Handled with care.

Multraship Salvage has successfully recovered three containers loaded with toxic cargo from the North Sea. The containers were lost overboard from the Ethiopian vessel Andinet twenty miles north of the Dutch coast and due to severe weather conditions, the operation took almost a month to complete.

Leendert Muller, Managing Director of Multraship, said: "It was a dangerous salvage operation that we were able to complete ... We worked according to the most stringent safety procedures in order to protect our salvage team from possible contamination and to prevent / minimise damage to the environment. We were assisted and advised throughout by experienced chemical experts."

The sheerlegs Cormorant lifted the containers from the seabed and placed in watertight, oversized flats on the aft deck of the multi-purpose vessel Multraship Commander and have since been discharged to Rotterdam for inspection.

The nature of the cargo consisted of wood preservatives known as CCA 72%, the main ingrediants of which include arsenic pentoxide, chromium trioxide and copper dioxide. Although there has reportedly been some leakage of the toxic cargo into the water, onsite analysis by Dutch ministry of transport division Rijkswaterstaat has revealed that any damage to the environment is likely to be much less than feared, not least because the product discharged into the sea was found to have a very low toxic concentration.

In the meantime, it is believed that the Dutch naval authorities are still searching for a further 63 single drums of cargo lost from the same vessel, which did not form part of Multraship's salvage contract.