Thursday, March 1, 2012

Other Shores - March 2012

The International Scene
An industry group said that the $45 million cut in the Corps of Engineers dredging budget could mean $10.5 billion in lost production and 33,800 jobs.

The owners of the stricken cruise ship Costa Concordia offered passengers $14,500 each if they promised not to sue but lawyers quickly calculated that a class-action suit might bring as much as $165,000 per.


Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Off New Zealand’s Coromandel Coast, the longliner Rebecca May began to “take on water very, very fast." The crew of three were rescued from a liferaft. The FV may have hit debris from the wrecked container ship Rena lodged on Astrolabe Reef not too many miles away. In central Philippine waters the Seaford 2 sank after hitting a floating log while heading for Antique province. Its cargo of 35,000 bags of cement failed to provide much buoyancy. In Turkey’s part of the Black Sea, the Vera radioed for help after its cargo of scrap metal shifted but the bulker had sunk by the time rescue forces arrived. Three saved, eight missing.

The small container ship Anke-Angela ran firmly aground in the Kalmar Strait between the island of Oland and the mainland of Sweden, 70 kilometers north of the Oland Bridge. Swedish authorities suspected that the two senior officers were drunk at the time of the accident and took them ashore for testing. In Ghana, the cargo ship Le Shan, loaded with dumper trucks, iron rods, and general cargo, ran aground because the master refused to hire a local pilot although instructed to do so.

On the Tennessee River, the 200-foot cargo ship Delta Mariner took out two spans of the Eggner Bridge. The vessel, which carries rocket components to Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg (California) Air Force Base, ended up anchored by the tangled mess of bent beams draped across its bow. The Coast Guard immediately closed a two-mile stretch of the River, commuters found other ways to get to work, and that weekend the Army Corps of Engineers closed the entire river when it released floodwaters from the Chickamauga Dam.

In Antarctica’s Ross Sea, the toothfishing Jung Woo No. 2 caught fire. Three died, and two seriously burned were transferred to the National Science Foundation’s research ship Nathaniel B. Palmer, which then headed for the McMurdo Base. Tank cleaning is normally routine but dangerous. Five crewmembers died and six went missing after an explosion sank the South Korean oil tanker Doola No. 3 north of Jawol Island near Incheon. It usually transports fuel oil but the crew was carrying out tank-cleaning operations after unloading 6,500 tons of gasoline at Incheon. The tanker sank in shallow water and was visible, its back broken. And, off Albania, the small product tanker Edirne sank about five kilometers from Durres after an explosion and fire. The tanker had unloaded more than 3,000 tons of fuel on the previous day. One body was found and at least two others were missing.

A stevedore acting as the ship’s boss was killed while working a ship at Pier J at Long Beach, California. He and his crew were unloading 20-foot containers with a wharf-based crane when the top 40-footer in a stack of six on the ship twisted and then fell. Everyone scattered but he couldn’t run far enough. At Immingham in the UK, a worker fell into the hull of the Panamax bulker Excalibur while shoveling coal and became fatally trapped under falling coal.

It took three Kodiak-based Coast Guard helicopters and one unsuccessful, weather-stricken flight to simultaneously rescue the crew of the grounded fishing vessel Kimberly and to pluck the survival-suited crew of the sunken fishing vessel Heritage from the water. And an Alaska-based Coast Guard chopper medevaced a 47-year-old man from the coastal freighter Coastal Trader while it was in Dead Man’s Bay. He was having trouble breathing. Elsewhere, a Coast Guard helicopter medevaced a female sailor off the amphibious warfare ship USS Bonhomme Richard while off the California coast. She was suffering from chest and back pains. Several hundred miles off Hawaii, the American-flagged container ship Horizon Reliance took three Canadian males off their battered 33-foot sailboat. In the dark of night (and wind gusting to 40 knots, 20-foot swells), the yacht slammed into the ship and soon sank. One man managed to climb a rope ladder but the other two drifted off into the night and ended upon the other side of the ship, Thanks to the strobe lights on their lifejackets, they were located but it took nearly an hour to rescue them – father (age 39), son (aged 9), and his uncle (aged 33) were safe. (Horizon Lines, operating twenty vessels, is the largest domestic shipping line in the US.)

