The current global marine insurance market has the capacity for
$1.1 to $1.2 billion of coverage but the risk presented by a single large container
ship could be larger. A loaded 18,000-TEU box ship could have a total value of maybe
$2.3 billion. In contrast, the hull and machinery and insured value of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, currently the
biggest marine insurance loss in history,
was $500 million.
India’s Supreme Court banned all mining operations and transportation
of iron ore, a $4.5 billion-per-year business, in Goa. A report estimated that the
exchequer had lost Rs35,000 crore (US$6.3 billion) due to illegal mining in the
last 12 years.
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In the Russian Far East, an EPIRB from the bulker Amurskaya started bleeping for help and then
the ship sank with its crew. The vessel was undermanned, overloaded with 700 tons
of gold ore, and had left port without proper clearances.
In the UK, the master of the reefer Springbok
pleaded guilty to three charges (failure to keep a good lookout, failure to ascertain
that risk of collision existed, and a failure to keep clear of a vessel being overtaken).
Because visibility in the English Channel had improved, he had dismissed the lookout
and proceeded at 18-20 knots. He spent the next twenty minutes chatting with a son
and brother-in-law when he suddenly saw through the ship’s forward cranes the fast-approaching
stern of the small LNG carrier Gas Arctic (7-8 knots), which
was desperately altering course to avoid the coming collision. However, they did
collide. He was fined £1,500 plus costs of £1,000. In 2003 at Singapore,
a small timber carrier named Springbok
was T-boned by an LPG carrier named Gas Roman.
The collision welded the two ships together and salvors separated them with difficulty
and some trepidation. Different ships, different owners, but much similarity in
names.
The smallish Wilson Avonmouth
gently grounded north of Elsinore. (If that name is vaguely familiar, get out your
copy of “Hamlet.”) The vessel traffic service had noted that the coaster was heading
for a problem and tried to call the ship on VHF. No answer so the VTS took actions
involving a helicopter and the Swedish Coast Guard in hopes of getting the ship
to anchor but no luck. The master was intoxicated. The container ship Fremantle Express ran onto rocks and its
starboard anchor while entering Puerto Cortes in Honduras. No leaks or structural
damage, and the ship was freed the next day by two tugs. In Alaska, the small tugboat
Capt Hendren had just finished a summer
of dredging for gold when it ran up on some rocks two miles outside of St. Michael,
It got off a day or two later. In India, the chemical tanker Pratibha Cauvery was pushed aground at Chennai
by Cyclone Nilam and the crew tried to
get ashore in a lifeboat. It capsized and eighteen were rescued but four others
went missing.
The container ship Deike
Rickmers arrived at Cape Town with dense smoke arising from a probable fire
in a container. Last summer’s fire on the container ship MSC Flaminia claimed one more life, raising the death toll to three.
A Filipino crewmember died in a hospital in Portugal from severe burns sustained
during the fire.
Three walkers were 3,000 feet up the munro (any mountain in Scotland with a height over
3,000 feet or 914.4 m) Beinn a’Chroin in the Trossachs when a cloud rolled in and
they were lost. Poorly equipped except for a smartphone and whistle, they asked
for help. A Royal Navy helicopter was diverted from a training flight but decided
it didn’t want to operate in thick cloud. A crewman hiked up the munro and found
the stranded walkers about 15 minutes later, uninjured, but cold. Visibility topside
was about 40 meters and the whistle provided useful vectoring information for the
chopper crewman. On the other side of the world, Typhoon Son Tinh separated the jack-up drill rig GSF Key Hawaii from its tugboat. As the rig approached the shore of
Ha Mai Island, a Vietnamese military chopper evacuated all 35 workers on board.
In the dark of night, a helicopter from the
USS McCampbell spotted five Filipino fishermen standing on the roof of their
sinking boat because one of them was repeatedly flashing a lighter. The destroyer
took them to Manila.
An argument on the tug Nicole
at Manila turned ugly and the quartermaster hacked the chief engineer to death with
a bolo. At Tampa, the geared bulker Honesty
Ocean was unloading bundles of 4-inch pipes with a ship’s crane when a bundle
broke apart, showering pipes into the hold, on the ship’s deck, and onto the pier.
