Combinatie Berging Tricolor

Last updated March 21, 2019

Combinatie Berging Tricolor (CBT) was a consortium of -mainly- Dutch salvaging companies led by Smit Salvaging BV, a daughter company of Smit International.

The Netherlands is a country located mainly in Northwestern Europe. The European portion of the Netherlands consists of twelve separate provinces that border Germany to the east, Belgium to the south, and the North Sea to the northwest, with maritime borders in the North Sea with Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. Together with three island territories in the Caribbean Sea—Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba— it forms a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The official language is Dutch, but a secondary official language in the province of Friesland is West Frisian.

Smit Internationale N.V. is a Dutch company operating in the maritime sector. The company was founded in 1842 by Fop Smit as a towage company with only the 140 horsepower paddle steamer tug Kinderdijk. Fop's sons, Jan and Leendert, continued the company under the name L.Smit &Co and expanded the fleet. In 1870, they began using tugs with propellers. After a merger in 1923 with Internationale Sleepdienst, the name was changed to "L. Smit & Co.'s Internationale Sleepdienst". Formerly listed at the NYSE Euronext stock exchange in Amsterdam, the company was fully acquired by Royal Boskalis Westminster in 2010.

MV Tricolor

The consortium was set up to remove the wreck of the MV Tricolor, a Norwegian registered vehicle carrier operated by Wilh. Wilhelmsen. The consortium consisted of Smit Salvage BV, Scaldis Salvage & Marine Contractors NV, URS Salvage & Marine Contracting NV and Multraship Salvage BV. The contract for the wreck-removal with this consortium was signed on 11 April 2003.^[1]

MV Tricolor was a 50,000 tonne Norwegian-flagged vehicle carrier built in 1987, notable for having been involved in three English Channel collisions within a fortnight.

Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northwestern Europe whose territory comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula; the remote island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard are also part of the Kingdom of Norway. The Antarctic Peter I Island and the sub-Antarctic Bouvet Island are dependent territories and thus not considered part of the kingdom. Norway also lays claim to a section of Antarctica known as Queen Maud Land.

Wilh. Wilhelmsen Holding ASA (WWH) is a global maritime industry group, headquartered in Lysaker, Norway. The group employs more than 21,000 people and has operations in 75 nations. The company is Norway's largest shipping company and one of the world's largest.

Starting in July 2003, the operation was declared complete on October 27, 2004. The salvage method included a carbide-encrusted cutting wire used to slice the wreck into nine sections of 3000 tonnes each. This technique was similar to one Smit had used in salvaging the Russian submarine, K-141 Kursk.^[2]

Cemented carbide is a hard material used extensively as cutting tool material, as well as other industrial applications. It consists of fine particles of carbide cemented into a composite by a binder metal. Cemented carbides commonly use tungsten carbide (WC), titanium carbide (TiC), or tantalum carbide (TaC) as the aggregate. Mentions of "carbide" or "tungsten carbide" in industrial contexts usually refer to these cemented composites.

Russia, officially the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres (6,612,100 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with about 146.77 million people as of 2019, excluding Crimea. About 77% of the population live in the western, European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is the largest metropolitan area in Europe proper and one of the largest cities in the world; other major cities include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.

A submarine is a watercraft capable of independent operation underwater. It differs from a submersible, which has more limited underwater capability. The term most commonly refers to a large, crewed vessel. It is also sometimes used historically or colloquially to refer to remotely operated vehicles and robots, as well as medium-sized or smaller vessels, such as the midget submarine and the wet sub. The noun submarine evolved as a shortened form of submarine boat; by naval tradition, submarines are usually referred to as "boats" rather than as "ships", regardless of their size.

CBT received the contract to remove the wreck from the (busy) area where she was lying, which was approximately 20 miles north of the French coast, inside the French Exclusive economic zone and territorial waters. The contract with the operator of the MV Tricilor was signed on 11 April 2003.^[1]

France, officially the French Republic, is a country whose territory consists of metropolitan France in Western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The metropolitan area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is bordered by Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany to the northeast, Switzerland and Italy to the east, and Andorra and Spain to the south. The overseas territories include French Guiana in South America and several islands in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. The country's 18 integral regions span a combined area of 643,801 square kilometres (248,573 sq mi) and a total population of 67.3 million. France, a sovereign state, is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. Other major urban areas include Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lille and Nice.

Exclusive economic zone UN maritime boundary

An exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is a sea zone prescribed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea over which a state has special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources, including energy production from water and wind. It stretches from the baseline out to 200 nautical miles (nmi) from its coast. In colloquial usage, the term may include the continental shelf. The term does not include either the territorial sea or the continental shelf beyond the 200 nmi limit. The difference between the territorial sea and the exclusive economic zone is that the first confers full sovereignty over the waters, whereas the second is merely a "sovereign right" which refers to the coastal state's rights below the surface of the sea. The surface waters, as can be seen in the map, are international waters.

Territorial waters Coastal waters that are part of a nation-states sovereign territory

The term territorial waters is sometimes used informally to refer to any area of water over which a state has jurisdiction, including internal waters, the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone and potentially the continental shelf. In a narrower sense, the term is used as a synonym for the territorial sea.

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References

1 2 Press release of Wilh. Wilhelmsen Group: Tricolor wreck-removal contract signed today Archived 2011-09-13 at the Wayback Machine ., 11 April 2003. Visited 12 February 2012
↑ Smit International website Summary of project MV Tricolor, visited 12 February 2012

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[wilh-1] 1 2 Press release of Wilh. Wilhelmsen Group: Tricolor wreck-removal contract signed today Archived 2011-09-13 at the Wayback Machine ., 11 April 2003. Visited 12 February 2012

[2] Smit International website Summary of project MV Tricolor, visited 12 February 2012