Another fire on a containership will have given fresh impetus to demands for answers, but waiting for the metaphorical smoke to clear could take a long time. Accident investigators hoping to discover the cause of the blaze on the Liberian-flag Hansa Brandenburg, abandoned by its crew last week after a fire is reported to have broken out in a container on deck, may have to wait until salvors have completed their work and the ship is allowed into a port.
A full report into a similar incident in July last year on the German-flag MSC Flaminia is still awaited. In an interim report last month Germany’s Federal Bureau of Maritime Casualty Investigation (BSU) said it had been forced to suspend the publication date of the full report, partly because the prolonged search for a European country prepared to accept the under-tow, disabled vessel meant its investigators could not begin work in earnest until two months after the incident.
The latest incident occurred in the Indian Ocean shortly after MSC Flaminia had been cleared to enter dry-dock for repairs to the damage caused by the fire that started in containers and by the subsequent explosion when the ship was crossing the Atlantic. Two of the crew died from severe burns, while a third has been presumed dead. Two others sustained serious injuries.
The BSU said it had been examining the fire, the crisis management on the ship and the salvage operations, but it added it had also made a “critical evaluation” of the time between the incident itself and the eventual decision by German authorities to allow the containership to dock in Wilhelmshaven.
Answers to why another containership – MOL Comfort – split in two and sank may also be delayed, following the loss of both fore and aft sections which are now lying on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The ship’s classification society has, however, promised preliminary results of its investigation will be available by September, while the Bahamas, as the flag state, is carrying out its own inquiry.
Even as MOL Comfort was splitting in two last month British accident investigators were revealing how they had been frustrated in their attempts to find out why two containerships – the UK-flag Hyundai Discovery and the Panamanian-flag ACX Hibiscus – collided in December 2011.
The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) in its report into the incident, which occurred when heavy rain had reduced visibility in the eastern approaches to the Singapore Strait, said it had been denied access to “primary evidence” from ACX Hibiscus and that pressure had been put on the Panamanian authorities not to release “critical evidence”, including that from the ship’s Voyage Data Recorder, to the MAIB.
The British investigators said as a result of being deprived of key information by the “obstructive behaviour” of the owners of ACX Hibiscus, their report could not deal with the “underlying causes of the accident”. This, they added, was despite the fact Panama had agreed to the MAIB taking the lead in a joint investigation.
Industry organisations have also expressed their frustration at the failure of many flag states to make public casualty investigation reports whose findings could help prevent similar incidents occurring. INTERCARGO, the dry cargo owners’ trade association, recently revealed the results of its attempt to access reports on the database maintained by the International Maritime Organization (IMO).
Concerned by the high loss rate of bulk carriers and, in particular, those involving the carriage of nickel ore, INTERCARGO searched the Global Integrated Shipping Information System (GISIS) for serious incidents involving both loss of life and vessel in the period 2008-11.
The association found that the majority of cases on the GISIS “marine casualties and incidents module” were either unaccompanied by flag state investigation reports or, if they were, the reports were unavailable for download. (Three reports by Panama into separate incidents involving nickel ore were, in fact, submitted simultaneously to GISIS and made available for download shortly before INTERCARGO revealed its findings.)
A similar problem will confront anyone searching GISIS for reports of serious containership incidents. For three of the most serious and well-known incidents involving cargo-related fires – the Antigua-and-Barbudan-flag CMA Djakarta in 1997, the Liberian-flag Hanjin Pennsylvania (2002) and the Panamanian-flag Hyundai Fortune (2006) – no flag state investigation reports are available on GISIS.
Even when an investigation report has been entered on the database, for it to be available for download, according to the GISIS website, it has to have been released to the public by the flag state, but this is not always the case. Two other well-known containership incidents (both in 2007) – the Hong Kong-flag Cosco Busan and the UK-flag MSC Napoli – have been the subject of published investigation reports. But while they are not available for download from GISIS, both can be downloaded from the respective websites, mardep.gov.hk and maib.gov.uk.
Flag states not only face demands to make investigation reports public but to do so as quickly as possible. The complexity of some serious incidents, however, can limit the ability of often under-resourced investigators to produce reports as fast as some might like.
As the frustrated German investigators pointed out, one of the problems they faced in dealing with the complex issues raised by the MSC Flaminia incident was their “limited personnel resources”.
The two-month delay, the incident’s complexity and lack of manpower meant they would have been unable to meet the European Union’s target of producing a final report for very serious or serious casualties within 12 months without “serious losses [to] the conclusions and safety recommendations”, hence last month’s interim report.
The full MAIB report into the containership collision also failed to meet the EU’s12-month deadline, although whether this was entirely due to the lack of co-operation it encountered is not clear. It too was forced to publish an interim report in December last year.
