Danish shipping giant Maersk is deep into the green scene. Its latest environmental policy is to reduce to a minimum the amount of illegally logged tropical hardwoods in the floors of its shipping containers.
Shipping companies are trying to ensure that the mega-container ships on order will have an adequate supply of containers by trying to fix ten-year charters for feeder ships of about 1,100-teu capacity.
At one point during the month, the transpacific rate per loaded 40-foot container was down to $1,932.
Increasing production in the US of shale gas and oil as a result of fracking (fracturing the shale layers in which gas and oil are trapped) should reduce by 5% the average ton-miles of oil cargo shipped, especially from the Middle East to the US. Attention in the Middle East became focused on the Asian market. And major flooding along the Mississippi River drastically cut coal shipments southward and that affected bulker traffic in the Gulf of Mexico.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In Columbia, the bulker Chios Wind ran aground in the River Magdalena and that blocked access to the port of Barranquila for five days. As a result, at least seven ships were diverted to the nearby ports of Santa Maria and Cartagena. The German-owned deep-sea salvage tug Uranus finally arrived and pulled out the harbor’s cork.
Ships collided: At night, the container ship Euros London collided with and sank the 165-foot pogy fishing boat Sandy Point about eight miles south of Gulfport, Mississippi and three of its crew of sixteen died. Worldwide, shore installations took a beating. In New Zealand, the container ship Maersk Dabou punched a large hole in its side when it hit the Beach Street Wharf at Port Chalmers. In the UK at Littlehampton, the dredger Arco Dee lost control in high winds and its superstructure scraped a concrete wall. No holes this time. At Odessa, the container ship RHL Fidelitas lost its ability to reverse and slammed into a pilot boat and the wharf while trying to dock. The pilot boat sank and the pier needed extensive repairs. And at Karmoy in Norway, so much gravel was unloaded from the Nyyfjeli that the pier collapsed.
In Thailand at Laem Chabang, the container ship MOL Aqua had a fire and explosion in a cargo hold as it was berthing. In Sweden at Trollhatten, fire broke out in a load of scrap cars on the cargo/container ship Rebecca Rousing. A port crane lifted off the scrap to allow access to the fire, and it was extinguished but then broke out again.
At a Singapore shipyard, a welder and a nearby worker were killed when fumes exploded in a tank on a barge. The tank had been painted a few days earlier. At Port Manatee in Florida, a dockworker died when he lost his footing and fell about 25 feet down a shaft between a load and the side of a ship. An overloaded crane collapsed at a Vietnamese shipyard, killing two South Korean workers and injuring two others. At Mexico’s Veracruz, three crewmembers of a Greek-flagged cargo ship loading maize died of asphyxiation when the door to a cargo hold accidentally swung shut and trapped them inside. (The bulker was probably the Chios Destiny.)
Alaskan Coast Guard helicopters found the bodies of five clam diggers on mudflats southwest of Kalgin Island in Cook Inlet. They had been digging for razor clams and what happened to their twenty-foot skiff was unclear. At Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick the ro/ro ferry Grand Manan V failed to reach its dock, hitting a nearby ledge. Its bow then swung around and hit the dock. About 100 passengers and eighteen crewmen were helped ashore from the ferry in its awkward perch on the ledges. Failure of one engine to go into reverse was the probable cause of the accident. An injured sailor was brought into Bermuda for treatment of serious burns to his hands after an accident on board the container ship Washington Express. He was picked up by the pilot boat at Five Fathom Hole off St David’s and the container ship continued on its way from Germany to Charleston, South Carolina.
Somewhere in the Bering Sea, a Coast Guard C-130 helped a Coast Guard vessel by dropping enough spare parts onto the cutter Bertholf to enable repair of its helicopter. In India, the product tanker Pratibha Neera gave Vishakhapatnam Port authorities a major scare when it developed a severe list while loading. A problem regulating the loading-compensating ballast was the probable cause.
