Vattenfall and the Danish Armed Forces have uncovered and detonated two English mines in the area of the Danish North Sea where the Vesterhav Nord offshore wind farm is being built.
Vattenfall’s task was to retrieve the mines and mark them so that the military miners could find and detonate them, said Dorthe Reng Erbs-Hansen, the company’s Senior Geophysicist.
According to Erbs-Hansen, the two mines were relatively big and contained significantly more explosives than the German deep-water bomb and mortar found and blasted at the site of the Kriegers Flak wind farm in the Baltic Sea.
Vattenfall began studying the seafloor of the Vesterhav Nord, Vesterhav Syd and Kriegers Flak late this summer with an aim of finding old mines or bombs.
There are still many undischarged explosives from the First and Second World Wars in the Danish waters and under the mud and seaweed in the exact areas where the three offshore wind projects are to be positioned, the company said.
Vesterhav Nord and Vesterhav Syd will comprise a total of 41 Siemens Gamesa 8MW turbines. Offshore construction is expected to begin in 2019 off the west coast of Jutland, with full commissioning scheduled for 2020.
Source: Vattenfall