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)?
