Here are five reason's it has sunk.DIETMAR HASENPUSCH/AFP/Getty Image
For the past two months a “ghost ship” has been wandering the North Atlantic Ocean and is now getting dangerously close to the Irish coast. The MV Lyubov Orlova, a former Russian cruise ship, has gone through an unfortunate series of events and in the end has been abandoned and left adrift.
The ship, built in 1976, was purchased by the Canadian firm Cruise North Expeditions, who intended to use it for summer cruises in the Arctic. Due to a financial dispute with the Russian owners, it was seized in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where it remained tied from September 2010 to January 2013.
On January 23rd, the Lyubov Orlova left Canada’s shores. The plan was to tow it to a scrapyard in the Dominican Republic but something went wrong: a day after departure the cable snapped, sending the ship adrift.
After a few days an oil platform, Atlantic Hawk, spotted the vessel and secured it, but on February 4th, was compelled by Canada’s transport authority to cut it loose because of dangerous sea conditions.
Since then the Lyubov Orlova has been adrift in the North Atlantic Ocean causing much concern. As a matter of fact the ship has no crew or warning lights and, in the unfortunate case of accident or sinking, it will spill toxic liquids and other non-degradable chemicals into the water.
Since the ship is now in international waters and given the dangerous sea conditions in that area, Canada’s transport authority has decided not to pursue the vessel.
So what will happen now to this wandering “ghost ship?”
- See more at: MV Lyubov Orlova
This week, the internet exploded with speculation that the M/V Lyubov Orlova, a derelict Soviet-made cruise ship cut loose from Newfoundland last winter, was on the verge of smashing into Ireland or the British Isles and unleashing a terrifying cargo of cannibalistic rats.
“Once the rats make landfall, they will be very, very hungry for something besides the raw flesh of their comrades at sea,” read a Thursday post by Gawker.com that soon spawned similar speculation around the English-speaking world.
But while Canada did indeed send a derelict Soviet cruise ship on a course for the Emerald Isle — and while it is indeed populated by a colony of Newfoundland rats — the M/V Lyubov Orlova has almost certainly been consigned to a watery grave:
Ever since, even as she bobbed around one of the world’s busiest ocean trade routes, nobody has been able to get a visual on the 90 meter long former cruise ship. And it’s not for lack of trying: Reports of a rat-infested ghost ship have a way of narrowing the eyes of North Atlantic mariners, particularly when they’ve had to worry about getting their freighters to Halifax or New York without hitting the damn thing.
And as shall be shown below, although the ship is without power, authorities have been able to receive scattered positioning signals from the vessel’s emergency equipment. The last recorded position, made in March, was less than 700 nautical miles from the Irish Coast. This indicates that the ship was already well past the halfway mark. At that rate, if she was still afloat, she should have been appearing off Galway harbour by June.
In a February, 2013 email to the National Post, Irish Department of Transport spokeswoman Caroline Ryan said they were poring over satellite imagery, drawing up ocean drift models and readying aircraft patrols to make sure they could intercept the wayward ship before it could emerge out of the fog and take out an Irish ferry or two.
After a fruitless year of such searching, Ireland is pretty confident the Lyubov Orlova is gone.
“Our belief is that it has more than likely sunk, given the storms that have gone through the region,” Chris Reynolds from the Irish Coast Guard told the Irish Independent on Friday.
And it’s not like the Lyubov Orlova was in tip-top condition to begin with. Before going to sea, the ship had spent three years deteriorating in St. John’s harbour and tellingly, the only buyer she could fetch was a scrap dealer.
In the October words of Irish Coast Director Chris Reynolds, she was less a cruise ship than “4,000 tonnes of metal,” he told the BBC.
The Lyubov Orlova’s immense size certainly makes it a bit heartier, but not immune. Take the example of the MTS Oceanos, a Greek-owned cruise ship that was 60 meters longer than the Lyubov Orlova. In 1991, the vessel was on a routine cruise off the coast of South Africa when [it sank].
Like any modern cruise vessel, the Lyubov Orlova carried EPIRBs (Emergency Position Indicating Rescue Beacon), safety devices that are strapped to the ship’s lifeboats and activated automatically when they come into contact with salt water. In late February, Transport Canada confirmed that an EPIRB from the vessel had been activated.
Two weeks later, another EPIRB was switched online, prompting Canada to send an aircraft over its reported position. What the patrol was a single lifeboat drifting alone in the North Atlantic, and no sign of the Lyubov Orlova.
Of course, it’s possible that the signals simply came from lifeboats that fell away and hit the water—and that the Lyubov Orlova itself is still proudly coursing towards Ireland with its complement of Canadian rodents.
But as the Irish Coast Guard’s Mr. Reynolds has often told European media, they may never know for sure. “You can’t prove a negative,” he said this week.