Retailers on the US East Coast may have less-than-ideal
Christmas sales because of difficulties in getting containerized merchandise in
stores in time for the holiday season. After Hurricane Sandy, more than 6,000
New York/New Jersey-bound containers were diverted to other ports and many
ocean carriers declared force majeure, abrogating their responsibility to
deliver containers to the original destination port. Importers had to pick up
their boxes at their own cost (although some carriers generously offered to
relay containers back to New York/New Jersey at a cost of around $750 per box.)
Worse, there was an acute shortage of trailers.
West Coast labor unrest quieted without too many container
ships being diverted elsewhere or sitting at anchor but expect labor problems
on the Gulf and East Coasts in 2013.
The Panama Canal moved a record 333.7 million Panama Canal
tons last fiscal year. (In million Panama Canal tons, full container ships,
119.8; dry bulkers, 83.4; tankers, 51.6)
One expert said gas and oil projects historically deliver 20
to 30 percent less than promised, largely due to a lack of engineering
graduates, who shy away from what they see as “a sunset industry.”
For a while, bargain hunters could pick up a secondhand VLCC
crude-oil carrier for only $54.5 million.
Will water levels fall so low that parts of the Mississippi
River will be closed to barge traffic? The Coast Guard says no; other entities
fear yes. As this is being written, the situation is iffy. A National Weather
Service hydrologist predicted lower water levels, possibly below nine feet,
unless there are heavy rains or snow upstream. An increased flow from the
Missouri River, which feeds into the Mississippi, would help but the Corps of
Engineers is bound by law to refuse requests to release more water, and that
alone may close the Mississippi. Meanwhile, barge drafts are being limited to
eight feet (instead of the usual nine feet) with one expert noting that it is
not economically sensible to reduce drafts farther, and some future shipments
have been cancelled. There is a race to get grain to Gulf ports for overseas
shipment, and a year ago, the River was at flood stage!
China confirmed that it is building large amphibious-warfare
ships. Said the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, “Some of our analysts
believe that once China and Japan start a military confrontation, China will be
able to use this type of naval vessel in amphibious battles against Okinawa and
the Japanese homeland.” On state-owned TV, an admiral bragged, “With the
amphibious assault ships in our hands, our Navy will be capable of delivering
power to any nation within the three island chains in the Pacific. (The
so-called “island chains” include the US and Australia.)
Thin Places and Hard Knocks
In nasty weather, the coal-carrying Volgo Balt 199 sank while waiting to transit the Bosphorus and a
coastal safety boat, part of the subsequent rescue operations, hit rocks and
also sank with loss of two of its crew of four. Three from the ship were
rescued but another ten died. The car carrier Baltic Ace sank after colliding with the container ship Corvus J. about 25 miles NW of
Westkapelle, The Netherlands. Eleven crewmen and 1,415 vehicles went down with
the carrier. Passing fairway buoys on the wrong side can put you aground. So
learned the bulker Trans Agila in the
Kalmar Sound SW of the Kronogrund and north of Sweden‘s Olands Bridge. It
suffered hull damage and water ingress but got free. After going south about a
mile, it was intentionally grounded to keep it from sinking.
In Germany in thick fog with visibility less than 100 meters,
the coaster Telamon collided with the
ferry Nordenham on the Weser. One
woman was hurt. The Telamon continued
on to hit an anchored dredger. Also in Germany and in the same dense fog, the
coaster Katharina Siemer collided with the
coaster Angon in the North West Anchorage off Brunbuttel. The Angon
suffered enough damage to its starboard side that it took on water. (Judging
from AIS tracks, Angon was under way
at the time of collision while Katharina
Siemer was either anchored or drifting.) The small container ship Cecilia allided head-on with the
Sluiskil Bridge in Holland and damaged the bascule bridge’s mechanism. In the
Bahamas, the container ship MSC Eugenia
holed a bunker-oil tank after striking an object in Freeport harbor. The ship
was taken offshore while divers set to work to patch the slowly leaking hole. At Vancouver, the bulk carrier Cape
Apricot wiped out 100 meters of a causeway at Westshore Terminals, severing
the only link with one of the terminal’s two loading berths. The causeway
carried a road, a coal-carrying conveyor belt, electricity, water, and other
services. Repairs could take months and so Westshore Terminal, North America’s
largest coal-exporting facility, will not ship out the anticipated 33 million
tons in the coming year. (Coal, particularly metallurgical coal, is British
Columbia’s largest export.)
