Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Other Shores - September 2010

Last month, US merchants were still worried whether there will be enough empty containers in the Far East to get Christmas goods in-country in time for the holidays.

Researchers working for Parks Canada found the hull of HMS Investigator, abandoned and sunk more than 150 years ago after being trapped in the ice at Banks Island’s Mercy Bay in Canada’s far north. The vessel had been searching for Sir John Franklin’s HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. The Investigator stands upright and intact, although its masts have been sheared off by icebergs. Its crew had walked over the ice to Beechey Island where they and the crew of HMS Resolute, deserted at Dealey Island, were rescued by HMS Northern Star, HMS Phoebe, and HMS Talbot. The North was a busy place in 1853.

With six months to the deadline for continued operation of single-hull VLCC tankers, only 53 were operating last month. The others are being changed into bulkers (14), used for storage (9 plus 6 Supermax tankers), or are being equipped with double hulls (1).

Is there really a worldwide depression? Forty-five car carriers arrived at the German port of Bremerhaven in a single week in mid-July, twice the normal rate of about 25 such ships. In fact, things were so busy that nine carriers were unable to dock upon arrival. Most of the vehicles were exports to the Far East and the US. Imports were far down, as a result of the failure of Germany’s cash-for-clunkers program and the building of car factories in Eastern Europe by Korean and Japanese car companies.

Congress has required that all containers entering the US by 2014 must be 100 percent scanned at foreign ports but it seems that that would require technologies that do not yet exist, much additional manpower, and the rebuilding of many foreign ports to create a single area through which all cargo would pass.

A massive fleet of vessels supported well shutoff and oil cleanup operations in the Gulf of Mexico after a well being drilled by the mobile drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew out and the rig burned and then sank. The well dumped an estimated 4.9 million barrels (of 42 gallons each) of crude oil into the Gulf before the well was capped on Day 86 after the blowout. A fleet of nearly 600 skimmers, including from a converted supertanker (it didn’t work out well), most of the non-profit Marine Spill Response Corporation’s fifteen-vessel fleet of big skimmers, and local shrimpers towing collection booms from their boomed-out outriggers, recovered an estimated 2.9 million gallons of oil.

Many wonderfully designed vessels of many foreign nations work in the Gulf of Mexico energy area because there are not enough American-flagged, America-manned vessels that can supply the necessary highly specialized services. This came to public attention because of the Deepwater Horizon spill and there were demands that laws be changed so only American-flagged, American-manned, American-owned vessels can be used in the US’s exclusive economic zone. If enacted, look for severe and devastating impacts on the cost of oil and gas.

The International Whaling Commission met in Morocco and the world’s three still-whaling nations (Japan, Norway, and Iceland) nearly had enough votes to cause cancellation of the 24-year-old moratorium on commercial whaling. The vote failed because of revelations that Japan had been providing bribes and babes, (openly admitted by the representatives of some small developing nations) and had paid the £4,000 bill for the chairman of the meeting’s stay at a luxury Moroccan hotel. The Commission decided to review the Commission’s rules and thus provide a cooling-off period until the next meeting.

UN peacekeepers in Haiti have been living aboard two cruise ships. The Sea Voyager (aka “The Love Boat” among UN staffers) left in May but the Venezuelan-registered Ola Esmeralda (ex-Black Prince) will stay on until the end of August at a daily cost of $72,500. That rate has been called “outrageous, ridiculous….I’d love to have that contract.” The UN’s World Food Program selected the ship over four others in competitive bidding because it “was the most cost effective in terms of price per cabin.” Others estimated that the ship is generating a cash flow of at least $29,000 a day.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Help was quickly sent to the Khalijia-3 after it reported it was taking on water and sinking off the Mumbia (remember, think of it as Bombay) coast. Its crew of 28 was removed while the Indian Coast Guard’s fast patrol vessel Subhadra Kumari Chauhan supplied enough pumping power to save the ship and its cargo of coiled steel during a six-hour operation. Rescuers found the water tanker Varnek upside down off the coast of the Kanin Peninsula and nobody, alive or dead. (For the curious but lazy: This peninsula in the northern European part of the USSR separates the northern part of the White Sea from the shallow Cheshskaia Guba of the Barents Sea and gave its name to a class of Cold War Soviet destroyers.)

