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By Ariba Shahid
t was more than two months ago on the 22nd of July when crowds thronged to Karachi sea view to take in the scenery. Except on this occasion, most of the gawkers were not there to enjoy the sea breeze or marvel at the beauty of the ocean. No, they were there to see Heng Tong 77 - a container ship bound for Turkey that found itself adrift without an anchor and stranded at a very public part of the Karachi beach. What followed was a long drawn out process watched closely by the general public as the Pakistan Navy and the Karachi Port Trust teamed up with other coastal organizations to dislodge the ship from where it found itself stuck. This turned out to be a long and arduous process. Stalled by bad weather and rough sea, the ship refused to budge and it
TRANSPORT
took around seven serious attempts over the course of 48 days to finally refloat the ship. In the middle of those attempts were conspiracy theories, environmental concerns, and a host of other problems that came with a 36,000 tonne ship being in a place where it was absolutely not supposed to be. Here is how it went down. The ship was never supposed to enter Pakistan in the first place. The Heng Tong 77, owned by a Hong Kong based cargo company, had set sail from Shanghai and was on its way to Istanbul. After reaching close to Pakistani waters, the ship was supposed to wait for a crew change. However, since this was supposed to be a short and efficient process, it did not actually come all the way up to Karachi harbour and instead dropped its anchor close to the harbour in Pakistani waters. Here, allegedly, choppy waters resulted in the anchor breaking and the ship’s engine turned out to be too weak to withstand the
rough sea. Rudderless and at the mercy of the winds, the enormous 321 feet long and 65 feet wide ship began floating towards sea view. In a very anticlimactic manner, the ship eventually found itself gently embedding itself ashore. People arrived at the spot to see it despite the fact that the beach was closed under Section 144 of the criminal procedure code, banning people from getting into the rough monsoon sea. Still, the public could access the beach from the McDonald’s parking lot to take many pictures and videos of the ship. It was possible to get quite close to it during low tide. But after the sharing of those pictures and videos on social media, the beach was properly closed from that side as well. Somehow authorities found themselves unusually concerned about equipment being stolen from the ship by people. This concern was more than fair enough, but what they were not considering in this situation yet was the possible hazard that the ship got pose
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