Major damage to reef caused by Westerhaven
The Cargo ship Westerhaven has been lying atop the barrier reef near Southern Long Caye, about thirty-two miles from Belize City for the past forty-eight hours. The ship left Belize City after eight Tuesday night after dropping off a few containers and the damage to the reef is considerable. According to Ports Commissioner Major Lloyd Jones, the information they have received so far reveals that at ten p.m. the pilot disembarked at English Caye and then the Ship Master plotted a course on a heading of one hundred and seventy degrees. The autopilot was then engaged and about thirty minutes later the ship ran aground onto the reef. And that is the source of controversy. The course heading a hundred and seventy degrees should have taken the ship at least one point one to one point two miles away from the reef. So how did the ship end up on top of Belize’s precious reef system? Well that is the question that the ports commissioner will attempt to answer as soon as the investigation gets underway. He has said that there were no emergencies reported aboard the ship at the time of the incident. If the name of the cargo ship sounds familiar that’s because it has been in the news before. On October 2008, hazardous material from a barrel in a container consigned to Belize Natural Energy was leaking. That situation was contained and there were no damages to Belizean waters. Melanie McField, Marine Scientist and reef expert, told News Five about the damage to a portion of Belize’s Barrier Reef.
Melanie McField, Marine Scientist
“The ship is about a hundred and twenty meters long and it was heading in a southerly direction. It had come out the channel of English Caye and was going between the barrier reef and Turneff going towards Guatemala. For some reason they were traveling rather close to the reef and then bad weather pushed them even further in and the boat went parallel to the reef crust and just pushed the slope of the reef which is where we had these nice spur and grove formations; hills of coral and valleys of sand. The boat, just as it got shallower, scraped up the slope and flattened everything. So the whole reef, the structure; everything, not just individual coral heads, the whole structure is pulverized. It looks like a steam roller ran over it. It’s really amazing, I’ve never seen anything so big. It’s the size of a football field and maybe wider. So it’s a large area that’s completely flattened.”
“The whole reef structure itself is thousands of years. Yeah, that kind of grove takes thousands of years. A coral head—a large coral head—would be like three hundred years old or something but the reef structure itself is built on many different coral heads that grow and die and others grow on top of them and it builds up over time. So it’s not just coral itself, one animal is lost; it’s the whole structure. It’s like all the ancestors that it’s built on got lost.”
Jose Sanchez
“Looking at the video, the way the ship—not your area of expertise—but the way the ship actually went in from what you saw on the video, did it look like ship just crashed into our reef?”
Melanie McField
“No, that was what was unusual; it didn’t go straight into the reef. So it wasn’t like the bow crashing up the slope and usually the damage would be the width of the ship. That would be the area of damage if it went straight up onto the slope. But in this case, it looked like it was brushed up the side. So it was the full length of the boat and that’s why there’s so much damage. The full length of the boat got pushed up the slope and flattened everything so that made it a wider field of damage.”
Ports Commissioner Lloyd Jones says that his team, along with the Department of the Environment and the Fisheries Department, have been at the site. However, the official inquiry as mandated by the Harbors and Merchant Shipping Act will take place once the vessel is removed from the reef. Two salvage experts were brought in from the U.S. to assess the situation. They have said that the ship is re-floatable and are negotiating with the owner to get the contract to remove the Westerhaven. If the details are worked out they will return on Sunday with a tug boat from the US to refloat the vessel. Once that is completed, the Ports Commissioner says that the Westerhaven will be returned to the Belize Ports Authority for their inquiry.