A crankcase explosion forced the container ship Hanjin Osaka to accept a tow to Hakodate. Elsewhere, the unmanned, cargo-less container ship FAS Provence was being towed by tugs West and Izmir Bull when the condition of FAS Provence deteriorated quickly, with the vessel taking in water and listing. Since the vessel then posed a serious hazard to navigation, regular broadcasts alerted all ships in the central area of the Mediterranean of the still-floating peril. The container ship COSCO Yokohama lost about 29 containers overboard in the Gulf of Alaska while en route from China to Prince Rupert. Many other containers shifted during the storm. The dry cargo ship Ivan Vikulov became stranded in ice in late January some 60 kilometers (37 miles) off Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and then caught fire. As this report is written, it is drifting, crewless and still on fire, in heavy ice in the middle of the Azov Sea. It is one of a fleet of about forty icebound vessels waiting the arrival of icebreakers.


Gray Fleets
The US Navy has been testing methods for in-flight refueling unmanned aircraft from conventional tanker aircraft, using both drogue (Navy) and boom (Air Force) techniques. (Next, one supposes, will be unmanned tankers refueling unmanned drones?)

Eight sailors on the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard were discharged for hazing a fellow sailor, including choking him unconscious.

A US Navy diver was killed while operating from HMCS Summerside, a Royal Canadian Navy coastal defense vessel. He and the warship were participating in Bold Alligator, a multinational maritime training exercise off the US East Coast. The Summerside is described as “multi-role, multi-purpose, cost-effective” and is basically a mine-countermeasures vessel. Bold Alligator had ten nations participating, including far-off Australia and New Zealand.

The Royal Malaysian Navy lost the use of KD Mutiara, one of its two survey vessels, when a fire extensively damaged it while undergoing repairs.

The top 100 British employers of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in 2012 included the Royal Navy (in 77th spot) and the RAF in 56th position. Top employer was an accounting firm, with the UK’s Home Office as number two. The Royal Army apparently didn’t make the Top 100 list.

White Fleets
A very few hours after the cruise ship Costa Concordia departed Civitavecchia, the port for Rome, on a week-long Mediterranean cruise, the master decided to give everyone a thrill by repeating something he had already done several times. He would make a close approach to the Tyrrhenian Sea’s Isola del Gigliorderex. (It was later suggested that he was ordered to do so.) It was safe enough since the island rises precipitously from the sea and, besides, he had made similar passes before…
I have recreated what may have happened next: Whoever was in charge on the ship’s bridge was tardy in noticing a rocky outcropping and perhaps even a visible rock. Full right rudder swung the ship enough so that the deployed port stabilizer (a wing-like protuberance) missed the large boulder. But the maneuver pivoted the stern inward into the boulder. It rolled aft along the hull until it socketed itself in the hull. The 165-foot gash marking the boulder’s path was a mortal wound. Generators kicked off, either from the impact or flooding, and the ship was both dark and propulsion-less.

The Costa Concordia gradually slewed outward away from the island and slowed to a virtual stand-still. Somehow (did some heroic officer use the ship’s tunnel thrusters or were wind and currents the cause?), it made a sharp pivot in place and then slowly floated sideways back towards the island, where it grounded very close to land, wounded side outboard. The Costa Concordia slowly rolled inward until it was lying on its side. Strangely despite the earlier blackout, many lights on the ship were blazing brightly.

Over the next two hours, most of the 4,500 people on board managed to escape. But there was rampant disorder and confusion and thirty-two crew and passengers went missing. Not helping was the fact that the ship’s crew, notably including the master, failed to exercise much leadership and example. (But are senior stewardesses and cabin stewards really qualified to operate a lifeboat or direct passengers into a liferaft?) Then followed the usual statements, inquiries, posturing, and sensational revelations. Searches by divers were followed by removal of fuel oil and experts began to ponder how to salvage the ship. The Costa Concordia tragedy will be a subject of public interest for years.

Elsewhere, tourism was less dramatic. At St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, a tourist bus collided with mailboxes and a parked SUV before plunging over a ridge and some 65 feet down into thick brush. Thirteen tourists from the Serenade of the Seas were taken to a hospital and one with a broken hip stayed there with the company of a crewmember sent from the ship. A woman missed a step and fell down a flight of stairs on the Liberty of the Seas while at Port Everglades and she died of her injuries. Usually, a cruise vessel with a few sick passengers is allowed to enter a port but, based on radioed advice from a UK-based microbiologist, authorities at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands denied landing rights to the Star Princess because the remote islands were unprepared to handle an outbreak of norovirus. (About two percent of those on board were sick.)

