2017 was a busy year for salvors

FORTUNES can change rapidly in a business because of bad luck or the bad judgement of others. That is certainly the case for marine salvage companies, or salvors, as illustrated by the latest statistics issued by their trade organisation, the International Salvage Union (ISU).

Just a few months ago, in early December, when speaking to journalists, ISU president Charo Coll warned: "The first thing to say is that the salvage industry has experienced a major drop in gross revenues in the last 18 months. The latest statistics are from 2016, and they show that ISU members' income from emergency response and wreck removal was US$380 million - that is a reduction of nearly 50 per cent on the previous year's US$717 million. We need to wait several months before the 2017 numbers are collected, and it will be interesting to see if 2016 was unusual or the start of a trend. Naturally, all the salvors in the room hope that the drop in revenue will be reversed."

Well, it now looks as though it was not the start of a trend. ISU announced last week that its members carried out 252 operations on vessels carrying in total more than 3.4 million tonnes of potentially polluting cargoes in 2017. This was indeed a significant increase from 213 operations, and just under 2.7 million tonnes of potential pollutants, in 2016. We are not, of course, looking at comparable figures. Nevertheless, there should be a fairly close correlation between gross revenues and the number and size of salvage operations.