Science

High-tech and human precision

Fabian de Wachter has been shipping contaminated soil from the STEIH site to the Netherlands since 2015. His penchant for high-tech and his deep-rooted sense of precision have helped the remediation team reach their goals in time.

Text by Goran Mijuk, photos by Gregory Collavini

Coupling unit during set-up at the remediation site.

Published on 01/07/2021

Fabian de Wachter knows the Rhine inside out. The 38-year-old captain has been traveling on Europe’s largest internal waterway since early childhood and today navigates one of the biggest transport vessels on the river that stretches more than 1000 kilometers.

“I represent the fourth generation of my family in the shipping industry,” de Wachter said, when we met him for our interview on the impressive high-tech bridge of his new ship, the MS Vera Pax. “When I was traveling as a kid with my father, I was always fascinated by ships and logistics. This passion has never left me.”

Despite his strong sense of tradition, Fabian de Wachter has his eyes clearly set on the future of shipping. The bridge on the MS Vera Pax looks more like the command center of a futuristic spacecraft than a slow-moving transporter on the Rhine. Surrounded by several screens, de Wachter sits in a comfortable chair like Captain Kirk from Star Trek and navigates his ship as if it was a rubber boat and not a 185-meter-long steel monster.

“Today, many manual navigation processes have been digitized,” de Wachter explained. “But despite all this technology, the experience of a captain is needed to travel the Rhine safely, especially when you have to navigate through the narrow water gates or carry hazardous goods.”

One of 13 locks (Kembs, France) on the transport vessel’s journey to Holland with the excavated material.

The entire ship, which consists of two separate transport vessels, is equipped with the latest digital navigation tools, some of which de Wachter developed himself together with a specialized firm.

One of the great innovations is a Bluetooth wireless connection that allows him to position the two separate transport vessels in parallel or in tandem. Thanks to this technological device, the transport capacity of the MS Vera Pax is massive. The two vessels can carry around 6000 tonnes of material in one tour.

The transport capacity was one of the key reasons why Novartis and the remediation teams from Marti, Züblin and ERM decided to work with de Wachter when they were looking for a shipping company to carry lightly contaminated soil from the STEIH site to the Netherlands, where the material would be prepared for reuse.

During the remediation of the site, roughly 700,000 tonnes of soil had to be moved by ship. If the material had been transported by trucks, it would have taken around 18,000 tours from Switzerland to the Netherlands by road.

In 2015, when the cooperation started, de Wachter was transporting the goods with a smaller ship. But he was ready to increase his capacity in 2017 when the remediation teams wanted to transport more material faster. “I was already working on the construction of the MS Vera Pax at the time and decided to adapt the ship for transporting hazardous material.”

Coupling unit in the lock.

Besides the transport capacity, de Wachter was selected for his navigation skills and his deep-rooted sense of precision. “The key thing was to load the contaminated soil onto the ship without the risk of any material escaping into the air. This requires extreme skill when it comes to maneuvering the vessel underneath the loading tube,” de Wachter says. The ship had to be positioned within a perimeter of just 15 centimeters beneath the loading tube to allow for the safe delivery of the contaminated material from the tents into the hull of the ship. “This is no small feat. Many companies were not prepared to take this on, for reasons both of time and of the risk involved. We usually were able to do it within a few minutes, with zero incidents,” he says.

Despite de Wachter’s strong sense of quality, one thing he could not control was the water level of the Rhine. “This was really something that put a lot of pressure on us, especially in 2018, when water levels were too low, and we could not ship any goods for almost five months. When rain set in in December, we immediately resumed transportation and were kept busy until the end of the remediation.”

Asked why he was ready to cooperate in this particular project, de Wachter said that he was always on the lookout for professional challenges and that he was willing to go to extreme lengths to help Novartis and the remediation teams to achieve their goals despite the risk involved.

“There is always a risk associated with transporting hazardous material,” de Wachter said. “But I was convinced that, with a mixture of high-tech and human precision, the job could be done in time and to the satisfaction of the customer. I was glad to be part of that project and show what can be done in modern shipping.”

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