At Mumbia, the container ship Chitra was in violent contact with the Khlijia and both ended up aground. The Chitra was nearly on its side and badly leaking oil, and the other vessel was nose-up. The Chitra also was periodically shedding containers, which littered the nearby local waters until they sank.

Where the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway intersects the Houston Ship Channel, the tanker Isabel Knutsen ran aground on mud flats after its steering failed. Initial efforts by three powerful tugs proved useless but the grounding did not affect traffic on either of the busy channels. (For those who have taken a ferry from Galveston to Bolivar Island, the grounding was one-quarter miles east of the Port Bolivar ferry landing.) The general cargo/container ship Transport did grievous damage to its stem and bulbous bow while docking at George Town at Grand Cayman, Antigua &; Barbuda. (The vessel operates a regular service between Mobile, Alabama and the port.) On the Amazon, the Panamax bulker Hellenic Star found it advisable to quickly deviate from its course to avoid a potential collision with an oncoming vessel and so it ran aground and suffered enough damage so that water ingress became a problem. (For those interested in the economics of vessel operation, this vessel was on time-charter at a gross rate of $23,000 a day.)

An accident at an Alang shipbreaking yard left one worker dead and four others injured. Workers were cutting a scrap piece with a gas cutter near a ship's engine room. Though the fire was quickly brought under control, one man had died on the spot. In Manila’s north harbor, an explosion (cause not specified) set the cargo vessel West Ocean 1 on fire. Nobody was hurt and the fire was kept from spreading to other parts of the ship.

Improper use of a desulphurizing chemical after a 300,000-ton tanker had finished unloading crude oil caused the rupture of a pipeline near the northern Chinese port of Dalian. The explosion caused a nearby, smaller pipeline to burst and together they caused a massive oil spill estimated at about 1,500 tons or 400,000 gallons. One cleanup worker drowned in a pool of crude oil and other workers were reported as using bare hands and chopsticks to scoop up oil.

A Russian electrical engineer disappeared from the LPG carrier Summerset while it was anchored off the shipbreaking beach at Alang in India. In the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia, a female cadet on the Safmarine Kariba reported to the master that she had been raped by the chief officer. The master called a meeting of the concerned parties, she failed to appear, a search was started, and her body was found in the water several hours later. The chief mate was fired.

An Alaska-based Coast Guard helicopter took a mariner off the US-flagged taker Alaskan Explorer some 200 miles south of Sitka. He was suffering from chest pains. 

The container ship Altivia arrived at Guam from South Korea and its cargo of containers were found to be heavily infested with spiders not native to Guam. The containers were hurriedly closed and reloaded and the ship was ordered to return to South Korea.

The Strait of Hormuz is a choke point for tankers serving the Persian Gulf. The Strait is 21 miles wide at its narrowest and is created by a narrow peninsula belonging to the United Arab Emirates that thrusts menacingly into the belly of Iran. Each day through the Strait pass about 17 million barrels of crude or nearly 20 percent of what the world needs. Traffic has been peaceful since the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, when dozens of ships of many nationalities were attacked (incidentally, tankers are remarkably resistant to sinking). Maybe the peaceful days are over. The Japanese VLCC M Star, loaded with one million tons of crude oil and heading for Japan, was attacked by what was finally declared to be a suicide boat. Initial reports attributed blame to a collision with a submarine or a rogue wave due to seismic activity somewhere (but there was none nearby) but a large area of dished-in and scorched plating the full height of the ship’s starboard quarter and extensive onboard damage (such as a lifeboat blown out of its position) soon brought realization that the probable cause was a suicide small boat that had exploded near but not against the hull. A terrorist group then confirmed that suspicion and supplied the driver’s name. He will not get a second chance to sink the Star M or any other ship.

