Tuesday, March 12, 2013

March - Other Shores


A single 20-foot standard container, on average, can hold about 48,000 bananas. In theory then, the giant containership Emma Maersk (see news below) is capable of holding nearly 528 million bananas in a single voyage – enough to give every person in Europe or North America a banana for breakfast.
In 2012, 263 rescues in the United States were triggered by receipt of aviation and marine distress signals by the Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking System (SARSAT), with 183 people being rescued from the water.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks
Let’s start off with a bit of a mystery item. A reputable maritime news service printed a news report from the Australian Rescue Centre stating that the apparently unmanned tug, the PB Margaret, sank at lat 21 30 06 S long, 115 21 48E. (That’s somewhere south of the Mangrove Islands in Western Australia.) No explanation was given why the 3,000-hp tug (ex-Heung Kong) was unmanned and the tug still appears in its owners’ fleet list on-line. (The list may not be current; many aren’t.) But then a colleague in Ozzie-land sent me the answer, a copy of a governmental warning about the sunken vessel – the tug was on a cyclone mooring and so was unmanned! Now to the northern hemisphere. At Kodiak, Alaska, the Fisheries and Wildlife Service’s research vessel Arluk, a 63-foot, 76-ton Bertram, quietly filled and rolled on its side at St. Herman's Harbor.

Multiple objects at Bremerhaven took a beating. The car carrier Euphrates Highway allided with the quay of the foreport of the Northern lock after the towing line to an assisting tug snapped. Both quay and hull were damaged. The container ship Flottbeck hit the Strom quay while docking. The quay was damaged and the hull of the vessel was breached, but not fatally so. The tanker Nordic Ruth was leaving Bremerhaven’s Bredo shipyard when it brushed against a motor yacht. Its hull was damaged while the tanker suffered scratches. The tug RT Stephanie was getting set to pull the vehicle carrier Atlas Highway from a pier when it struck the stern of the American-flagged pure truck carrier Endurance, and then rebounded into the Atlas Highway. All wheelhouse windows on the tug were smashed but both vessels managed to depart Bremerhaven more or less on schedule. In the Bosphorus Strait near the Turkish city of Istanbul, five people were injured in a collision between the tanker Amur 2521 and the high-speed Turkish ferry Yenikapi-1.

While heading for the Panama Canal, the container ship MSC Fabienne ran aground near the port of Cristobol. Canal tugs soon got it free. In Wales, high winds pushed the ro/ro Ciudad de Cadiz thoroughly aground at Mostyn in late January and four tugs were unable to free it. That happened due to the high spring tides in the middle of the next month and Airbus A-380 super jumbo jets in production at Toulouse in southern France may have waited for British-built A380 wings since that is what the ship carries.

In suburban Shanghai on Zhangjing Creek in Jinshan District, an unknown gas triggered an explosion in the cabin of a fertilizer-carrying barge as the operator was about to start the engine. His wife was killed and he and a son were injured. There were public concerns about pollution in the creek so households in the district received a 50-percent discount on their water bills for the next month. The smallish tanker MCT Breithorn had an engineroom fire at the Bijela shipyard in Montenegro. The shipyard’s firefighters aided ship’s personnel in extinguishing the fire in an hour.

An Australian report reported that in November 2011, a wave knocked a seaman off MSC Siena’s accommodation ladder while he was rigging a combination pilot ladder in preparation to embark a harbor pilot near Rottnest Island off the port of Fremantle. He was wearing a safety harness and harness rope. While working on the bottom platform, an unexpectedly high wave struck, leaving him hanging below the platform. The rolling of the ship banged him against the hull several times and then he fell out of his harness. In the UK, the small tug Endurance was towing a sixty-foot motorboat in gale-force winds and violent seas when one of the two crewmembers on the tug fell overboard five miles south of Sovereign Harbour on the East Sussex coast. An extensive search failed to find him. Five crewmen fell 65 feet and died when cables broke during a lifeboat drill on the cruise ship Thompson Majesty at La Palma.

