Working Conditions Aboard the Marion-Dufresne

The 'Marion Dufresne', enroute from La Réunion, spilled 800 centiliters of oil per hour when it was 25 nautical miles off the west coast of Mauritius on Nov 4. The Oil Contingency Plan was deployed with the Mauritius Ports Authority and the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), which agreed that the ship, after arriving in Port Louis on Nov 5, would be drydocked for repairs at the Indian Ocean Shipyard (CNOI).

The 'Marion Dufresne', which had just set off for her third annual supply of the subantarctic archipelagos of Crozet, Kerguelen and Saint-Paul-et-Amsterdam, departing from La Réunion on Oct 29, was diverted almost immediately to Mauritius and had to be drydocked at the CNOI shipyard due to a problem with the starboard side propeller shaft. The ship should resume its rotation after the repair, adjusting its schedule while ensuring all the logistical needs of the southern archipelagos and their scientific bases.

While en route to La Réunion to complete the OP1-2020 rotation, the 'Marion Dufresne' in the morning of April 24, 2020, changed course to set out again towards the Kerguelen archipelago, in order to ensure the medical evacuation of a personnel of the base at Port-aux-Français and an injured sailor who was disembarked from the fishing vessel 'Ile de la Réunion II'. The suupply ship then resumed its course for Reunion. The state of health of the two evacuees was unrelated to the current covid-19 epidemic: the TAAF agent had been on mission for more than eight months on the base of Kerguelen; the fisherman had followed a strict health protocol with containment and screening before leaving Reunion. After three weeks of navigation in the southern seas, no case of coronavirus was identified on the 'Marion Dufresne'. No community base has identified cases of Covid-19; French Southern and Antarctic Lands therefore remained in stage 1 of the epidemic.