Gray Fleets
Russia will boost its defense spending by more than 60 percent by 2014. That translates to an annual 2.025 billion rubles. The Navy will spend its share on the development of new submarines and the Bulava missile system, upgrades of the Black Sea Fleet and acquisition of two French-built Mistral amphibious landing ships. (Russia has previously announced that these sophisticated ships plus possibly two-Russian-built sisters would become part of the Black Sea fleet where the most-probable enemy is Turkey or the Ukraine. Other Western nations wish that France would not transfer western navy technology to a former enemy.) The 21,300-ton Mistral-class “BPC” (Batiments de Projection et de Commandement) ships operate as helicopter carriers and amphibious assault transports, with secondary capabilities as command and hospital ships. One of the vessels can carry 700 troops or evacuees for short periods. Normal hospital capacity is 69 beds, with a fully equipped operating room. That capacity can also be expanded in emergencies by appropriating other ship spaces. The command post section is not expandable, but has workstations for up to 150 personnel.

The British military structure must be made smaller, but how to do so is raising some interesting prospects. For example, it is possible that the Royal Marines could be handed over to the British Army and combined with the Paras. “Are the plans a touch mad? Possibly. Are they being discussed? Absolutely.” stated a senior defense figure. It is expected that the nation’s Ministry of Defence will tell the Army, Navy, and RAF to get rid of 16,000 personnel, hundreds of tanks, and half a dozen ships. That would leave the RAF smaller than it was in 1914—that’s World War One!

White Fleets
A gangway to the cruise ship MSC Spendid gave way while passengers were boarding at Genoa and an elderly woman fell to her death. Her husband hit the quay and suffered severe head and leg injuries. The Emerald Princess lost all power shortly after leaving Port Everglades and passengers enjoyed only intermittent hotel services for almost six hours and the ship missed a stop at Princess Cay. The body of a juvenile humpback whale was spotted atop the bulbous bow of the Sapphire Princess while it was steaming south of Juneau, Alaska in Tracy Sound. A tug soon arrived to pull the whale free and tow it elsewhere for a discreet necropsy to determine the cause of death.

Over the next few years, cruise ships will be required to use low-sulphur fuel while in the national waters of Canada and the US. The prospect caused one British cruise company to announce it may drop calls at ports like Halifax and Victoria, British Columbia. Currently, fuels with 1.5 to 2-5% sulphur are used but the sulphur level must drop to 1% in 2012 and to 0.1% in 2015. These changes will save 14,000 lives a year, predicted the US Environmental Protection Agency, but there are questions whether such fuels will even be available.

Those That Go Back and Forth
On Lake Victoria, a passenger boat capsized with sixty on board, mostly traders with their merchandise. Only four people were rescued. They had held onto pieces of wood and sacks of fish. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a (probably overloaded) ferry carrying passengers to the capital of Kinshasha sank in the Kasai River in the western province of Bandundu, leaving at least 138 dead. On Lake Victoria, a boat carrying 36 people, almost all of them primary-school children, capsized in strong winds and half of the children did not survive.

Legal Matters
Legal penalties vary tremendously worldwide. In the Philippines, the Coast Guard arrested the product tanker BMI Angelita for discharging about 15 liters (about four gallons) of oily waste water from its flooded engineroom. (The ship had gone aground at the height of typhoon Conson.) The arrest will be lifted as soon as the owners pay a fine of 10,000 pesos (about $217).

Illegal Imports
The car carrier Frontier Ace arrived at Walvis Bay in Namibia with several stowaways crouched atop its rudder. They had boarded at Lagos, Nigeria.

Metal-Bashing
Massachusetts’ senior senator John Kerry had the 76-foot sailboat Isabel built in New Zealand for about $7 million and apparently intended to put it into the charter business out of Rhode Island’s Newport, a popular port for East Coast charterers. It should be noted that Rhode Island is a state without a sales tax while the Massachusetts sales tax is 6.25%. The senator didn’t have to pay the Massachusetts sales tax of $437,500 if the luxury vessel stayed out of Massachusetts’ waters for six months but it was spotted at Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard shortly after delivery. (The Senator and his multi-million-dollared wife have a summer place on Nantucket.) When these inconvenient facts were brought to a flustered Senator’s attention, he agreed to pay the sales tax (plus an annual vessel excise tax of about $70,000) “if the taxes are owed.”