Venice wants no more cruise liners. They bring air and water pollution (up to 30 percent of what plagues that city), and an additional two million more tourists a year into a city already under constant siege. And one resident complains that every time a cruise ship cruises by, her toilets overflow.

Those That Go Back and Forth
Because the Costa Concordia had departed from Civitavecchia near Rome, local travelers tended to be nervous. The ferry Sharden was buffeted by a violent northeast snowstorm shortly after departing Civatavecchia. It hit a breakwater, tearing an 80-foot (25 meter) gash above the waterline but none of the reportedly panicky 262 passengers were hurt. And somewhere between Active Pass and Tsawwassen in British Columbia, a middle-aged Asian jumped off the Coastal Celebration An extensive five-hour search failed to find him. In California, Taiwanese vacationers in a minivan on the Balboa Island Ferry went into the water when a black Mercedes with a stuck accelerator pedal pushed the minivan into the water. It floated just long enough for the family of four to be rescued.

Off Papua New Guinea, the ferry Rabaul Queen was travelling between Kimbe and Lae when it sent out a distress signal. Soon after, the ferry, with up to 350 on board, sank east of Lae, the South Pacific country's second-largest city and some 10 miles (16 km) from Finschhafen. Rescuers saved 238 and the number of people on board may have been lower than previously reported, perhaps only 300.

On its delivery trip from a Finnish shipyard, the new cross-Channel ferry Spirit of France had to follow an icebreaker through 100 miles of ice. The vessel joined her slightly larger sister Spirit of Britain on the Dover-Calais run. At 47,000 and 49,000 gross tons, the two ferries are slightly bigger than the Titanic’s 46,329 tons.

Legal Matters
FBI divers from the USCGC Cypress and the Canadian frigate HMCS St. John's recovered more than 6,700 kg of cocaine from a sunken semi-submersible. Scuttled by drug smugglers off Honduras, it lay 3,000 feet (more than 900 meters) deep.

In the UK, the German owners of the freighter Katja pleaded guilty and were fined £28,015 plus costs of £5,000 for overloading their vessel. As it arrived in Liverpool from the St Lawrence Seaway with a cargo of rock salt, a pilot on a passing vessel had noticed that the Plimsoll line and load lines were not visible and the vessel appeared suspiciously low in the water.

Nature
Neptune Canada is a 500-mile loop of underwater cable starting and ending at Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Multiple “observatories” feed back data on underwater ocean phenomena including audio effects. Listen to them plus the Japanese earthquake and more from worldwide stations at listentothedeep.com. (For those with national-security concerns, fear not. The sound of naval vessels is scrubbed from the recordings before they reach the Internet.)

The icebreaker USCGC Healey and the Russian ice-strengthened tanker Renda fought their way through 800 miles of tough Bering Sea ice in making an emergency delivery of 1.3 million gallons of fuel to Nome.

Fleet Air Arm mechanics found two black widow spiders on an aircraft recently back from a deployment in California. That in spite of the sterilization, or "bug-bombing" process, that aircraft and equipment undergo before returning to the UK. Not to be outdone, mechanics working on a 1964 Ford Falcon in Oxfordshire found two more black widow spiders, one under the gas tank and the other behind the dashboard. These spiders were donated to the Bristol Zoo. The car was imported from the US a year ago.


Metal Bashing
Recycling of large vessels increased to where scrappers on the Indian subcontinent were paying over $500 per ldt. And being scrapped for the first time are double-hulled VLCCs .

Imports
Singapore customs arrested five Filipino seamen for smuggling in ten packs of cigarettes even thought the men argued the butts were for personal consumption. A pack of Marlboro cigarettes in Singapore costs S$10 or around Rp 70,000, while the exact same pack in Indonesia costs only Rp 15,000.


Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Somalian pirates have erected a modern telecommunications tower in their stronghold town of Hobyo. That may give them better cell-phone communication plus limited access to possible-victims’ Automatic Identification System signals.