Four stevedores were trapped under the pipes in the hold. One died and another was
seriously injured. In Alaska near Skagway, a fisherman fell off the fishing boat
Darlin’ Michelle. Shipmates tossed him
a life ring and tried several times to pull him aboard but his lifejacket broke
and so he died. A mechanic was killed while performing maintenance on a crane at
Oakland, California. He was about 250 feet up when the trolley moved and he was
crushed between a cable and the body of the crane. About 90 miles SE of Cape Hatteras
and pretty much in the path of Hurricane Sandy,
the made-for-a-movie replica square-rigger HMS
Bounty ran into trouble and sank. Fourteen made it into liferafts but two missed
a raft when the Bounty rolled. One was
later located, survival-suited but comatose and unresponsive. She was Claudene Christian,
a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, the original Bounty’s chief mutineer. Still missing was Capt Robin Waldridge, a vastly
experienced skipper of replica ships like the Bounty. The master of the Saudi Arabia-flagged tug Resolve Guardian died, probably of a heart
attack, while the tug was en route from India to a Pakistani port. A South Korean Coast Guard small boat capsized while rescuing 15
of the Malaysian freighter Shinline’s crew and five of the just-rescued
died. On the LPG carrier Maharshi
Krishnatreya, five died when they accidentally inhaled gas from a leaking pipe.'
At Loch Lomond, an unconfirmed
report stated that more than 100 vessels had been stolen after dark, taken out to
an island and stripped that night, and then sunk. One of the custodians of
the Mersey Heritage Trust’s Baltic trader tall ship Zebu attempted to mount his bike on a pontoon (float) alongside the
dock wall. But he lost his balance and fell head first into the narrow gap between
the pontoon and quay and became trapped under it. The Zebu’s safety officer immediately jumped in and pulled him out. He was
rushed to Liverpool Royal Infirmary where he was admitted to intensive care suffering
from secondary drowning. He recovered sufficiently to come out of intensive care
but his condition then deteriorated and he died.
Gray Fleets
Off Florida, the submarine USS Montpelier rose to periscope depth in the path of the cruiser USS San Jacinto. Their meeting crushed the
cruiser’s sonar dome.
The USS John C. Stennis
Carrier Strike Group had barely arrived in the Middle East when its commander,
a rear admiral, was temporarily reassigned because of an "inappropriate leadership
judgment" during the deployment. The CO of the Navy’s Southwest Regional Maintenance
Center was relieved of command for mismanagement and misuse of funds. And the commanding
officer of the frigate USS Vandergrift
took photos during a three-day “happy” visit with the ever-convivial Russians at
Vladivostok and posted them on the 7th Fleet’s own Facebook page. He
was promptly relieved of command for “demonstrating poor leadership and failure
to ensure the proper conduct of his wardroom officers.” Three of his senior officers
were relieved of duty “for personal conduct involving use of alcohol and not adhering
to established liberty policies."
The commanding officer of the landing ship dock USS Harpers Ferry was hospitalized after
a motorcycle accident while commuting home from work. His executive officer took
over. At Mayport, Florida, a Royal Navy
officer died after falling off a hoisted-out landing craft on HMS Ocean and
landing on another landing craft below.
To raise £5,000 for
the British Limbless Ex-Service Men's Association a Royal Navy diver ran the Great South Run while
wearing 200 pounds of antique diving gear. He figured he could run a mile in an
hour and a half so race organizers allowed him to run the ten miles over three days
and start two days before the race itself. (For those who really must know, yes,
he wore a catheter.)
White Fleets
The ex-master of the wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia sued his ex-employer for
wrongful termination of his job. In Western Australian waters, a helicopter from
the frigate HMAS Toowomba was training
off Fremantle when it was diverted to pick up an elderly man off the Sea Princess. He was suffering from acute
stomach pains. Serious damage was discovered on the Ventura, 116,017 gross tons and built in 2007, after it hit bad weather
in the Bay of Biscay. A crack at least two inches wide ran across the full width
of an upper deck. (The cruise ship and its passengers made it safely to Southampton.)
Off Cape Town, an un-named catamaran capsized near Hout Bay and
a crewman went missing. Passengers said he had given his lifejacket to a youngster.