Nature
Revenge for ancient whaling kills or merely an accident? You choose. Off Cape Town, quite near Robben’s Island (where Nelson Mandela was jailed for so many years), a couple on the cruising sailboat Intrepid cut the engine to watch a southern right whale gambol nearby. Suddenly, the nearsighted cetacean swam in their direction, broached high out of the water, and crashed down on the yacht’s deck. Away went the mast and the whale swam away, perhaps missing some blubber. A nearby vessel got the whole episode on some-what shaky video. (Neither human on the Intrepid was injured.) 

In Alaska, the operator of a 34-foot jet boat taking loggers to work sites intentionally deviated from his course and hit humpback whales at high speed on two separate occasions. He got a remarkably light sentence of two years of probation and a $1,000 fine.

In the Philippines, the Coast Guard wants the owners of the coal-laden barge Gold Trans 306 to get it off a coral reef near Batangas (the barge is badly damaged) and to collect all of the coal that fell overboard so the reef and marine life would not be adversely affected. (The barge was another victim of typhoon Conson after its towline snapped.)

The Norwegian Polar Institute claimed at the abortive Copenhagen Climate Change Conference last year that sea levels may rise by 0.5 to 1.5 metres before the end of this century. If true, that will inconvenience about 150 million people. Most of the sea rise will be caused by melting ice and snow with 25% contributed by the expansion of the warming waters.

On Rwanda’s Lake Kivu, a barge has started collecting volcanic gasses in the fizzy lake. They are pumped ashore where methane is separated out and used to power three large generators that create electricity for that power-short nation. The volcanic gasses are a product of seismic activity in the Great Rift as Africa slowly splits apart. Historically, Lake Kivu's gasses have been a killer. Deaths attributed to invisible pockets of carbon dioxide along the shoreline are frequently reported. The gasses dissolved in the water, however, present a far greater threat. The ever-expanding volumes of carbon dioxide and methane in Lake Kivu, coupled with nearby volcanic activity, may trigger a “limnic eruption” (also referred to as a lake overturn, in which CO2 suddenly erupts from the lake). These are highly likely at some stage in the future unless degassing occurs. That has begun with the extraction of some of the 60bn cubic metres of methane in the Lake. The world's only other known "exploding lakes,” Monoun and Nyos, both in Cameroon, overturned in the 1980s. The clouds of carbon dioxide that burst through from the deep water asphyxiated about 1,800 people. But Lake Kivu is nearly 2,000 times larger than Lake Nyos, and is in a far more densely populated area. An American professor described Kivu as possibly "one of the most dangerous lakes in the world. She said, "You don't even want to think about the scale of the devastation that could occur."

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
At Bangladesh’s main port of Chittagong, a small group of pirates seemingly specializes in stealing one type of relatively low-cost items. Four pirates armed only with long knives took four mooring lines from the container ship PFS Keshava while it was anchored in Anchorage A. Then a week later in Anchorage C, four long knife-armed pirates boarded the bulker Hong Kong Star and got away with four mooring lines. A watchman failed to spot them and the loss was only noted when it came time to anchor the vessel.

Odd Bits and Head-Shakers
Ordnance left over from World War II’s Pacific battles still pose dangers. About fifteen Solomon Islanders lose their lives each year due to still-viable explosives. Royal Australian Navy divers have been training members of the Royal Solomon Island Police divers in explosive ordnance disposal techniques.

Insufficient dredging kept the Chinese-flagged Zhen Hua 10 from approaching near enough to a wharf to unload the first four container cranes that will be essential parts of making Cochin into India’s first international transshipment port. Rapid dredging enabled the ship to unground and deliver its towering cranes.

Near-misses, hails from another yacht, horn blasts from a coaster’s horn, and radio calls from the Coastguard failed to alert anybody on the yacht Erma, a sailboat jogging along under only a jib in the middle of an incredibly busy English Channel. But siren blasts from a hovering Coastguard helicopter brought a sole navigator topsides. He said he was sailing from Portland to the Azores and had been busy below. (Sleeping, perhaps?)