While trying to avoid a fishing boat, the container ship Hanjin Geneva ran aground on a sandbar
at the Prince Rupert harbor entrance in British Columbia. Tugs refloated the
ship on the next high tide. (In spite of its Asiatic name, the vessel is
German-flagged.)
Off Holland’s coast, the geared bulker Ocean Victory ran over a buoy. Its chain became entangled in the
bulker’s propeller, jamming the main engine to a stop and damaging the
propeller. Wind was pushing the vessel toward the beach and various rescue
craft futilely tried to hold the bulker. Its crew finally managed to drop an
anchor and several tugs soon arrived to relieve the bulker of its misery. In a
Singapore shipyard, a test on the drill platform Noble Regina Allen went wrong when the jacking mechanism for one of
three lifting legs failed and the platform sharply listed to one side. Ninety
workers were hurt, some seriously.
In Hartford County, Missouri, a chain
broke while removing a four-to-five-ton towboat propeller and it fell, crushing the pelvis
of a worker standing several feet away. He died of his injuries. A crewman on
the grain-carrying Tecumseh
accidentally died while the freighter was docked at Thunder Bay, Ontario and
the Transportation Safety Board of Canada decided the circumstances of his
death warranted an investigation. (The 29,984 -dwt, US-built ship was formerly
the Mexican-flagged Sugar Islander II
and carried sugar. Its bridge wings were trimmed back to satisfy St Lawrence
Seaway regulations.) In West Virginia at the Robinson Run coal mine, a
bulldozer and its operator slid into a slurry pit when an embankment he was
constructing collapsed. Rescuers determined that they were 25-30 feet down in
the slurry but it was too thick for a rescue diver. A barge was trucked in,
sheet pilings were driven around the dozer, and the search began. Five days
after the accident, the body of the operator was found inside the cab when
divers peeled back the roof of the dozer.
An Alaskan-based Coast Guard chopper medevaced a crewman
from the container ship COSCO Long Beach approximately 200 miles south of
Kodiak. He was suffering from abdominal
pains.
Gray Fleets
Does it pay a nation to acquire the most-advanced warships
if not enough qualified operators can be found to man them operationally? That
is a question that is plaguing Norway (five advanced frigates of the Fridtjof Nansen class) and Australia
(its six Collins-class submarines),
Canada, the UK, USA, New Zealand, and other navies. Swapping a crew in and out
of ships as they deploy helps solve the problem but it’s hard on the personnel.
On the day the US Navy officially took the aircraft carrier Enterprise out of service after 51 years
in the fleet, the Navy announced that its name won’t be long-absent from the
fleet. The third Gerald R. Ford-class
aircraft carrier, CVN-80, will become the ninth ship in the Navy’s history to
be named Enterprise.
The US Navy fired the top two administrators (president and
provost) of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, for
mismanagement and fostering an atmosphere of defying Navy rules and
regulations. (The details are juicy but far too long for this column.)
The US Navy's IT network is targeted by 110,000 attacks
every hour. That translates to 1,833 attacks per minute or some 96.36 billion
attacks every year.
The Coast Guard cutter USCGC
Halibut became suspicious of a panga-type small boat off Southern
California and sent its RHIB, its blue light flashing, to investigate. The
panga maneuvered sharply and struck the approaching RHIB at high speed. One of
the RHIB’s two-man crew, the cutter’s executive officer, suffered massive head
trauma that caused his death. The panga was stopped by other Coast Guard assets
and its crew of two were detained.
After a seaman was critically injured when he got between a
berthing (mooring) line and a winch on Landing Ship Tank RSS Endeavour, the Singapore Navy ordered a 48-hour safety time-out
(aka “stand-down”) for its frigates, missile corvettes, and landing ships tank.
White Fleets
While heading for the North Cape at the northern tip of
Norway, the heating system on the cruise ship Amadea broke down when the temperature in Olso was -18 (Celsius,
one presumes) and so the ship headed to Bremerhaven for repairs. Most (95
percent) of the passengers stayed with the ship although cabin temperatures
were 9C. For their bravery, they received a refund of 130 percent of their
fares and the crew was put off duty for a while.
The former cruise ship Explorer
is now the nautical platform for the Semester at Sea program, carrying college
students to foreign shores. During a stop at the Island of Dominica, some
students went on a snorkeling excursion. The captain of the boat went off to
get food and upon his return somehow backed over several students in the water.