His body was found the next day. The boat was carrying 38 people to Duiker Island,
a popular destination for seal spotting. A mock cannon exploded on a mock pirate
ship carrying 26 tourists near the island of Kos in the south Aegean Sea. The explosion
killed the master and injured five tourists, none seriously. A relative of the dead
master got the ship back to port. In Vietnam’s scenic Ha Long Bay, five tourists
died when their boat collided with another and capsized. None were wearing lifejackets
and there was no safety or medical equipment on board. After a similar accident
killed five tourists last year, safety standards for tour boats were implemented
but their enforcement seems to have been haphazard if at all.
Those That Go Back and Forth
Gusts of wind caused the
ro/ro ferry Napoleon Bonaparte to break
its moorings at Marseille and it ended up aground and leaning heavily on a dock.
That ripped an underwater breach in the hull about 30 meters long. The ferry was
out of service for the winter. A female deckhand on the Alaska Marine Highway’s
Columbia was injured at Fairhaven, Washington
when a cable supporting a passenger ramp snapped and it buckled and collapsed. She
fell about 20 feet onto the ramp and suffered multiple injuries. Due to bad weather
conditions, the ro/pax Pride of Burgundy
collided with the similar ferry Berlioz
off Calais. The PoB had damage to its
starboard bridge wing. On Lake Erie, the
small ro/ro ferry Jimann got stuck on
a sandbar only two hundred meters from its terminus at Leamington, Ontario. Thirty-three
crew and passengers, including an infant, spent the night on board and the next
day a tugboat pulled it free. Many on Pelee Island breathed a sigh of relief because
the ferry was due to bring over six hundred hunters for the Island’s annual pheasant
shoot. The Washington State ferries have minimum staffing and, if a crewman doesn’t
show up for work, the ferry doesn’t sail. There were dozens of such cancellations
this summer (up from four last year) and company officials are talking with unions
whether union members might be unhappy (as in “work slowdown”).
In the Egyptian province of Beheira, a minibus rolled off a ferry
into the Nile and fourteen workers died. In the US or perhaps Canada, another minivan
knocked down a raised ramp and rolled off Horne’s ferry while it crossed the St
Lawrence River between Cape Vincent in Jefferson County, New York and Wolfe Island,
Ontario. The three occupants standing nearby weren’t hurt but ferry’s master/owner
Horne was hospitalized for a possible heart attack. And the next day the company’s
website announced, “We must close early this year due to low water levels.”
Energy
A 13.8-megawatt solar power plant has been operating at the US
Navy’s China Lake research center in the Mojave Desert since January. It will save
the Navy about $13 million a year because the maker of the solar units got to install
its units if it sold electricity to the Navy at below the current rates.
The US Navy signed an agreement with a privately owned company
for the development of advanced biofuels and bioenergy for use throughout the US
military. The company will build a sustainable bio-refinery at US Naval Base Ventura
County that will produce biofuels and bioenergy at prices competitive with unsubsidized
conventional fuel and power. Construction of the plant will be partially funded
by the California Energy Commission.
Nature
An Australian-Bahraini team of coral-reef rebuilders has been
using realistic molded-concrete replicas of coral heads but may switch to more-complex
heads printed by a 3-D printer.
Scientists are working on ways to “see” through the icy crust
on an ocean to explore what is underneath. A major problem is the sea is on Europa,
a moon of Jupiter some 390 million miles from Earth.
Metal-Bashing and Salvage
Three laborers died when steel plates fell on them from a ship’s
deck at the Gadani scrapping yard on the Balochistan coast in Pakistan. In India,
Asia's largest ship breaking yard, Alang, was closed as a protest against the arrest
of company officials in connection with death of six laborers in a blast on a oil
tanker being dismantled. Those arrested were booked for culpable homicide not amounting
to murder and negligent conduct with respect to fire rather than the more-usual
charge of negligence, and they could get life imprisonment.
To eliminate pollution sources Russia may hire international
salvage companies to raise two old nuclear submarines. While being towed to a dismantling
site, B-159 (originally K-159), a November-class submarine, sank
in the Barents Sea in 2003 with nine of her crew and 1,760 lbs. (800 kg) of spent
nuclear fuel. K-27 was an experimental
attack submarine built in 1962 and decommissioned in 1979 due to her troublesome
nuclear reactors. Nine of her crew died when fuel elements failed. Her reactor compartment
was sealed and the submarine was scuttled in the eastern Kara Sea in 1982.
