250 passengers on board Unmaneuverable Helgoland ferry reaches the mainland
The "Funny Girl" is on its way back from Helgoland to Büsum. Then there is a power failure in the engine room. Almost 250 passengers are in for a long journey.
07.10.2024, 04:25
07.10.2024, 05:00
SDA
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- The unmaneuverable Helgoland ferry "Funny Girl" with almost 250 people on board reached the mainland early Monday morning after hours of sailing on the North Sea.
- The passenger ship was towed by two ships.
- There was a power failure on board.
- Such a failure is not unusual and can usually be rectified with on-board resources - but not in this case.
The unmaneuverable Helgoland ferry "Funny Girl" with almost 250 people on board reached the mainland in the early morning after hours of sailing on the North Sea. The passenger ship was brought into the harbor of the Schleswig-Holstein municipality of Büsum by two tugboats, as a reporter from the German Press Agency reported.
The ship was actually supposed to be back in Büsum at around 7.30 p.m. on Sunday evening. But that didn't happen. There was a power failure on board, a spokesperson for the Elbe-North Sea Waterways and Shipping Office (WSA) told the German Press Agency. According to the office, such a failure is not unusual and can usually be rectified with on-board resources - but not in this case. The ship's crew contacted the traffic control center at around 5.30 pm.
The passengers were only able to leave the ship in the early morning at around 2.15 am. It took around half an hour for everyone to disembark. Most of them seemed relaxed - and just wanted to get home as quickly as possible. According to the Elmshorn police control center, none of the 250 passengers were injured.
Both generators failed
The sea was calm and no other ships or similar were involved in the accident, said the WSA spokesperson. According to the "Hamburger Abendblatt" newspaper, a switchboard for the electrical system in the engine room had stopped working. As a result, both generators had failed, the cooling of the engines and thus the engines themselves. According to the report, the emergency generator was unable to feed any power into the grid.
The mood on board was apparently not so bad at first: an employee of the Funke Media Group who was on board told the "Hamburger Abendblatt" newspaper earlier in the evening that the mood on board was relaxed as the sea was calm and the current was gently driving the "Funny Girl" back towards Helgoland. The North German humor of the crew contributed to this. "They announced right at the beginning that the good news was that we had enough beer on board," the reporter told the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper.