IMMH

Coastal freighter Inga

Coastal freighter Inga. The yard model of the Inga stand as a example for specialised coastal freighters on deck 6 of the museum.


Shipbuilding has been taking place on a grand scale in the North Frisian town of Husum since the early 17th century. The Husumer Weft company also emerged from this tradition. The Husum shipyard experienced an enormous boom in the years after the Second World War and profited greatly from the German economic miracle. The company finally experienced its absolute heyday in the 1970s, when it employed up to 800 people at times. At the beginning of the 1980s, however, there was a shipyard crisis and a decline in orders. As a result, the Husum shipyard was forced to halve its capacity. New fields of business had to be developed and in the 1990s the shipyard started building wind turbines. However, this could not compensate for the constant decline in new orders, and in December 1999 the Husum shipyard had to file for bankruptcy. 

Between the late 1940s and the bankruptcy in 1999, the Husum shipyard built well over 400 ships. The shipyard’s specialty was the construction of smaller coastal freighters like the „MS Inga“ from 1985. She was 82 m long and 11 m wide. She was a very flexible ship built to transport a variety of goods, even though her main task was to transport timber. The owner became Jan Peter Lüdtke KG in Rendsburg. 

The „Inga“ returned to the Husum shipyard in 1995 to be overhauled and given higher loading capacities. In 2002, the management of the ship passed to the partners of the previous owners. The ship was renamed „Carrier“ and sailed under the flag of the Eastern Caribbean state of Antigua & Barbuda. On 3 April 2012, a tragedy occurred. The ship had just left Llanddulas in Wales with a cargo of limestone when it was caught in a storm and ran aground. The ship began to capsize. Fortunately, the entire crew of 7 could be rescued by helicopter, but the ship had to be declared a total loss and was scrapped on site.