Rhine stays shut as cranes move in to clear boxes
German authorities working to reopen the Rhine, Europe's busiest commercial waterway, located all of the containers that have halted traffic since sliding off a carrier vessel over the weekend.
Accident site: A container lies partially submerged in the waters of the Rhine river in front of the container ship Excelsior near Cologne
Two crane ships will start to recover the freight, Markus Lehmacher, a spokesman for Cologne's Water and Shipping Agency, said yesterday by telephone. Thirty-one containers were lost when the German ship Excelsior accidentally tilted in the river near Cologne on March 25.
As many as 200 container vessels pass through Cologne each day, according to Joerg Rusche, head of Germany's inland shipping association in Duisburg. BASF, the world's biggest chemical producer, said that it may be forced to use alternative transportation to move goods to and from its plants if the disruption continues.
A 20 km stretch of the Rhine was closed after the accident. It remained shut yesterday, according to a statement on the shipping agency's website.
A boat with a diving bell on board has arrived on the scene. The affected area stretches from the marina at Cologne-Zuendorf to the suburb of Niehl.
'I have no information that there's been any effect so far' on supplies of oil and gasoline, said Barbara Meyer-Bukow, a spokeswoman for the German Petroleum Industry in Berlin. 'It will definitely affect a couple of ships, but there are pipelines from Rotterdam to southern Germany, and there are refineries within southern Germany, like Karlsruhe, Germany's largest.'
ThyssenKrupp, Germany's largest steel maker, will be unaffected by the disruption because it only ships materials as far as Duisburg, a city further north than Cologne, spokesman Avid Schneider said in a telephone interview from the company's Dusseldorf headquarters.
Lanxess, the chemical maker spun off from Bayer in 2005, is not affected, spokesman Rudolf Eickeler said. Salzgitter, Germany's second-largest steel maker, is also unaffected as its transports on the Rhine river don't pass Cologne, spokesman Bernd Gersdorff said.
Accident site: A container lies partially submerged in the waters of the Rhine river in front of the container ship Excelsior near Cologne
Two crane ships will start to recover the freight, Markus Lehmacher, a spokesman for Cologne's Water and Shipping Agency, said yesterday by telephone. Thirty-one containers were lost when the German ship Excelsior accidentally tilted in the river near Cologne on March 25.
As many as 200 container vessels pass through Cologne each day, according to Joerg Rusche, head of Germany's inland shipping association in Duisburg. BASF, the world's biggest chemical producer, said that it may be forced to use alternative transportation to move goods to and from its plants if the disruption continues.
A 20 km stretch of the Rhine was closed after the accident. It remained shut yesterday, according to a statement on the shipping agency's website.
A boat with a diving bell on board has arrived on the scene. The affected area stretches from the marina at Cologne-Zuendorf to the suburb of Niehl.
'I have no information that there's been any effect so far' on supplies of oil and gasoline, said Barbara Meyer-Bukow, a spokeswoman for the German Petroleum Industry in Berlin. 'It will definitely affect a couple of ships, but there are pipelines from Rotterdam to southern Germany, and there are refineries within southern Germany, like Karlsruhe, Germany's largest.'
ThyssenKrupp, Germany's largest steel maker, will be unaffected by the disruption because it only ships materials as far as Duisburg, a city further north than Cologne, spokesman Avid Schneider said in a telephone interview from the company's Dusseldorf headquarters.
Lanxess, the chemical maker spun off from Bayer in 2005, is not affected, spokesman Rudolf Eickeler said. Salzgitter, Germany's second-largest steel maker, is also unaffected as its transports on the Rhine river don't pass Cologne, spokesman Bernd Gersdorff said.
