Ship history: Flood in Hamburg 2013

At the end of January 2013, I received a text message from Hamburg: „Ship flooded“. At first, I couldn’t believe it. After all, the ship was in dry dock at the time. But unfortunately, it was true. The port authorities had forecast a metre of high water. In the middle of the night, when there was no one at the shipyard who could have reacted, the water rose to 3.60 metres. It hit my ship – from which steel had been cut out for replacement – head-on. This is what it looked like when the flood in Hamburg inundated the ship at the shipyard.

Note: The ship was in the DRY dock! So several metres above the River Elbe… In theory, at least! Two areas (the seminar room and the engine room) were flooded…A blessing in disguise – or rather, a huge reason to be grateful – was that the water only affected the areas that hadn’t yet been derusted and stopped 1 cm short of the already derusted, painted and floored sleeping quarters below deck. Another centimetre and months of work would have been ruined, at least in part.

It was bad enough as it was. It took us nearly two months to get the water out of every last nook and cranny during the harshest winter in decades – with temperatures hovering around minus 8 degrees. I don’t even want to get started on the heating bills – to make sure nothing froze… Once in a lifetime is enough. I hope everything goes well with the current storm, Xaver. We’ve moored the boat securely… and it’s in the water, after all.