Without the lessons that accident investigation reports can provide, the higher the risk that containerships will continue to burn and bulk carriers to sink and more lives to be lost.
Source: BIMCO
A full report into a similar incident in July last year on the German-flag MSC Flaminia is still awaited. In an interim report last month Germany’s Federal Bureau of Maritime Casualty Investigation (BSU) said it had been forced to suspend the publication date of the full report, partly because the prolonged search for a European country prepared to accept the under-tow, disabled vessel meant its investigators could not begin work in earnest until two months after the incident.
The latest incident occurred in the Indian Ocean shortly after MSC Flaminia had been cleared to enter dry-dock for repairs to the damage caused by the fire that started in containers and by the subsequent explosion when the ship was crossing the Atlantic. Two of the crew died from severe burns, while a third has been presumed dead. Two others sustained serious injuries.
The BSU said it had been examining the fire, the crisis management on the ship and the salvage operations, but it added it had also made a “critical evaluation” of the time between the incident itself and the eventual decision by German authorities to allow the containership to dock in Wilhelmshaven.
Answers to why another containership – MOL Comfort – split in two and sank may also be delayed, following the loss of both fore and aft sections which are now lying on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The ship’s classification society has, however, promised preliminary results of its investigation will be available by September, while the Bahamas, as the flag state, is carrying out its own inquiry.
Even as MOL Comfort was splitting in two last month British accident investigators were revealing how they had been frustrated in their attempts to find out why two containerships – the UK-flag Hyundai Discovery and the Panamanian-flag ACX Hibiscus – collided in December 2011.
The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) in its report into the incident, which occurred when heavy rain had reduced visibility in the eastern approaches to the Singapore Strait, said it had been denied access to “primary evidence” from ACX Hibiscus and that pressure had been put on the Panamanian authorities not to release “critical evidence”, including that from the ship’s Voyage Data Recorder, to the MAIB.
The British investigators said as a result of being deprived of key information by the “obstructive behaviour” of the owners of ACX Hibiscus, their report could not deal with the “underlying causes of the accident”. This, they added, was despite the fact Panama had agreed to the MAIB taking the lead in a joint investigation.
Industry organisations have also expressed their frustration at the failure of many flag states to make public casualty investigation reports whose findings could help prevent similar incidents occurring. INTERCARGO, the dry cargo owners’ trade association, recently revealed the results of its attempt to access reports on the database maintained by the International Maritime Organization (IMO).
Concerned by the high loss rate of bulk carriers and, in particular, those involving the carriage of nickel ore, INTERCARGO searched the Global Integrated Shipping Information System (GISIS) for serious incidents involving both loss of life and vessel in the period 2008-11.
The association found that the majority of cases on the GISIS “marine casualties and incidents module” were either unaccompanied by flag state investigation reports or, if they were, the reports were unavailable for download. (Three reports by Panama into separate incidents involving nickel ore were, in fact, submitted simultaneously to GISIS and made available for download shortly before INTERCARGO revealed its findings.)
A similar problem will confront anyone searching GISIS for reports of serious containership incidents. For three of the most serious and well-known incidents involving cargo-related fires – the Antigua-and-Barbudan-flag CMA Djakarta in 1997, the Liberian-flag Hanjin Pennsylvania (2002) and the Panamanian-flag Hyundai Fortune (2006) – no flag state investigation reports are available on GISIS.
Even when an investigation report has been entered on the database, for it to be available for download, according to the GISIS website, it has to have been released to the public by the flag state, but this is not always the case. Two other well-known containership incidents (both in 2007) – the Hong Kong-flag Cosco Busan and the UK-flag MSC Napoli – have been the subject of published investigation reports. But while they are not available for download from GISIS, both can be downloaded from the respective websites, mardep.gov.hk and maib.gov.uk.
Flag states not only face demands to make investigation reports public but to do so as quickly as possible. The complexity of some serious incidents, however, can limit the ability of often under-resourced investigators to produce reports as fast as some might like.
As the frustrated German investigators pointed out, one of the problems they faced in dealing with the complex issues raised by the MSC Flaminia incident was their “limited personnel resources”.
The two-month delay, the incident’s complexity and lack of manpower meant they would have been unable to meet the European Union’s target of producing a final report for very serious or serious casualties within 12 months without “serious losses [to] the conclusions and safety recommendations”, hence last month’s interim report.
The full MAIB report into the containership collision also failed to meet the EU’s12-month deadline, although whether this was entirely due to the lack of co-operation it encountered is not clear. It too was forced to publish an interim report in December last year.
Without the lessons that accident investigation reports can provide, the higher the risk that containerships will continue to burn and bulk carriers to sink and more lives to be lost.
Source: BIMCO
Comments
Post a Comment