Two new emergency response tugs ordered by the Russian Marine Rescue Service have arrived at their designated port at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the Russian Far East.
Pechak and Uzon belong to the Project NE025 series of tugs designed by Russian naval architecture firm Nordic Engineering and built by Okskaya Shipyard in the Nizhniy Novgorod region. The tugs arrived in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky as cargo aboard a heavy-lift ship.
The vessels will perform a range of duties including towing of non-self-propelled pontoons, salvage, installation and maintenance of buoys, anchor handling, maritime safety patrols, cargo transport, dredging support, oil spill response, and firefighting.
Each tug has an LOA of 29 metres, a beam of 9.4 metres, a summer draught of 3.2 metres, a moulded depth of 4.2 metres amidships, and a displacement of 482 tonnes at maximum draught. Two 746kW diesel engines will deliver a bollard pull of greater than 25 tonnes.
Each tug is laid out with the engine room placed amidships on the main deck, an open aft deck, and a superstructure with two decks. Accommodation is available for up to eight crewmembers.
In the summer and autumn months, the tugs can independently navigate through thin first-year Arctic ice up to 80 cm thick, In the winter-spring period, they can navigate through ice up to 60 cmthick. In finer ice conditions of freezing non-Arctic seas, the vessels can be operated year-round.