Gray Fleets
Two officers and two others of the Indian Navy died when a floodgate collapsed at the naval dockyard at Visakhapatnam on that nation’s East Coast. In New York City for Fleet Week, a US Marine was struck and killed by a car about 200 yards from his ship, the helicopter carrier USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7).
A lieutenant commander on the Royal Navy frigate HMS Richmond was sent home from anti-piracy patrolling because of a seven-month affair with a leading seaman (a female). His father is a Rear Admiral and former head of naval training. The commanding officer of the US Navy’s Blue Angels flight team was relieved of his command at his request. He had led the team into a lower-than-planned maneuver during an air show at Lynchburg, Virginia. In Alaska, the commanding officer of the USCGC Anacapa was temporarily relieved of his command after superiors lost confidence in his ability to command. The vessel is a 110-foot patrol boat.
The Royal Australian Navy apologized to Britain, Malaysia, Singapore, and New Zealand because the submarine HMAS Decaineux, which was to play the enemy submarine during anti-submarine Exercise Bersama Shield in the South China Sea, couldn’t make it. The sub had to sit out the exercise in Singapore with “propulsion problems.” Making matters worse for the Ozzies was the discovery that just before the exercise the navy newspaper Navy News had written an imaginative and complimentary article on the sub’s daring performance in the exercise. High brass were not amused.
What does a nation do when it gets rid of its carrier-based aircraft but wants have a few carrier-trained fliers? It sheds its national pride and looks for alternative schemes. Since the UK has deleted its Harrier aircraft and its last aircraft carrier, naval fliers will serve on American carriers and be trained to fly F-18s, a plane the UK does not plan to operate. The flyers will form the basic training cadre when the Royal Navy once again has naval jet aircraft (probably a variant of the US Joint Strike Fighter F-35) sometime in the next decade. And thirty Royal Navy fliers will serve on the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle as soon as they learn enough French in a Parisian school. They will then join the air wing of the Charles de Gaulle for three years to gain experience flying French Rafale jets.
The French are also looking for win-win options. That nation has the one aircraft carrier while the UK has none but has two 60,000-ton biggies ’abuilding, although one will be put into storage as soon as it is completed. As a win-win option, French naval authorities have been pondering cooperative schemes in which that second carrier might fly the tricolor at times. As a French admiral explained, “It would be useful to each have a national carrier [and] then have an extra carrier – not as expensive and for training uses [only] – for UK and French use.”
For his 90th birthday the Duke of Edinburgh was made the Lord High Admiral of the Royal Navy. Her Majesty had held the office of the titular head of the Navy since 1964 but passed it on to her husband as he celebrated his ninth decade. The office dates from the 14th century.
White Fleets
At Gibraltar, a sullage* tank on the North Mole exploded and that triggered a string of frantic activities. The first was to rescue the two men who had been welding on the tank’s top. They were badly burned and one had life-threatening burns. Also needing help were twelve passengers (mostly minor burns and one fracture) on the cruise ship Independence of the Seas, which was moored near the burning tank and the ship’s master then hurriedly took his ship to sea, leaving two passengers behind. Three tugs operated by a local company were among the first-responders. Two tugs set to work to help vacate the area of vessels - including fuel-laden bunker barges - before starting to spray the tanks adjacent to the fire to help cool them down.
Meanwhile, the tug Egerton, crewed by off-duty employees who had run down to the port to offer their assistance, took on the task of moving a barge named Slop 107 that was docked next to the exploded tank and carrying fluids similar to what was in the burning tank. When the Egerton arrived at the scene, its crew found the company’s tug Sun Swale up against the quay next to the fuel barge, spraying water on the tanks on land. Getting the barge underway was not easy; Slop 1707 was tied up to two bollards and the initial plan was for someone to approach along the quay and cut the ropes, allowing Egerton to tow it away.
But the fire intensified and it became too hot and too risky for land-based personnel to help.