Identifying one Somalian pirate should be easy in the future. He has twelve toes, ten fingers, and the usual two thumbs. The polydactyl and thirteen other pirates were captured by the Royal Navy supply ship RFA Fort Victoria, part of NATO’s counter-piracy Operation Ocean Shield

Iran embarrassingly found that the US Navy is an effective substitute for the Iranian Coast Guard. The Coast Guard patrol boat Monomoy spotted flares and flashing lights in the Northern Arabian Gulf. The Iranian cargo vessel Ya-Hussayn was sinking from a flooded engineroom. The Monomoy’s small boat took two Iranian sailors from the vessel and another four from a liferaft tied to the dhow's stern. Later, after being supplied with water, blankets and halal meals, the Iranian sailors were transferred to the Iranian Coast Guard vessel Naji 7 (Some US Coast Guard vessels carry halal meals for Muslim mariners in distress.) A helicopter from the guided missile destroyer USS Dewey spotted a sinking Iranian fishing boat that two other vessels were trying to tow to safety A boarding team found one man on the Al Mamsoor while two other crew members had taken refuge on the assisting vessels. The three had fought flooding for three days. The rescue team gave the crew about 150 pounds of food, water, and other supplies (and apparently stopped the leak) before returning to the Dewey. The USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group responded to a “distressed Iranian fishing dhow” that had nine crewmembers on board. The Navy team was allowed to board the vessel and quickly repaired the engine. The Navy rescued six Iranian merchant marines from a sinking cargo ship. A Navy destroyer rescued thirteen Iranian fishermen being held hostage by Somali pirates…you get the trend here?

Danube River pirates are attacking passing tugs in Romanian waters. Armed with axes, knives and bars, groups of pirates board from small boats and steal everything they can lay their hands on – a crew’s possessions and cash, cargo, and vessel equipment including mooring lines, coils of towing lines, and power cables. In an attack on the Ukrainian tug Perm underway with barges, they threatened the skipper with a knife, and offered to toss a crewmember overboard. They demanded spirits, cigarettes, money, and fuel.


Odd Bits and Head-Shakers
The old vessels in the James River Reserve Fleet still serve their country. SEALs practice their “standard breaching” skills by blowing holes and blasting open doors during live-fire exercises on the Del Monte. The break-bulk freighter was laid down in 1968 as Delta Brazil and served in the commercial trade until 1984. After being renamed SS Del Monte (T-AK-5049), it became part of the Military Sealift Command's Ready Reserve Force.

Much territory, including Australia and Indonesia, was wracked by Tropical Cyclone Iggy. Iggy? Is that the best the cyclone-namers could come up with? (Actually, there are ten sets of names for tropical cyclones and hurricanes, one set per region such as Atlantic, Fiji Region, or Northern Indian Ocean.)

New Zealand’s wonderfully scenic Bay of Islands is an international yachting destination and a rubbish barge has served boaters’ trash-disposal and recycling needs until recently. But the barge was damaged in 2010 when a bollard was torn off, presumably by a large vessel trying to moor alongside, and it was later scrapped. The barge service had become unsustainable due to the lack of acceptance by users and the cost of emptying and maintaining the barge. Now, yachties are taking bags of rubbish ashore and leaving them indiscriminately, and recycled bottles are getting mixed with household waste. Four new land-based recycling/rubbish sites may solve this problem. Stay tuned.

In Afghanistan, an RPG smashed into the UK’s oldest military helicopter, Sea King ZA298 built in 1982, and it was badly damaged. But it was painstakingly rebuilt and now adds to its 9,000 hours of flight time. (In addition to the wound from a Taliban RPG in Iraq, it survived a two-foot hole in its rotor during the Falkland War, and was peppered with bullets while rescuing women and children in Bosnia. However, its service in North Ireland seems to been comparatively calm.)

The US Coast Guard Pipe Band (yes, there is one) wears the US Coast Guard Tartan. (All four services have their own tartans. The Coast Guard Tartan is predominantly black, white, and red.)

After the cruise ship Costa Concordia stranded itself on an Italian island, a press release from the owners quickly noted that loss-of-use of the wrecked ship would have a $90-million impact on earnings. The statement ended on a curiously optimistic note: "The vessel is expected to be out of service for the remainder of our current fiscal year….”