On 20 August 2010, flexible fallpipe vessel Stornes was launched at the CIMC Raffles yard in Yantai, China. A naming ceremony will be held at a later date. Final building operations will be conducted at the same yard. The ship is scheduled for completion in 2011 after which it will be operational on the offshore market.
Apart from the vessels Nordnes, Tertnes and Jan Steen, Stornes is the fourth and largest flexible fallpipe vessel in the Van Oord fleet and one of the largest in its category. The ship has an overall length of 175 m, a width of 26 m and a loading capacity of 27,000 tonnes. Gliding rails brought the ship from shore to a pontoon, after which the pontoon was submerged in the harbour.
Stornes is one of the latest investments from the EUR 1 billion Van Oord investment programme. The final investment in this programme is the self-propelled cutter suction dredger Athena, which is currently being built at the IHC Dredgers yard in Kinderdijk, the Netherlands. Later this year, Van Oord will launch a new investment programme for the period 2011 – 2015.
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Source: vanoord, August 29, 2010