Italy is treating the cruise ship Costa Concordia stranding as a national disaster and it is important for other nations to stand back and be rational. So noted an industry technical expert.
Royal Dutch Shell announced that it was losing $1 billion a year due to drilling delays since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
How many seaports and their terminals will be able to handle the larger bulkers of the near future? We’re talking about ships of 200,000 dwt and more. The paucity of such ports and terminals will limit the available options for shipowners.
“Automation is not something that scares us, as long as employers take us along with them,” announced a California labor leader with regard to plans to introduce automated straddle carriers at one container terminal at the Port of Los Angles. (Such automation is common overseas.)
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In thick fog in the Dover Strait, the gas tanker Gas Arctic collided with the cargo ship Spring Bok. No “boom” and both ships, although damaged above the waterline, proceeded to Portland for inspection. At Belfast, at the harbor entrance, the 21,800-ton ferry Stena Feronia was hit by the small coaster Union Moon. The little one‘s bow took a beating, its master was found to be under the influence of drink and faced a possible two-year sentence, and he was fired.
In Danish waters, the combined chemical and oil tanker Terry ran aground off Drogden. Reason why? The master tested quite drunk. In Scotland, the Dutch-registered coaster Flinterspirit became stuck on Flodday Mor Island on its way from Sweden to Belfast. The second mate felt a judder and rushed up to the bridge; there was no one there. The second mate called the chief mate to the bridge and together they sounded the general alarm. When the master still did not appear, the second mate went down to his cabin where he was found in bed. The vessel was refloated on the next high tide. The Russian master fined £3,000 for failing to alter his course and prevent grounding the vessel, and additional £300 on another charge for failing a routine breath test three days after the grounding. (Life for the two officers on a coaster is brutal. Full-time work in port for both – mate loading cargo, master handling shoreperson interactions – and then they alternate on-duty watches with inadequate rest breaks when finally underway again, all repeated frequently. Drinking and misjudgments often result.)
The 2,000-ton coaster Carrier was loading limestone at the jetty of a North Wales quarry when it began to blow. The skipper tried to break away but the vessel was blown ashore against nearby riprap alongside dual-lane highway A55. As waves broke over the vessel, a Royal Navy helicopter hoisted five and lowered them to the highway (which had been closed to traffic) until the winch cable caught on a light on the ship. The chopper aborted, leaving a winchman on the coaster. An RAF chopper later rescued him and the last two crewmen.
An explosion wracked the chemical tanker Royal Diamond 7 near Mumbai, injuring seven, one of whom later died from his burns while being transferred from one hospital to another. On Lake Ontario, the newly purchased tug Patrice McAllister was steaming on its way to new owners in New York City when an engineroom fire gutted the vessel and burned the chief engineer seriously enough that he died in a Toronto hospital. An EPIRB was used to alert Canadian and US rescuers. Two Vietnamese fishermen got into a fight as the fishing vessel Jung Woo was leaving Montevideo. The fight caused a fire in the accommodations area and the FV had to return to port. Off the coast of Brazil, a tug towed the container ship Buenos Aires Express towards the Dominican Republic after an engineroom fire off the coast of Brazil. The 20-day tow probably meant that the powerless-ship’s cargo was a total loss.
On Denmark’s North Jutland island minutes before a train was to cross a bridge at Aalborg, the Finnish coaster Ramona struck it and put it out of commission for six months. The coaster was undamaged and neither the master or the bridge tender were drunk so they may have just miscommunicated. Trains stranded north of the bridge were sailed to Gothenburg from Fredrikshavn and returned to Copenhagen via the Øresund link.
On the Outer Weser, the engine of the container ship MSC Frederica failed and the vessel drifted on the German river for some time. Eventually, two tugs towed the vessel back to the quay. In New York, a crane on a barge towed by the tug Thomas Dann tore a fifty-foot hole in metal sheathing under the Brooklyn Bridge. The sheathing protects passing boats from anything dropped during painting operations.
