WWII wreck oil fears
Niagara at bottom of Hauraki Gulf with at least 1000 tonnes of oil still on board nearly 80 years after sinking
New efforts are under way to convince the Government to salvage a huge quantity of oil trapped inside a shipwreck in one of New Zealand’s most treasured marine environments.
If successful, it will be a return to the ship which sank in 1940 with half a billion dollars in gold on board.
The gold has been removed but the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Niagara remains, sitting 120m below the surface of the Hauraki Gulf with at least 1000 tonnes of oil still on board.
That’s more than three times the 300 tonnes MV Rena spilled on reefs and beaches near Tauranga in 2011.
Records examined by the Herald show there are reports of small discharges of oil over decades with some observers recording oil stretching for kilometres on the sur- face of the sea around wreck.
While Maritime NZ considers the Niagara to be at no immediate risk of a huge oil spill, documents released through the Official Information Act show a new plan specifically for the Niagara was developed in 2016.
Auckland councillor Mike Lee wants the oil out as soon as possible, once an exploratory mission has checked the wreck and estimated how much is actually aboard.
“The real concern is as the wreck’s got older and older, the bulkheads tend to collapse in on themselves,” says Lee. “The tanks holding this bunker oil are likely corrupt and a lot of oil will come up at once.”
He has written to Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage and Transport Minister Phil Twyford for support.
First he wants them to meet experts on deep-sea recovery, including Keith Gordon, who wrote Deep Water Gold about the Niagara’s treasure.
Gordon said concern about the oil was first raised with officials 20 years ago and despite surveys it was still not known exactly how much oil remained on board.
“It’s always been out of sight, out of mind. The Rena has brought it to a lot of people’s attention. The ship is on its side and is collapsing.”
The depth had always been seen as a barrier but Gordon said modern technology made work on the ship achievable for about $6 million.
Responsibility currently rests with Maritime NZ. Auckland Council landed responsibility also when the Super City was created, with boundary changes planting the wreck squarely inside its zone.
Maritime NZ safety manager Nigel Clifford said there was no planned monitoring of the wreck but it did receive regular reports.
“The wreck lies below one of New Zealand’s busiest shipping routes and the occasional oil leaks coming from it are reported to Maritime NZ by the many vessels that use [the route].”
The OIA documents from Maritime NZ show its concern over an oil spill is low, with sampling from 2008 showing the type of fuel would exist in a semi-solid state because of the temperature at that depth.
It meant it was unlikely to shift or discharge in great quantities.
If a spill did happen, Maritime NZ’s “New Zealand Marine Oil Spill Response Strategy” would kick in, with local supporting plans. That would see 20 depots of oil spill equipment nationwide and a national response team made up of 400 trained staff from councils, Massey University, and other organisations.
The Niagara was launched in 1912 as the “Titanic of the Pacific” and set out to ply its trade at ports from Australia and New Zealand to the United States and islands between.
The passenger liner was blamed for decades as the ship to have brought the deadly influenza virus in 1918, but the virus was already in New Zealand, with dozens of ships arriving from Europe and the United States.
The Niagara was then relied on at a critical early point in World War II. With the bitterness of Dunkirk fresh to the British and Commonwealth war effort, the ship was loaded with gold to pay for supplies in the US and weapons bound for Britain.
At 3.40am on June 19, the Niagara struck one of 228 mines sewn by the Germans in the sea off the Northland coast. All 400 people aboard abandoned ship in the 90 minutes before the ship slipped beneath the surface.
With that, she became the first ship sunk by enemy action in the Pacific.
As Lee says: “The Germans, with that mine, scored a big hit taking out the gold and all our ammunition.”
Documents in Archives NZ show the loss of the gold was a war secret.
It was with great secrecy that salvage work began in December 1940 in a bid to recover the gold. The depth was beyond the edge of comfortable human endeavour so required new diving bell technology — and divers with nerves of steel.
“How the hell we got the gold out in the 1940s shows how resourceful that generation was and the allure of gold,” says Lee.
Brothers John and Bill Johnstone were lead divers on the recovery and became heroes of the day,
In 1953, another attempt recovered 30 bars. Five gold bars — about $3.5m worth — are still unaccounted for. The gold still belongs to Britain. An added layer of isolation arrived for the wreck in 1979, in the form of legislation passed to protect the submarine communications cable.
With the law, it became illegal to anchor over the Niagara.
Documents from the Department of Conservation and Maritime NZ from the mid-1990s show a series of officials rediscovering the wreck’s existence and its potential threat.
As Gordon says, it was only with the Rena that there came a new focus on the potential risks posed.
There is also a potential added risk with warmer sea temperatures this year showing the water 2 degrees higher than normal.
Records over the decades have shown an increase in reported leaks when the water gets warmer, possibly loosening the “semi-solid” state of the oil created by low temperatures, although Maritime’s Clifford said there was little seasonal temperature change beyond 100m.
Associate Minister of Transport Julie Anne Genter said she had asked Maritime NZ to provide advice to both her office and that of Sage.
“I would be concerned if there was a serious risk of oil being released from the Niagara.”
A “ticking time bomb” is what Lee called the Niagara, saying the sinking was an act of war that continues to be a “clear and present danger”.
Auckland Conservation Board chair Lyn Mayes called it a “preventable environmental disaster”.
Writing to ministers this year, she said: “It is better to act now to minimise the effects than to let the wreck totally fail in the next decade or so and have a catastrophic effect.”