In Danish waters, three crewmen were helicoptered off the freighter Atalanta while it was anchored in the Bay of Aarhus. They had been working in a hold that had recently been cleaned with gases. On the container ship Jonni Ritscher at Hamburg, fourteen workers became ill, possibly by fumes from bunker fuel, and they were hospitalized after on-scene treatment by an emergency physician for nausea and eye- and respiratory irritation.

At Durban in South Africa, although the container ship MSC Luciana was moored by twenty-two lines and had a powerful tug pushing on it, that was not enough when sudden wind gusts arrived. First, bowlines started snapping and then stern lines broke and the vessel was blown against the Finger Jetty at the opposite quay. The vessel whammed into the chemical/oil tanker Marlin (scheduled to be scrapped anyhow) and then the wind slewed the MSC Luciana’s bow so that it totaled the superstructure of the pilot boat Orient and pushed the tug up onto the east quay. Nearby, a crewman on another container ship had his leg broken by a snapping mooring line. (Last September, the MSC Luciana lost power while outbound from Antwerp and ran onto a sandbank.) The tug Christos 22 was towing the ex-German Navy training ship Emsstrom off the UK’s southern coast when the tug slowed and headed towards the coast to check out things. The towed ship smashed into the slowing tug, holing both vessels. Valiant fights by RNLI lifeboats, local tugs, and Royal Navy ships HMS Severn and HMS Lancaster saved the tug but the Emsstrom sank and so the vessel failed to meet a scrapper in Turkey.

A leak at one of the aft thrusters and the consequent flooding of the engineroom of the Emma Maersk, one of the world’s nine largest container ships, threatened to block the Suez Canal. The vessel was towed to the Suez Canal Container Port where its cargo of 13,537 containers (including about 1,000 reefer containers) could be discharged and loaded onto other vessels. But it was not possible to unload all the containers since, without engine power, it was not possible to trim the vessel's ballast tanks to keep it stable during the discharge work.

It took only an hour for the Emma Maersk’s engineroom to be flooded about 60 feet (18 m) deep, deep enough to cover the massive main engine. Unclear was the extent of damage to this huge 14-cylinder engine (109,000 hp) and whether it and the auxiliary engines, which together provided about 40,000 hp, will be reparable. The first priority was to preserve the engineroom equipment, which ironically meant keeping it submerged for the time being since any contact with oxygen would result in corrosion. The plan was to have the hole plugged by underwater welders, unload the remaining containers, pump out the water, and as equipment was exposed, wash it with fresh water, dismantle it, and decide what could be repaired and reused and what must be replaced. As a precaution, Maersk instructed the seven other vessels in the E-class fleet not to use their stern thrusters.

(The Emma Maersk has faced adversity before. The first of the eight-vessel E-class, it was nearly ready to be launched when a disastrous fire gutted the accommodations and bridge structure. Un-fazed, the Danish shipbuilders removed the superstructure from the next E-class vessel being built and made a fast swap. The Emma Maersk was launched only six to seven weeks late.

Gray Fleets
In the Philippines, the Japan-based mine countermeasures vessel USS Guardian ran onto Tubbataha Reef, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site, in spite of warnings from park rangers. Efforts to pull the ship free and attempts to lift it by the crane-barge SMIT Borneo (recently used on the wrecked container ship Rena in New Zealand) proved fruitless and damaged the fiberglass and wood ship enough so it will be dismantled in place. The cause of the mishap seems to have been an error on digital charts that misplaced the reef by several miles. The Philippine Government and people were not happy with the accident and the US government will probably pay the usual fine of about $300 per square meter (yard) of damaged coral, plus other fees. But the Navy has good company; in 2005, the environmental group Greenpeace was fined almost $7,000 after its flagship struck a reef in the same area.

The US Navy revised its overall fleet-size requirement downward from 313 to 306 ships – a modest downscaling that reflects modified operational requirements, not the ongoing budget crisis. The fleet currently has 288 ships, up from May 2007’s low of 275 ships. (The count fell below 300 in August 2003.)

The US Navy cut back the number of aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf region from two to one, the latest example of how contentious fiscal battles in Washington are impacting the US military. The USS Harry S. Truman and its carrier strike group will now remain stateside at Norfolk, Virginia.