The sunken ro/ro ferry Bahuga
Jaya may remain at the bottom of Sunda Strait at a depth of 76 meters and with
strong underwater currents along with what is now believed to be the bodies of 43
passengers. Rescue authorities said it would be “inefficient” to raise it to the
surface. (A salvor might have a different opinion.)
“Bottom suction” is often a limiting factor when refloating a
grounded vessel. At Valencia, the grounded bulker Celia broke bottom suction by
using its cranes to swing two heavy containers from one side to the other while
the tug Punta Mayor pulled. Everything
worked and all that remained were a damage assessment and an investigation into
why the ship had gone aground almost a month earlier.
Human Imports
As many as 130 people may have drowned off the coast of southern
Bangladesh after a boat carrying passengers trying to illegally get into Malaysia
sank in the Bay of Bengal. Only six survivors were found. At least 61 people died
when a boat believed to be carrying illegal Syrians and Palestinians migrants sank
off the coast of Turkey. A boat carrying as many as 100 Tunisian migrants ran into
trouble in the Mediterranean and at least 56 people were rescued, some from the
sea and others from the small and uninhabited Sicilian island of Lampione
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
West Africa was the month’s piracy hot spot. Seven non-Nigerian
mariners were kidnapped from the anchor-handler Bourbon Liberty 249 off Nigeria while another nine crewmen, reportedly
all Nigerians, were left on board. The vessel was soon located at Bonny Island and
the captives were released two weeks later, probably after ransoms were paid. The
comment was made that “this attack was a ‘departure against the usual pattern of
piracy’ in the Gulf of Guinea.”
The Aframax tanker Orfeas
quietly left the anchorage at Abidjan, probably hijacked and heading for Lagos,
Nigeria. About three days later, the tanker was released minus a goodly part of
its cargo of 32,068 tons of gasoline.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
The US Coast Guard conducted an extensive search off Mobile,
Alabama for a Filipino sailor from the containership MSC Tokyo. He had been told to recover the Jacob’s ladder after the
pilot arrived. The ladder was down and a shoe was on the deck so it was believed
he fell overboard. Four days later, he was found in a downtown Mobile hotel.
The Statute of Liberty will soon have a rival. In 2014, a giant
Ferris wheel will open near the Staten Island ferry terminal. The wheel will be
625 feet high while London’s famed London Eye wheel is only 443 feet tall. (I once
asked a carnie operator why they bothered erecting a Ferris wheel when few rode
on it. He said attendance was always way down unless the Ferris wheel showed above
the trees.)
Actor Sir Alec Guinness said, “I gave my best performances during
the war trying to be an officer and a gentleman.” (He was commanding officer of
a landing craft or two during World War II with several combat landings to his credit.)
In the UK, the Strood is an ancient causeway (originally built
by the Saxons in about 680 AD) that connects the Essex mainland with Mersea Island,
about a half-mile offshore. The causeway (now paved) is low-lying and is regularly
inundated by high tide. Most locals carry a tide table to avoid being embarrassed
or inconvenienced but one elderly woman forgot that detail and was stranded. She
got out of her car and was swept away. A nearby recovery truck was called and rescued
her but within half an hour there were seven more vehicles trapped on the flooded
road. Nine forgetful adults and a toddler were rescued.
At San Rafael in California, a backhoe excavator on a barge was
cleaning silt from a canal when the crew spotted a nearby apartment on fire. Moving
in, the operator tried to dump dredge buckets of water on the fire but was too far
away. He then dredged his way closer. The fire was effectively knocked down when
local firefighters arrived.
A Senatorial candidate in Connecticut ran a television ad
promoting his efforts to create jobs at the state's sub-maker, General Dynamics'
Electric Boat of Groton. Inadvertently, it featured a Norwegian submarine.
Was the homophone accidental or not? A marine technology magazine
creatively used the English language when it printed that one company had “developed
a way to take fish awful and make a world-class fertilizer.”