So the master of the Egerton pushed the barge against the quay, allowing two brothers to jump across and release the ropes. They were sprayed with water by the crew on the Sun Swale to give them some protection from the heat.
(*Sullage is usually defined as being gray water, the wastewater generated from domestic activities such as laundry, dishwashing, and bathing. In this case, sullage meant a mixture of oil and water. Sullage is not to be confused with ullage, the unused space in a nearly filled tank.)
The MSC Opera had to be towed to Sweden after an engineroom blast cause a massive power failure in the Baltic Sea. Readers know what “no power” means – no toilets, lights, air conditioning, or hot food – in short, much like steerage class was a century ago. At Copenhagen while leaving port, the Costa Magica, with a pilot on board, ran onto a sand bar without harming a single passenger. A tug pulled the ship free the same day.
A woman with symptoms of a stroke was heli-evacuated by an Alaska-based Coast Guard chopper from the Celebrity Millennium.
In the state of Washington at Woodinville, a tour bus carrying 46 passengers from the Sapphire Princess had mechanical problems. First, it ran across the community’s award-winning traffic circle, made it around the next traffic circle but not the third, and finally hit two cars along the way before being stopped by two large boulders. No one in the bus was hurt.
Norway was not kind to some cruise ships. While boarding passengers at Bergen, Norway, the Costa Deliziosa broke free, tearing off two bollards and a large chunk of the wharf. Fifty feet of the pier were destroyed and walkways plunged into the sea. After some cleaning up, the final one hundred passengers were boarded and the ship departed towards Geiranger. (140-180 cruise ships visit the beautiful fjord there during the four-month cruise season.) And at Kristiansand, the Oriana acquired a large dent in her stern after colliding with the dockside in Norway. The vessel was beginning to maneuver away from the quayside when a combination of high winds and fierce tidal conditions resulted in Oriana’s stern striking the corner of the solid stone dock, damaging a water pipe and a fiber-optic cable. Nobody was hurt and the ship was able to head to Southampton with 1,800 passengers on board.
In 2009, a woman slipped on a pool deck on the Carnival Pride and suffered a fractured kneecap and that required at least six surgeries. She sued, claiming that the cruise company knew the deck was slippery by nature and knew of other falls on the Pride and other ships in its fleet. She also claimed that she will need one or two complete knee replacements in the future. A US judge awarded her a total of exactly $2,998,155.70.
Those That Go Back and Forth
In Scotland, the £25 million ferry Finlaggan was the first new large ferry in the Calmac fleet in ten years and the first new ferry to serve Islay in forty years but the new vessel broke down with engine problems that cancelled its inaugural voyage. The problem was an “unexplained component failure of the port engine.”
The Leonora Christina, one of the world’s largest high-speed ferries at 371 feet (113 meters), 1,400 passengers, and 357 cars, allided with a freshwater supply vessel at the entrance of the Suez Canal. The damage was not serious enough to stop the vessel continuing through the Suez Canal on its delivery voyage but it will arrive in Denmark with a depressing depression in its side.
The old (1965) ferry Grand Manan V made an unconventional and unsuccessful landing at its wharf at Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick. It hit a ledge and then its bow swung around and hit the pier. About 100 passengers and eighteen crewmen had to be helped off the ferry from its awkward perch on the ledge. Loss of the ability to reverse one engine was the probable cause.
On Vancouver Island at Swartz Bay, a man committed suicide by driving his pickup truck at high speed through a barrier, down a lane leading to a loading ramp, and off the ferry’s ramp and into the water.
In Indonesia, at least 27 people died when a passenger ferry capsized off Indonesia’s Borneo but more than 70 people were rescued. The ferry was carrying four crewmembers and more than 100 passengers when it capsized and sank about two hours after the ship departed from Tanjung Dewa.