Rubber tires make great fenders in port but are noisy seamates offshore. The New Zealand tug Tuahine used its EPIRB to request help when its steering broke down off Australia’s Cape Moreton and couldn’t be repaired. A report on the incident revealed that the tires had been stored in the lazarette and, during rough weather, one had chafed through a hydraulic hose, disabling the steering.
The container ship Gati Pride had been anchored off the Chennai coast for three months after the vessel was arrested on an order from the Madras high court because its previous crewmembers had not been paid. The ship was released after its owner paid up and hired a new crew. The new third officer fell into an empty hold and was killed. His widow promptly had the ship arrested, claiming it was unseaworthy due to long neglect. In Georgia at Savannah, a female dockworker was killed when struck by a forklift. She was a retired postal worker who had become a full-time member of the longshoremen’s union. An explosion in the engine of a tugboat in the Suez Canal killed three and injured a dozen others. Four Chinese college students were killed on Taihu Lake when a drunken boat operator tried cutting between a tug and barge. The towing hawser cut off the motorboat’s roof, which collapsed onto the students.
A muttonbird in New Zealand is usually the sooty shearwater (Puffinus griseus) or tītī (Maori), and muttonbird young are caught and preserved by Maori families for later consumption. Helicopters are often used to get to the remote muttonbird islands off NZ’s South Island during each two-month season but boats, often rickety boats, are still used. The 40-foot Easy Rider, without much in the way of basic safety equipment, set out with a family group in bad weather and was capsized by a large wave. A sole survivor was found clinging to a barrel in the ocean after enduring 18 hours in the dark, rain, and cold but eight others, including a 7-year-old, had died.
About 400 miles off California, the USCGC Bertholf took the two most-seriously injured crew off the 68-foot racing sailboat Geraldton Western Australia, one of ten yachts competing in the biennial Clipper Round The World Yacht Race. A big wave overwhelmed the boat, snapping off the steering-wheel pedestal and injuring four of a crew of eighteen. And, at the request of the US Coast Guard, the California National Air Guard dropped four paramedics and a Zodiac near the Chinese fishing vessel Fu Yuan Yu 871 some 700 miles off Acapulco. Then two special-ops helicopters, refueled in flight by a special-ops MC-130P tanker aircraft, arrived and took two badly burned fishermen to Acapulco where another MC-130P flew them to a San Diego burn treatment center. It was a mission the Coast Guard can’t do with its current equipment but, luckily for the fishermen, southern California is host to an Air Force air-rescue wing.
Gray Fleets
The British helicopter carrier HMS Illustrious was participating in Exercise Cold Response in Norway when one of four tugboats escorting the carrier into port at Harstad punched two sizable holes in the thin-skinned warship. After minor repairs, it continued on with the exercise in blizzard conditions for the next five days but then authorities decreed that the ship had best return home.
The large offshore multi-purpose oilfield support vessel Skandi Bergen was purchased by the Australian Navy but it will never see combat unless special insurance is purchased for its civilian crew. The 6,500-ton ship might be very useful in Australia’s humanitarian and disaster relief efforts but critics say the $130-million vessel was purchased for the Border Protection and Customs Service, is of no use to the Navy, and the purchase was a public-relations stunt anyhow.
In about a year and a half, the US Navy will test a humanoid robot firefighter named Octavia (why a female name here?) that can walk onto a fiery, smoke-filled compartment and throw extinguisher grenades or "man" a hose. She will also provide feedback to human firefighters safely outside the compartment.
Scotland votes next year on separation from the UK so should the Royal Navy place ship orders with Scottish yards in the meantime? One political party is calling for a ban until after the referendum. (It should be noted that the Royal Navy will have two replenishment ships built in far-off South Korea.)
White Fleets
In thick fog off Vietnam, the cruise ship Silversea Shadow T-boned a smallish Vietnamese container ship in Ha Long Bay in what the cruise company described as “a minor incident.” Both vessels were damaged and some on the other vessel, whose name was never publicized, may have been injured.
