spending millions to tamper with the wreck of a World War II submarine with a small cargo of mercury entombed inside its hulk?

:nope: Do you have any idea how much 67.000 kg / 147709 lbs of that stuff is. U-864 is corroding and that mercury won't stay inside there forever. If that was lying somewhere near you and you knew about the damage it could do to you and will do to your environment you'd be happy someone was taking care of it.

As with a lot of things nature can partly take care her of herself but there´s only so much it can handle before things will remain affected.There are a lot of places in the world where this is already the case.

Although it would be easy to ignore the area and problems with regards to the fishing stock for future generations i think the Norwegian authorities deserve some respect for willing to take some responsability rather then leaving it for future generations to deal with.