Legal Matters
In an unpublished decision, a US Appeals Court confirmed that the manufacturers of a recre
ational vessel and its engine were liable for injuries if a propeller blade cut and severely injured a swimmer.
Imports
Refugees fleeing the recent “Arab Spring” series of revolts and overthrown rulers increased the already-massive illegal-immigration problem for other nations. Typical was the 100-foot fishing vessel Wave. With high hopes for better lives for those onboard, it set out from Tripoli in Libya with maybe 850 refugees from Mali, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh but ran aground and capsized off the Tunisian coast. Rescue forces were able to save 578 men, women, and children, and the reader can do the remaining arithmetic. The survivors were sent to a refugee camp at Ras Ajdir near the Libyan border.
Nature
Hydrophone-using scientists located some rare right whales in a region off Greenland where they were thought to be extinct.
Southern California has the world’s first hybrid tugs, the purpose-built Carolyn Dorothy, and a converted sister, the Campbell Foss. European designers have been developing hybrid designs too and the Dutch tug RT Adriaan will be retrofitted with basically similar hybrid systems that combine main diesels engines, electric motors, and batteries. All three tugs basically use electric power except for tasks (high-speed transits or ship assist) that require more power, and that is when the main engines are started and used.
Metal-Bashing
She may look like an oversized, over-specified shrimp trawler but an as-yet-unnamed vessel and a 2009-delivered sister named Poncho will trawl for old tires, scrap metal, and any other scrap at the sites of decommissioned oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. US laws require that such sites be left clean enough to allow the typical Gulf shrimp boat to safely use its trawls.
Shell has decided to go ahead with construction of the world’s first Floating Liquefied Natural Gas facility. This “vessel” will process gas from offshore fields and cool it into liquefied natural gas. The FLNG facility will be immense, at 1,600 feet long and a displacement of about 600,000 tons (about six times the largest aircraft carrier). Some 260,000 tons of that displacement will be steel (as the Australian press release parochially notes, that is about five times the steel used in the Sydney Bridge). A South Korean yard will build what will be the world’s largest floating offshore facility.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
In 2010, Somalian pirates attacked 4,185 seafarers with firearms and rocket-propelled grenades; 342 seafarers were rescued from citadels (ships’ reinforced security rooms); 1,090 seafarers were taken hostage; 516 seafarers were used as human shields; and as many as 488 seafarers were subjected to abuse or torture. Currently, more than 400 mariners are held captive along with more than twenty vessels. Piracy increases the cost of international commerce by $12 billion a year.
Piracy Somalia style, is big business with the actual pirates getting only pennies of each ransom dollar. There is even an actual stock exchange (at Harardheere and established ‘way back in 2009) that may list more than seventy entities that sell shares in pirate activities. As one participant bragged, “We’ve made piracy a community activity.” Somalia also has five banks eager and able to launder pirate money. Perhaps international sanctions are needed to complement the busy but relatively ineffective patrols by the warships of many nations?
Odd Bits and Head Shakers
The Felicity Tenacity, carrying 23,500 tons of propane, ran a gauntlet of vessel abuse during the recent Japanese tsunami. First, it broke free and rammed into the bulker China Steel Integrity, and was then battered in turn by numerous smaller boats and tugs before it hit a jetty, which opened a gash in its side. The vessel started taking on water into the engineroom but soon ran aground. It was repeatedly freed and then trapped again as tides came and went, and that sequence damaged and bent the rudder. The ship remained at anchor for at least two weeks before its dangerous cargo was discharged and the ship could limp to a repair yard.
NOAA’s Office of Coastal Survey now uses Twitter to keep customers abreast of critical chart corrections and new chart editions. See www.twitter.com/nauticalcharts.
In May, the bulker Double Prosperity, which departed Australia for India with 65,351 metric tons of coal, ran aground on Bacud reef that runs along Sarangani Bay in the Philippines. The ship’s captain admitted to officials that he had moved his ship closer to the mainland merely to establish solid cellphone signals.
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