A special traffic control will be imposed in a busy and narrow waterway of the Huangpu River, which runs through China's largest economic hub Shanghai, for salvage operation on a 15,000-tonnage sunken dredger, sources with the local maritime authorities said on Wednesday.

Measures will be also taken to prevent any pollution from the operation.

Shanghai Salvage Bureau under the Ministry of Communications is taking on the salvage work, which began Monday afternoon and will be completed on Feb. 16, 2007.

The vessel capsized on the afternoon of Dec. 2, when it was conducting dredging near the Napu Bridge over the river.

More than half of the 200-meter-wide waterway at the accident site will be demarcated for salvage vessels and the sunken dredger named Yin Chu till the operation is finished.

Cost of the salvage operation, for dragging equipment, labor and silt clearing purposes, is estimated at 16.5 million yuan (2.1 million U.S. dollars), which will be covered by the refit company and five ship owners equally.

Sources with the salvage bureau said Yin Chu has more than 60 cubic meters of fuel oil and lubricant. Measures will be taken to prevent oil leaking during the operation.

The dredger, transformed from a roll-on-roll-off vessel, was 146.5 meters long and 22.6 meters wide. The whole body of the ship were submerged, with only part of its control cabin sticking out of the water.

Divers from the salvage bureau said there were a large amount of scrapped steel bricks and wires around the sunken vessel, and that the ship has sunken two meters into the silt. All this made salvage work more difficult, they added.

According to the bureau, frogmen will attach steel cables to the sunken vessel. The cables will be connected to six pairs of floating canisters and two floating cranes. Two salvage boats will also assist in the procedure.

The salvage work requires 13 sockets to which the steel cables should be attached. Divers continued to fix part of the sockets on Wednesday.

Preliminary investigation found the vessel sank after one of its doors was inadvertently opened, letting water flow in. Crew and workers on the ship escaped before the sinking. No casualties were reported. 

(Xinhua News Agency December 27, 2006)