The $3.3 billion, three-and-a-half-year refueling overhaul of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was postponed by the Navy – another manifestation of Congress’s inability to pass a 2013 defense funding bill. Any significant delay in beginning the Lincoln’s refueling overhaul will ripple through years of carrier scheduling.

The US Navy wants to acquire binoculars capable of reading faces of uncooperative subjects up to 650 feet away. The purpose is to identify them.

The rescue of two bullocks from a cliff in Cornwall by a Royal Navy helicopter was deemed “a useful training exercise.” The two Charolais Cross bullocks had been in the gully for at least two days. (In North America, these castrated male animals would be called “steers.”)

White Fleets
The cruise ship Seabourn Quest left Tonga an hour earlier than scheduled so it would be in deeper water when a tsunami hit. (The five-foot-high waves of the tsunami, created by a magnitude 8.0 earthquake at Santa Cruz Island several hundred miles SW of the Solomon Islands, killed nine people at Santa Cruz plus others in the Solomons.)

The polar expedition ship Silver Explorer encountered heavy weather and sustained damage while on a cruise from the Argentinean port of Ushuaia to South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula and so it returned to port. None of the 133 passengers were injured but four crewmembers had minor injuries.

The polar expedition ship PV Orion, eleven days into an 18-day cruise of the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic, made a 50-hour diversion from a visit to Macquarie Island to pluck a French solo sailor from a liferaft. His boat, the Tchouk Tchouk Nougat, had been dismasted and suffered hull damage about 500 miles southwest of Tasmania during a solo round-the-world voyage. The rescue effort lasted three days and involved near-continuous communication with the 63-year-old sailor and multiple airdrops by up to five aircraft while the PV Orion and its 100 passengers headed towards the raft through deteriorating weather. When in contact, the PV Orion launched a Zodiac and then tethered the Zodiac and liferaft together and pulled the sailor into the Zodiac. Next stop on the ship’s revised itinerary? Hobart, Tasmania.

Those That Go Back and Forth
The passenger ferry Sarash capsized after colliding with a sand barge on a river in central Bangladesh, dumping as many as 100 people into the water. There were no immediate reports of casualties after the ferry went down on the River Meghna in Munshiganj district, 32 kilometers (20 miles) south of Dhaka but there was confusion over the number of passengers on board: a TV station put the number at more than 100, a local police official said it was about 80, and the president of the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport and Passenger Service said the ferry was carrying just more than 50 passengers.

In Greece, a strike by ferry workers was stopped when the Greek government imposed martial law on striking ferry workers and mobilized police to break up their picket lines.

Legal Matters
The Philippine Senate committee on foreign affairs conducted an inquiry into operations of the small tanker Glenn Guardian, a contract vessel that removed waste from US Navy ships, and found it liable for violating Philippine laws when it dumped some 200,000 liters of wastewater off Subic, Zambales. (A business rival tipped off authorities to the dumping in 2011.) But the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority concluded that the Malaysian contractor had committed no violations with regards to its handling and disposal of waste materials, agreeing with company statements that the waste materials were "treated" and environmentally harmless.

Nature
A preliminary new record low-water level of 576.02 feet (175.57 meters) was registered for Lake Michigan-Huron for January. It was the lowest water level for this body of water since Great Lakes water levels were first maintained in 1918.

Energy
Although the current federal administration and the greenies want to kill off all fossil fuels, shipments of US-mined steam coal last year were 120 million tons, about twice that exported as recently as 2009. Most of the coal went to Europe, especially the UK, the Netherlands, and Italy, for generation of electricity. For many years, the US exported much high-quality metallurgical coal used in steel mills but now most exports are of steam coal.

A California senator introduced a bill to permanently prohibit offshore drilling on the outer Continental Shelf off the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington.

