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For the past fortnight, Sergio Francisco has harboured an unusual fear: that his seaside café, Las Palmas, will be blown up.
Las Palmas faces Great Yarmouth’s sandy pleasure beach and sits among a cluster of fish and chip shops and blaring arcades. But late last month, Las Palmas got a new neighbour when a damaged ship laden with 20,000 tonnes of explosive Russian fertiliser, nicknamed ‘the floating bomb’, moored up at the port of Great Yarmouth.
“Of course you feel nervous, especially because of how close we are,” said Francisco, 32, gesturing in the direction of the ship, the outline of which can be seen in the distance from his café. “We should never have taken it. I don’t understand why we let it dock here.”
The Ruby, to give the 183-metre-long ship its official name, has become a sinister sight for many, because it has on board barrels of a chemical used as fertiliser called ammonium nitrate — the same chemical that exploded in the port of Beirut in 2020 in a blast that killed nearly 200 people and wiped out a swathe of the local neighbourhood.
The Ruby was carrying seven times the volume of ammonium nitrate as the Beirut depot held, and sparked fear that it would reduce the East of England to rubble.
But, luckily for Francisco, the floating bomb is in the process of being defused. Last week, her cargo was being offloaded onto a second ship, the Zimrida, which will then ferry its load on to Africa, where the chemicals were initially destined. The Ruby will be taken to another British port for repairs. While the episode may be drawing to a close, many still have questions about how the Russian fertiliser ended up in the East of England, and whether it was really a danger in the first place.
The Ruby had been on quite the Odyssey before it ended up in Great Yarmouth. In late August, the vessel set sail from the Arctic Russian port town of Kandalaksha, laden with the fertiliser chemical which was destined to be delivered to several ports in Africa. But all did not go as planned — the Ruby was buffeted by a storm soon after setting sail and ran aground on August 22nd.
The 12-year-old ship limped on and decided to pull into the Norwegian port of Tromso, where it was assessed by authorities. Dag Inge Aarhus, an official for the Norwegian Maritime Authority, said the Ruby’s hull, rudder and propeller were damaged, but the ship was judged to be seaworthy. “There was nothing about the overall condition of the ship that indicated we should conduct a more detailed inspection,” he told the Sunday Times. The Norwegian authorities approved plans by the ship’s owners to use a tugboat to take it to the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda for repairs.
But, thanks to the paranoia in the region instilled by Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, all did not sail smoothly. Lithuania refused entry to the vessel. The country’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, warned that there was a small possibility that the Ruby could represent a Trojan Horse from Russia, and asked it to decant its cargo if it were to enter.
“When we are dealing with Russia or other international actors that are unfriendly to us, we always keep this possibility in mind. In other words, we have to be better prepared, more prepared, more cautious than when dealing with another state,” he told a press conference in September.
The Ruby was left scrambling, trying to find a port to dock at, but ports soon followed the Lithuanian lead. Maritime authorities in Sweden and Malta also refused entry, all while word was spreading of the precarious ship laden with the potential explosives.
“Alarm bells started ringing,” said Henning Gloystein, who directs the energy, climate and resources centre of the think tank the Eurasia Group which tracked the ship’s movements closely. “The fear was that this was, at best, a dodgy ship carrying materials from Russia that was unfit to be sloshing around EU or Nato waters and, at worst, a political tool.”
The Ruby’s owners, and several shipping experts, insisted that these ports refused to allow passage due to politics, rather than reality.
By now, the Ruby was bobbing in and out of British waters, off Margate in Kent, desperately trying to find a port to pull into for its repairs. The impasse was broken on October 28th by the port of Great Yarmouth, which is operated by Peel Ports, the ports giant owned by John Whittaker, the northern property tycoon who used to own Manchester’s Trafford centre. The port decided to invite the Ruby in, but not before the mission got personal sign-off from Stephan Hennig, the Secretary of State’s Representative for Maritime Salvage and Intervention (SOSREP), to verify the mission’s safety.
This was no act of charity to a distressed ship — as ports charge for each berth, the port of Great Yarmouth will have raked in lucrative fees by welcoming the Ruby in.
Francisco was among many locals not happy at the decision: “Why did we take it when it was rejected by God knows how many other countries?” he asked.
But shipping experts said that safety concerns were overblown. Richard Meade, the editor of the shipping journal Lloyd’s List, said: “The narrative in the mainstream media suggesting that this ship was somehow a floating bomb was wholly inaccurate. It was damaged and it had run into problems, but these things are not uncommon.”
Another shipping source labelled the whole media and political storm, “total bullshit”.
Many cited the Beirut explosion as a reason for refusing the Ruby entry, but the comparison was nonsense, shipping executives said. They pointed out that the blast at the port in Lebanon occurred because an old store of ammonium nitrate was unsafely stored next to a stash of fireworks and ignited. Ammonium nitrate is regularly ferried around the world and does not spontaneously combust, despite its explosive potential.
Others pointed out that, unlike the so-called shadow-fleet of derelict ships that ferry Russian oil across the world, the Ruby’s documentation all appeared above board. It was insured by the West of England Protection & Indemnity (P&I) Club, a reputable, well-capitalised insurer, which covers ships across the world. The ship flew the Maltese flag, but was owned by a Dubai-based company, known as Serenity Ship Management. It is not unusual for ships to fly different flags to their owners’ addresses.
But safety was not the only reason Great Yarmouth residents were uneasy. Down by the seafront, Addy Bauld, 63, a retired charity worker, said: “I never felt that there was a danger of it going bang- the crew wouldn’t be on it if that was the case. I just did not feel that it should be here because it came from Russia, and we should not be helping Putin.”
But while it might be distasteful to some, it is not illegal, despite the tough sanctions regime on goods from oil, to technology and industrial goods.
Ammonium nitrate is not sanctioned, so still can technically be imported legally to the UK from Russia. There is a caveat however; the sanctions rules prevent British citizens doing business with Russian entities. However, this, too, may not be a problem for Whittaker’s Peel Ports.
It is thought that the ammonium nitrate is owned by a non-Russian trading company, transporting it from northwest Russia to buyers in Africa.
But Francisco fears that the Ruby’s damage has already been done. “We are a seasonal town, so that does not help Yarmouth at all,” he said. “Would you want to come here having heard there was a dangerous ship near?”