A female student was dead upon arrival at a hospital.
Due to high winds, the Pacific
Princess ran over the harbor-marking buoy while entering the port of Yalta.
The damaged buoy sank. The Celebrity
Reflection had to skip a stop at Tenerife in the Canary Islands after a
mechanical problem slowed the ship. The Costa
Pacifica suffered minor damage when it collided with a berthing structure
called a "dolphin" at Marseille. A strong gust of wind was blamed and
there was a one-day delay in a Mediterranean cruise.
Those That Go Back and Forth
The Washington State ferry Walla Walla went abruptly out of service during routine maintenance
in the engineroom. State workers were cleaning a drive motor commutator when
something went terribly wrong. The resulting temperatures of over 2,600°F
melted brass and steel components of the motor. A spare motor may be
installable but otherwise the 1972-built ferry will have to wait for General
Electric to build a new motor, and that might take two years.
But that wasn’t the state ferry system’s only problem. One
of its captains slept over on the Whidbey Island ferry Cathlamet at Clinton and was supposed to take out the adjacent
sister ferry Kittitas early next
morning. He overslept and the Cathlamet sailed
on time but had to return to Clinton
due to a “personnel issue” (the over-sleeping captain). That put the schedules
of both ferries back by about twenty minutes. A ferry spokeswoman said the
incident apparently had nothing to do with recent minimum-staffing problems.
(In 2011 when union and Washington State Ferry officials couldn’t agree on
manning levels for the ferries, they let the Coast Guard decide. It established
minimum manning levels and union members started failing to show up for work,
each no-show meaning a ferry couldn’t sail. In October, the Coast Guard issued
revised guidance that mandated more mariners on nine ferries in four classes,
and no-shows have drastically dropped. The company does not yet know how it
will pay for the additional mannings. Cuts in sailings may be the answer.)
Luckily, a midwife, an OB/GYN nurse, and two EMTs were on a
Bainbridge-to-Seattle ferry when a passenger went into labor. The result, a
first for the ferry company, was a girl named Lucy.
The Japanese ferry
Ginga, carrying 162 high-school students and teachers on a school trip, ran
aground on the shoals off Suo-Oshima town, Yamaguchi Prefecture. The efficient
Japanese Coast Guard soon rescued them but the school trip was truncated. In
Iceland, a heavy current suddenly drove the ro/pax Herjolfur against the breakwater at Landeyjarhofn. An examination
at the pier revealed substantial damage to a screw and the ship proceeded to
Westman Islands using only the starboard propeller. Mooring lines snapped due
to strong winds and the cruise ferry Baltic
Queen smashed into a pier at Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Some
superficial damage. In northern Germany, the smallish UK-flagged container ship
Kitty C. collided with the canal
ferry Swinemunde moored at the
Brunsbüttel fishery quay, probably due to human error. The ferry crew saw the
collision coming and jumped ashore. The ferry’s pilothouse was bent to one side
and numerous pilings will have to be replaced. In the middle of the English
Channel, separate fights on the Holland-bound ferry Pride of Rotterdam sent two men with serious injuries to a Dutch
hospital. One fight was over a piece of pizza in which one man injured his neck
while falling down a flight of stairs. The second fight involved four men and
ended with an 18-year-old being stabbed in the neck with a piece of glass.
Near Pingshan village in Anhua County in China, a river
vessel capsized, tossing four trucks and eleven people into the stream. Three
persons were rescued and the vessel’s owner and “driver” were detained by local
police. And. perhaps presaging a long-overdue crackdown on corruption, six
local officials were removed from their posts.
Over the Veterans’ Day weekend, a New London, Connecticut
ferry company came to the rescue of Long Islanders and New Yorkers plagued by
no gas or long gas-station lines after Hurricane Sandy’s visit. It offered free
one-way passage across Long Island Sound and even provided directions to local gas
stations in and around New London.
Legal Matters
A ship’s agent was asked to supply tidal information for an
arriving ship. He scanned the wrong tide table (a corner of a page was folded
over, hiding the year). The ship had excessive draft upon arrival and could
only unload a few hours each day and had to shift anchorage three times in four
days. The agent settled with the owner for the additional costs to the tune of
$120,000.
The US Customs and Border Protection seized 35,000 imported
rubber ducks in the port of Los Angeles/Long Beach. They contain an excess
amount of phthalate, making them potentially harmful to the health and safety
of children.