In Philippine waters, the Azamara Quest had an engineroom fire and smoke drifted into dining spaces, alarming the ship’s 1,000 passengers. The fire was quickly extinguished and, after drifting for 24 hours, the ship limped at six knots to Sandakan city in Malaysia's eastern state of Sabah on the island of Borneo. In the Caribbean, the Caribbean Princess arrived four hours late at St Maarten due to a propulsion-motor problem and the next two sailings were cancelled.
Damaged by an engineroom fire earlier this year, the Costa Allegra, one of the company’s smallest and oldest vessels, will be sold as-is or scrapped.
Those That Go Back and Forth
Officers on the cross-Channel ferry Spirit of France were forced to confine about 1,300 passengers in a secure lounge while 200 drunken students from two Manchester, UK universities, trashed the ship. They will not return from a European skiing trip on that ferry.
The Isle of Man ferry Ben-My-Chree returned to Douglas after an engine developed problems two and a half hours into the voyage. It wasn’t that the ferry was inoperable but the ferry’s master figured he needed two engines to berth at Birkenhead. Overnight accommodations and alternative sailings were arranged for the 40 passengers.
Since the small craft used by students to get to school had proved to be extremely dangerous, strictly supervised students of some schools in China’s Hunan Province now wear lifejackets as they board new “school boats.” These are working out better than the rafts and fishing boats previously used.
Locomotive operators must expect vehicles stopped on the tracks at crossings and, accordingly, ferry skippers should expect passengers to go missing. A woman told her husband that she was going for a walk but her “walk” was off the Condor Rapide somewhere between the Channel Island of Guernsey and Poole in Dorset. A search on board and of the sea until nightfall failed to find her.
In Myanmar, the Pathein Thu sank as it was about to dock at a jetty near the town of Ngapuda in the Irrawaddy Delta. Seventy-two people were rescued, ten died, and others were missing. In southern Bangladesh, the double-deck ferry Shariatpur-1 capsized after colliding with a coal barge and 142 people died. The Japanese ro/ro ferry Masagena was heading to its new home in Indonesia when it sprung a leak. Most of the crew was taken off but the master and chief engineer remained on board to fight the leak. No reports are available on what happened next but they may have grounded the vessel.
A Washington-state ferry company needs full loads as part of a federally funded research project to see whether the low-wake ferry Rich Passage I can carry riders through Rich Passage without damaging beaches or bulkheads so it is offering very low fares for five months.
Legal Matters
Drugs can be hard to trace. At Los Angeles/Long Beach, custom officials found twenty bricks of cocaine in the sidewall of an empty reefer container. The container originated in El Salvador with vessel stops in Guatemala and Mexico, and had been returned to the terminal after delivering a shipment of cantaloupes to a distributor in California.
Nature
Explorer and filmmaker (“Titanic” and “Avatar”) James Cameron bottomed at the 35,756-foot depth in the Mariana Trench in his 24-foot-tall Deepsea Challenger. He filmed and took samples and readings with a sediment sampler, a robotic claw, a "slurp gun" for sucking up small sea creatures for study at the surface, and temperature, salinity, and pressure gauges. His vessel is bullet-shaped and designed to spin its way down faster than conventional diving vessels.
Elsewhere in the Marianas Trench, scientists discovered an eco-system, including ovesicomyid clams, that feeds on mantle material such as serpentinized peridotite, or serpentinite. Yep! Rock-eating clams.
The Cascadia fault in the Pacific Northwest is an offshore subduction zone fault capable of producing a magnitude-9 earthquake that would damage Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, and Victoria, British Columbia and generate a large tsunami. Scientists will soon build and install a seafloor geodesy observatory above the expected rupture zone.
Oceanographers have found that the very-cold deepsea Antarctic Bottom Water has been disappearing at an average rate of about eight million metric tons per second over the past few decades. That is equivalent to about fifty times the average flow of the Mississippi River or about a quarter of the flow of the Gulf Stream in the Florida Straits.
In a Caribbean rift, other ocean scientists discovered the deepest-yet vents. They spout water hotter than 450°C more than one km above the vent openings, four times higher than other vents. The vents also host a new species of pale shrimp, which cluster in dense clumps (2,000 per square meter). The shrimp have a light-sensing organ on their back in place of eyes, and the vent output is unusually rich in copper.
