Helicopter response to burning cargo ship took over twice as long as agreed

The helicopter response to the fire on the Fremantle Highway freighter last week took more than twice as long as agreed. According to agreements, the Coast Guard helicopters should be in the air 20 minutes after the report. In this case, it took 40 and 49 minutes for the two helicopters to respond, NRC reports based on flight data and conversations with first responders and pilots.

The fire on the Fremantle Highway, carrying nearly 4,000 cars, broke out on the North Sea north of Ameland late at night on July 25. The captain called for help for him and his 22 crew members. When the helicopter didn’t arrive quickly, some crew members had to jump overboard to escape the flames. One crew member died in the fire, and multiple others were hurt. The fire burned for nearly a week, with Rijkswaterstaat reporting on Tuesday that it seemed to be out.

The Coast Guard has been renting helicopters and crew from the British-American company Bristow since November 2022. According to NRC, Minister Mark Harberts of Infrastructure was warned during the tendering process that the company couldn’t live up to its promises. But the VVD Minister said that the “international company, with years of experience,” would even achieve a response time of ten minutes.

That was not the case with the Fremantle Highway. Data from Flight Radar 24 shows that the first helicopter took off from Den Helder 40 minutes after the call for help, and the second took off from Midden Zeeland 49 minutes after the report. Why it took so long is unclear, according to NRC.

And then, instead of flying directly to the emergency scene, both helicopters first went to Rotterdam to pick up a fire brigade team. The first responders told NRC that this was because there weren’t enough seats in one helicopter to take the entire team, so both had to detour via Rotterdam. According to the newspaper, Bristow promised during the tender that it would have more seats available.

And this is not the first time things have gone wrong. In mid-July, an employee on a platform in the North Sea had to be rushed ashore due to appendicitis. Internal correspondence about the incident shows the employee waited a long time for help. The northern helicopter in Den Helder couldn’t fly because it didn’t have the required papers. The reserve helicopter also proved unavailable, so the southern helicopter responded from Arnemuiden, taking twice as long to get to the oil rig. Moreover, that helicopter only took to the air almost an hour after the report.

Flight data also shows that the promised reserve helicopter is not always in the Netherlands, as the tender states. It is regularly in the United Kingdom, where Bristow has a branch. And the southern base at Central Zeeland Airport sometimes had no helicopter for days on end. Training courses are also regularly canceled because the helicopters are unavailable, the pilots and rescue workers told NRC.