Oil in wrecks

The Finnish coastal waters are shallow and routes are narrow, thus there is a lot of ship wrecks in Finnish waters. Some of the wrecks contain oil, that was ship's fuel. Along time the wrecks rust, their structures collapse and the oil in the tanks start to leak out from the wreck.

On the bottom of the sea the water is most of the year so cold, that the heavier oil grades are almost solid and they do not leak out from the wreck before the water gets warmer and the oil becomes liquid again - these wrecks start to leak oil usually in August.

SYKE has developed special equipment and methods to remove oil from wrecks. The first large scale oil removal work started in year 1994 when the oil removal from wreck of Park Victory started. The work was finalised in year 2000. Altogether 410 m³ oil was removed from the wreck of Park Victory.

In year 1996 total of 230-260 m³ of different kind of oils was removed from the wreck of M/S Estonia. 

In June 2003 the wreck of 1964 sunken vessel Brita Dan started to leak oil out side Rauma. Total of 20 m³ quite light grade of oil was removed from the wreck.

The wreck of vessel Coolaroo is located outside Helsinki. SYKE has conducted onsite studies in years 2001 to 2005 with the aim to get a realistic estimation of the oil amount still left in the wreck.