Production of coal in Australia and the overseas shipping of it were hampered by two factors. Bad weather hit first. Yancoal declared a Force Majeure for its Yarrabee coal mine after it received more than 360 mm of rain in the pit and production was suspended for two days. Another Force Majeure was declared due to damage caused to the Blackwater rail corridor by ex-Tropical Cyclone Oswald. Yarrabee, along with several other mines on the same rail corridor, was not able to rail coal from the mines to the port in Gladstone. Following flooding in Queensland, Xstrata declared a Force Majeure on some of its coal exports because heavy rains damaged its rail network. Rio Tinto Ltd also declared a Force Majeure on coal sales contracts from its Kestrel mine due to damage to the Blackwater rail network.

But Australian labor also played a role. Australia's main rail union called two 24-hour strikes that affected the New South Wales coal industry. Pacific National Rail normally hauls about 300,000 tons of coal per day and so there were 600,000 metric tons less coal in the stockpiles at Newcastle and Port Kembla when railing resumed.

In Nigeria, Shell declared a Force Majeure at their Soku gas flow station when there was no supply available due to leaks in the pipeline and loading of a LNG vessel at the Bonny Nigeria LNG Terminal had to be suspended.

Salvage
About two weeks after its stranding, the fast reefer Asia Lily was pulled off its island beach by the Papua New Guinea-based tugs Wombi and Vulcan. (The Asia Lily had been on its way to the Philippines to get bananas when it ran into a coral beach at speed and ended up with its bow angled high above the beach on Kwaiawata Island in the Marshall Bennett Islands on Christmas Eve, December 24 last year.)

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives
Piracy reached a five-year low in 2012, thanks to a “huge reduction” in Somali piracy, but east and West Africa remain as “hot” areas. Attacked in 2012 were 297 ships vs. 439 vessels the previous year. Globally, pirates boarded 174 ships last year, while 28 ships were hijacked and 28 were fired on. Hostages taken on board fell to 585 vs. 802 in 2011; a further 26 were kidnapped for ransom in Nigeria. Six crew were killed and 32 were injured or assaulted.
Sailors on board the USS Kearsarge and USS San Antonio can chat with each other for free using free Android-powered LG phones – subject to certain limits. The warships are part of a 4G LTE network, a microwave-based wireless wide-area network or WWAN that handles calls, text, and data transfers anywhere within a radius of 20 nautical miles. One probable application: helicopter crews will be able to shoot videos of pirates and forward the footage for analysis.

The US Navy has been crowdsourcing other ideas using a new gaming platform called MMOWGLI (Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet) to collectively generate ideas. Anti-piracy results have included "stinky water" walls (a skunk-smelling water curtain that even a tough Marine cannot penetrate), propeller-tangling ropes, and extremely loud (louder than a jet engine at 100 feet) warnings to turn away.

Odd Bits and Headshakers
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement issued a Safety Alert to operators of some offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. They must secure current well operations and retrieve the Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) and/or Blowout Preventer (BOP). The existing bolts on the LMRP connector/wellhead connector must be changed-out with bolts certified by an independent third-party to be in compliance with recommended heat treatment practices or the exiting bolts must be examined and certified by an independent third-party that they are fit for the purpose. The Safety Alert was triggered by a pollution incident involving the discharge of synthetic base mud (SBM) into the water due to a loss of integrity of a LMRP H-4 connector.

India issued a circular reporting that a container ship arriving in Mumbai had fires in two of its containers. They held sunflower cake with an oil content of 14-16% and a moisture content of 4-6% and had experienced self-heating due to oxidation of the residual oil.

The bulker Oliva with a cargo of soy beans (nearly 60 percent of all soybeans entering international trade today go to China, making it far and away the world’s largest soy bean importer) was en route from Brazil to Singapore when it ran aground on Spinners Point, the far-north-west promontory of Nightingale Island, a four-square kilometer island in the Tristan da Cunha archipelago in the South Atlantic, the most-remote inhabited archipelago in the world. The crew of 22 was removed and the vessel soon broke up. That was in March, 2011. Recently, a lifeboat from the Oliva washed ashore in the Cooring wetlands near the mouth of the Murray in South Australia after having floated about 8,000 kilometers from Nightingale Island. The boat with 29 seats, a diesel engine, and a lot of barnacles must have passed south of one of the world’s most-famous capes but which one? Was it the Cape of Good Hope (drifting eastward) or Cape Horn (westward)?