A ship leaves Haldia Port on Friday. A Telegraph picture

Tamluk, May 30: A ship carrying 15,000 tonnes of oil until

a few hours ago rammed into the walkway of Haldia Port today, giving it a brush with near disaster.

Fortunately, MT Jagat Pragati had discharged the entire freight of furnace oil from its belly and was sailing out when it hit the walkway, damaging it severely. “While the ship was casting off (drifting away) after discharging the furnace oil, there was a strong wind and the ship landed heavily on the mooring dolphin,” Calcutta Port Trust chairman A.K. Chanda said in Calcutta.

MT Jagat Pragati was not damaged, though.

“The walkway connecting the dolphin with the main jetty, a fire monitor, water supply lines and electrical cables were damaged,” Chanda said.

A dolphin is the steel structure on which the ship is fastened. It is connected to the main jetty with a walkway.

“The ship has been stopped at Sagar Island as it will have to pay compensation to the port,” Chanda added.

The extent of damage could have been severe had the accident taken place when the ship was loaded, a port trust official said.

A port trust official said a jetty hit was unlikely to affect the “oil that the ship was carrying because it was in the cargo hold, immersed deep in the water. However, the oil in the pipelines of the deck could be spilled.”

Even if 1,000 tonnes of oil had spilled out, which the official said was “eminently possible”, it would have spread fast over the water surface because of the strong wind.

The oil could have covered 5,000 square metres, causing pollution and killing thousands of fish, prawns and other animals and damaged ecological balance of the area.

The ship, owned by the Mumbai-based Great Eastern Shipping Company, arrived at Haldia’s jetty No. 2 last evening. The consignment was for the Hindustan Petroleum unit here.

After discharging the fuel, the ship was scheduled to sail to Visakhapatnam and onwards to Jamnagar, Gujarat.

The vessel, unfastened from the mooring around 3pm today, was about to sail into deep waters when the wind took it adrift. Port Trust officials said it would take a few days to repair the damage and make the jetty fit for operation.

There are two more jetties in the port and so operations would not be hit, officials said.