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Olympic Shipping and Safeway support Sandbank

4C Offshore | Tom Russell
By: Tom Russell 24/11/2020 Safeway

Multi-purpose offshore vessel Olympic Commander has been equipped with a 28 metre-long Safeway Seagull type walk-to-work gangway system to support works at the
Sandbank wind farm in the German North Sea. Contracted by JDR Cables, the vessel and gangway will provide the transfer of people and goods during a maintenance campaign.

The presence of a smart Safeway A-Frame construction at the boom tip of the Seagull gangway also allows the operator to switch from People Transfer Mode to Cargo Transfer Mode, activating a lift capacity of 1,000 kg at the touch of a button.


This particular maintenance project started in September and the combination of vessel and motion compensated gangway is providing direct access for JDR technicians maintaining the inter array cables between the offshore substation and the 72 Siemens wind turbines. These cables also contain an optical fibre that allows for the data exchange between each wind turbine and the OSS as well as the remote control and surveillance of the wind farm by the Vattenfall Control Center in Esbjerg, Denmark.


The Safeway Seagull gangway type is developed for retrofitting on existing vessels and has been operational since early 2017. It’s specific features such as 10m vertical elevation range, hover mode, and easy plug & play installation makes it the ideal tool for offshore maintenance campaigns.

“We are excited to continue our collaboration with Olympic Shipping and are thankful for the trust JDR Cables is showing in our combined services,”
said Mario Kerssens, Safeway’s Sales & Marketing Director. “Safeway and Olympic Shipping have already a lot of experience in the offshore wind sector and we are glad that directly after a successful campaign on the Rentel OWF in Belgium, we are now able to use those experiences to deliver our high quality transfer service on a project developed by Vattenfall, one of Europe’s largest producers of renewable energy determined to make fossil free living happen within one generation.”

The 288 MW
Sandbank project was put into operation in 2017 and is located 90 kilometres off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It features 72 Siemens SWT-4.0-130 turbines. The array generates enough electricity annually to meet the demands of 400,000 German households. It is jointly owned by Vattenfall and Stadtwerke München.

For more information on offshore wind farms worldwide, click here.

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