Louis Dreyfus Travocean repaired on behalf of RTE and National Grid 4 of the 8 submarine cables being part of the IFA2000 electrical link between France and England.
The cables of this link are buried in pairs, and form 4 routes about 1 km apart from one another. The defaults concerned 2 of these cable routes and were located off Folkestone, about 6 km away from the English coast, in 20 to 25 meters of water.
The defaults were notified in November 2016 followed by the Multibeam, sonar and TSS survey of the sites at the beginning of December same year.
Louis Dreyfus Travocean chartered three support vessels: the Olympic Triton, was mobilized at the end of December 2016 to debury the cables, to prepare them to facilitate the work of the repair vessels, and then to protect the repaired cables. The Siem N-Sea, was mobilized in early January charged with repairing a pair of cables. The third vessel, the Normand Flower, mobilized as of the January 20, 2017, was charged with repairing of the other 2 cables.
Offshore repair operations were carried out in parallel on both sites. The first pair of cables was repaired and put back into service on February 17, 2017, and the second pair on March 2, 2017.