renamed and given pennant number 90. The ship served as a support ship for Tuima class missile boats and Turunmaa class gunboats, towing them during transit journeys. The second Louhi was decommissioned and scrapped in 1986 mainly because it had become nearly impossible to get spare parts for the old engines. Operational career On 24 December 2011 Louhi and Linja, another Finnish spill response vessel, were dispatched to the Gulf of Bothnia as a precaution after a tall oil spill from Arizona Chemical plant near Söderhamn in Sweden. While Sweden had not send an official request for assistance yet, the Finnish recovery ships prepared to join the spill combating operation if the oil slick, at that time some northeast from Söderhamn, started drifting towards the Finnish coast. Although Louhi can operate in relatively high seas, the recovery effort was hindered and subsequently the oil slick was broken up by the storm on 27 December 2011. When Louhi moved to the recovery area on 28 December, the slick could not be located and only of weathered oil was recovered. Mission Due to the sensitive ecology of the Baltic Sea, it has been agreed in the Helsinki Convention (HELCOM) that instead of using dispersants to dissolve the oil slicks, combatting the spills is based on mechanical recovery using oil booms to limit the spill and skimmers to collect the oil from the surface as quickly and completely as possible. For this purpose every Finnish pollution control vessel is equipped with permanently installed built-in recovery equipment and such systems have also been installed on several patrol vessels of the Finnish Border Guard. As the primary mission of the new vessel is pollution prevention, the ship has an extensive array of equipment capable of detecting and recovering spilled oil and chemicals in open water, high seas and ice conditions. Some of the equipment, such as an oil-detecting radar and a thermographic camera in the mast, are used for the first time in a Finnish oil recovery vessel. In addition the ship has a weather station and a wet laboratory capable of analyzing water samples automatically. In addition to environmental duties, Louhi can also be used as a support ship for underwater operations by the Finnish Navy. The vessel has facilities for divers, a moon pool and remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs), and it can be used to lay and recover submarine communications cable which