Photographs from Bandar Abbas showed the frigate Sahand on its side at the wharf, only a slice of hull and the sonar dome clear of the water. Iranian state media said the ship rolled over on Sunday, July 7, 2024, while workers were repairing it. By Tuesday it had gone under completely.
IRNA, the official news agency, put the cause down to water ingress. The vessel “lost its balance due to water leakage into the tanks,” state media said, and it was soon “returned to a balanced state.” Reports of the toll differed. The first accounts spoke of several people taken to hospital with minor injuries, while later coverage of state media reports mentioned at least one death and an undisclosed number of injured.
Then the rebalancing failed. Local outlets reported on Tuesday that the ship had sunk in the shallow water of the port after a rope holding it broke. It was the third Iranian navy ship lost to an accident since 2018.
A new ship with a heavy load
The Sahand is a Moudge-class frigate, launched in December 2018 after six years of construction. It is 315 feet long and displaces 1,300 tons. Iranian media boasted at the time that it could run for roughly five months without refuelling. It carries a helicopter pad, radar, and both surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles.
The ship got heavier after that. Following a long voyage to St. Petersburg for Russia’s naval parade in 2021, which passed without reported trouble, it was reportedly fitted with four more anti-ship missile launchers, five more surface-to-air launchers and new radar on deck.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Business Insider the upgrade “probably didn’t help because it raised the center of gravity, which will reduce its stability.” He blamed the loss largely on “poor maintenance and inadequate training.”
Steven Horrell, a former naval intelligence officer now at the Center for European Policy Analysis, pointed to the hull’s lineage. The Moudge class grew out of the British-built Alvand frigates of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “If you put more superstructure on a similar hull, you might be creating center of gravity problems,” he said, “which would contribute to the rapid rollover Sahand experienced.”
Horrell also questioned what happened aboard. If water flooded the ballast tanks quickly, he said, then valves or hatches were left in the wrong position. “And then it looks like whatever crew was aboard during that pier-side maintenance was not postured to respond.”
Can it be saved?
The Iran Shipbuilding & Offshore Industries Complex said the frigate might be repairable. Horrell agreed the hull is “certainly salvageable” but expects “a long process.” Seawater ruins electronics, and the damage reaches the engines and propulsion train too. “They will be replacing systems from stem to stern,” he said.
Norway’s frigate Helge Ingstad offers the comparison. It was recovered in one piece after sinking in 2018, then scrapped because replacing its saltwater-damaged systems cost too much.
Not the first loss
In January 2018 the Damavand, a sister ship in the same class, went down in the Caspian Sea after striking the breakwater at Bandar-e Anzali port. Two crew died. Clark said she “ran aground and could have capsized because of instability created by the updated design.” In June 2021 a fire destroyed the 680-foot Kharg, the navy’s largest ship by tonnage, and injured 33 people.
Horrell saw one thread running through all three: damage control. “Every sailor on board should have some basic damage control training or firefighting training; these are all-hands operations.”
Farzin Nadimi, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, put it more bluntly. “They are losing warships at such a pace in peacetime,” he said. “Who knows how quickly they will lose ships in wartime!” He did not rule out sabotage by the Revolutionary Guard, which he said is eating into the regular navy’s turf and budget with new oceangoing vessels.
The name has history. The first Sahand, a British-built Alvand-class frigate, was destroyed by US forces in 1988 in a clash that killed 45 of its crew.
Sources
- Iranian Navy Warship Capsizes During Repairs At The Port Of Bandar Abbas
- Iranian Frigate Capsizes and Sinks at the Pier
- Why the Iranian Navy keeps losing warships in accidents, like when its Sahand frigate capsized and sank
