A major gash in the hull of one of Shell's two contracted ice breaker ships, MSV Fennica, on July 3rd had the potential to derail Shell's plan to drill in Alaska's Chukchi sea. Apparently, the icebreaker ran into an unchartered shoal. The Alaska Dispatch News, reported that the shoal may have "shaved 11 to 24 feet off the expected 45-foot clearance at the site. The Fennica, a Finnish ship built to be resilient even amid crushing blows from ice, has a draft of 28 feet". According to Alaska Dispatch the Fennica decided to follow a fishing vessel into 12' of water. The Fennicia had to return to Dutch Harbor, AK to analyze the damage to the ship. The finding was that the needed repair was major and was unable to be repaired in Alaska. The ship will have to go to Portland, Oregon and not Seattle for repairs, because Terminal 5 at the port of Seattle, where Shell’s two drilling rigs were stored is a cargo terminal that does not allow repairs....

It is expected to take several weeks to repair the crucial icebreaking ship for drilling operations. Winter in the Chukchi starts in September so any work will need to be completed and capped by that time. Shell does not give a crap about their obligations to their drilling permits and environmental impact assessment. They are moving the remainder of their vessels to the Chukchi to drill without the critically important Fennica because to them only the black gold matters to them....

Shell appears to have opted for speed over safety in sending the Fennica along the route it did. Some of the charted depths in the Fennica’s path gave it just seven and a half feet of clearance in some areas — even at high tide, as it was when the ship was under way on July 3 and the hull breach was discovered. Shell could have sent the Fennica on a slightly longer route out of Dutch Harbor that would have kept it in deeper water....

“The damage to the Fennica due to traveling through shallow water is yet another example of Shell's reckless attitude in its pursuit of unburnable Arctic oil,” David Turnbull of Oil Change International told DeSmog, referring to the fact that the vast majority of proven fossil fuel energy reserves cannot be burned if we’re to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, the critical threshold climate scientists say is necessary to prevent the worst impacts of runaway climate change.