Nature
Sponges are harmless, aren’t they? Well, the harp sponge (Chondrocladi
lyra), found in the depths off California, is carnivorous, using
elaborate harp-shaped arrays (they are well-worth Googling) to catch tiny
crustaceans and wrapping them in a membrane before digestion starts. And its
sexual behavior is interesting too. (Actually, a dozen or more carnivorous
sponges have been identified to date, all members of the same family.)
Corals threatened by approaching toxic algae call for help
by releasing specific chemicals and its inch-long resident gobie fish respond
by immediately attacking the algae. As one report explained it, “The symbiotic
relationship between fish and the coral on which they live is the first known
example of one species chemically signaling a consumer species to remove
competitors. It is similar to the symbiotic relationship between Acacia
trees and mutualist ants, in which the ants receive food and shelter while
protecting the trees from both competitors and consumers.”
Despite its fearsome name and appearance, the small deep-sea
vampire squid is the only non-predatory squid identified to date. In fact, it
eats “marine snow,” the tiny particles that drift downward towards the bottom.
Its feed falls onto three categories: particles from dead bodies, fecal (poop
from small coepods), and snot (debris from animals that use gelatin-like mucus
nets to catch prey).
Metal-Bashing
An American shipping company (Totem Ocean Trailer Express)
will have two 3,100-TEU container ships built that will be powered by LNG. They
will be the first of the kind in the world.
Russia started construction of the second LK-25-class diesel-electric icebreaker,
with the “25” standing for its power output of 25 megawatts. The vessels will
feature 150-ton cranes for underwater work in the oilfield and pipeline
industries. Although touted as “the largest icebreaker in the history of the
Russian shipbuilding industry," these icebreakers are far less powerful
than planned icebreakers with up to 100 megawatts from double nuclear reactors.
[In general, Russia divides its icebreakers into several classes:
nuclear-powered, multi-purpose; diesel-powered; icebreakers for non-Arctic
conditions (non-Arctic=Baltic Sea?); auxiliary; harbor, and shallow-water.]
Too much tonnage and a weak rupee dampened the enthusiasm of
India’s ship-scrappers for new deals.
Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
A revised South Korean law calls for new ocean-going
construction to have built-in citadels where crews can retreat from boarding
pirates.
Nigeria, Somalia, and the Far East were, pirate-wise, quiet
last month and the major piracy effort was off the coast of Vietnam, where the
small Malaysian chemical tanker Zafirah was
hi-jacked by up to eleven knife and pistol-wielding pirates. It was later
recaptured by Vietnamese marine police with its name changed to MD Feahorse, and a fishing vessel
came across its crew of nine, all unhurt, in a liferaft.
A Nigerian pirate described the business of ship hijacking
as “highly lucrative” and said that “Nigeria today had some 1,250 trained
pirates and 3,000 high-caliber military weapons… There can be no successful
vessel hijacking in West Africa, or Africa as a whole, without inputs from
Nigerian oil mafias, including top government functionaries.” Helping is that
Nigeria’s security forces suffer from under-funding, a lack of hardware,
vessels and maintenance, and problems with discipline and corruption. Add to
them grudge attacks that stem from personal conflict, envy, disputes over
payments and contracts and turf wars between gangs of bunkering thieves.
Odd Bits and Headshakers
Three of Denmark’s formerly state-owned icebreakers, Thorbjoørn, Danbjøorn, and Isbjoørn,
have seen so little use in the last sixteen years that they are for sale.
(Bjørn is a Nordic male given name or, less often, a surname meaning the animal
“bear.”)
In the last dozen years, there have been 410 engineroom
fires, with cruise ships having the highest number (90) or about eight a year.
Most ships have CO2 fire-extinguishing systems but CO2 is deadly for humans so
there is always a race between getting personnel out of machinery spaces before
the CO2 system is triggered. A master’s dilemna: save your crew or imperil your
passengers by tardy firefighting? (There are firefighting systems, such as water
misting, that are safe for people in the fire space.)
The French skipper of the racing yacht Safran was intent on breaking his own record for sailing around the
UK and Ireland but he sailed the wrong way in a traffic-separation lane in the
English Channel and forced ships to take action to avoid him. He told the
French Coastguard he was trying to set a record and would not alter course. A
British court later fined him £9,381 plus costs of £4,125.