Metal-Bashing
The ex-Exxon Valdez was sold for $25.8 million (about $460 per ldt) for scrapping (probably in India) 23 years after the crude-oil tanker caused the worst oil spill in US history. Now converted into an iron-ore bulker, it was renamed Exxon Mediterranean, SeaRiver Mediterranean, S/R Mediterranean, Mediterranean, Dong Fang Ocean and, most recently, Oriental Nicety. Also sold for scrapping, this time in Turkey, was the cruise ship Pacific Princess, better known to TV watchers between 1977 through 1987 as the Love Boat.
Imports
The tanker Hamburg and a Canadian helicopter rescued six of nine men on the 35-foot sailboat Tabasco 2 in deep trouble about 100 miles off Canada’s Sable Island. It is suspected that the boat was smuggling humans since the occupants were from Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia.
In 2011, at least 1,500 people lost their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean in search of a better world – and few governmental or private entities made any attempt to help those in trouble. One small boat left Tripoli during the conflict in Libya with 72 people on board. It needed help and a distress call was duly logged by an Italian rescue center. Several vessels made contacts with the boat but none provided meaningful assistance (although a helicopter did drop biscuits and water). Only nine people were alive when the boat drifted ashore back in Libya 15 days after its departure.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Employers and unions agreed that the territorial waters of Benin and Nigeria are a high-risk area so mariners venturing there will get double pay.
Peru joined most South American nations demonstrating solidarity with Argentina in its dispute with the UK over the Falkland/Malvinas Islands by cancelling a visit by the Royal Navy frigate HMS Montrose.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
The 164-foot Japanese fishing vessel Ryou-Un Maru, spotted floating crewless off British Columbia, was the first large object to complete a trans-Pacific transit after being set adrift by the tsunami created by Japan’s earthquakes in March of last year. The Canadian fishing vessel Bernice C claimed salvage rights to the FV but was unable to tow the abandoned ship. As soon as the Bernice C left the scene, the USCGC Anacapa used its 25-mm deck gun to sink the FV 180 miles off Alaska.
Those fighting shipboard fires often need shore-based assistance. Some time ago in the UK, national funding enabled fifteen counties to organize and equip quick-response Maritime Incident Response Groups, each consisting of about fifty specialist firefighters and medics. Teams of nine responders would have been helicoptered to incidents as far as 250 miles at sea. To save $535,000, in the national budget, the MIRGS were de-funded and now only seven local fire and rescue services might be able to respond to a ship fire, and that number is expected to dwindle.
Excavations at the site of a former army barracks in Plymouth brought up a grenade-shaped object. A bomb disposal team decided it was either the knob of a bedstead or the end of a curtain rod. But the bomb disposal team at Portsmouth had a juicier object to work on – maybe a WW II German V2 rocket! Some of it was sticking up in shallow water and had been used for years for mooring local boats. Digging revealed it was the last four feet of a V2—nothing explosive, just the rocket motor.
Mozambique’s northwestern Tete province has the world's largest untapped coal reserves, estimated at 2.4 billion tons. How to get coal to customers hit a hitch when the government rejected a proposal to barge thermal and coking coal down the Zambezi River due to possible flooding if the river was dredged for barges. One mining company still plans to use both barges and the Sena railroad, recently restored nearly thirty years after the civil disturbances that put it out of service, since it has already invested $4 billion to buy one mine and control of another mine.
Some bunker fuel originates in the Urals and passes through many hands before being pumped into a ship, perhaps at Rotterdam. Along that long path, nasties have been adding waste products not naturally present in the fuel, including chlorine and zinc. The illegal pollution has been found in about one third of the tanks of inland tankers.
A new shallow-water sidescan sonar system was able to lead rescuers to the body of a drowned sailor who had been missing for over 10 years.
In Louisiana, a foreign shipping company was fined $2 million for dumping oily water in international waters while a land-based environmental company was fined $5,000 for dumping 1,200,000 gallons of oily water into a canal near New Orleans. Same court but different versions of justice.
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