Job not quite done
Posted on | May 18, 2010 | No Comments
We don’t sink bulk carriers quite as often as we once did, in the bad old 80s and 90s, when it was not unusual to lose 20 bulk carriers a year along with their crews. Last year there were 9 ships lost along with 39 lives of seafarers, but that was an exceptionally bad year. Over a ten year average, there has been real progress.
We were reminded of these grim days at the launch of the 2nd Edition of The Nautical Institute’s Bulk Carrier Practice, written with a lot of skill and persistence by Captain Jack Isbester, who used to drive these ships for a living and has gone that extra mile to ensure that it is really up to date and relevant in 2010. It is arguably needed as much as it ever was, with a vast orderbook of new ships about to swell the fleet, many of which will surely be manned by seafarers short on experience aboard these ships, which are not as uncomplicated as many people once thought.
It was old ships and poor maintenance, along with a cavalier attitude by bother terminals and charterers which were blamed when we were losing sometimes two iron ore laden ships per month in the early 80s. The real scandal was that nobody appeared to be particularly interested in why they were sinking. I recall one particularly harrowing case when a bulker out of a Canadian ore port was overwhelmed in the freezing winter Atlantic, sinking before the horrified eyes of those aboard a Coast Guard aircraft, who were powerless to intervene in the terrible weather. I was in New York at the time, and noted that the tragedy, in which about 28 foreign lives were snuffed out, merited about a one inch “nib” in the New York Times, which devoted vast tracts of newsprint inveighing against the catastrophe of an oil barge which had grounded in Long Island Sound, and caused some pollution. There was the rage in South Africa after an old Capesize out of Brazil had sunk off the Cape, and affected the local penguins. This was interpreted as the tragedy, not the 30 Chinese seamen who died as their ship flooded under them.
Then there was the Derbyshire, lost 30 years ago this year, which did make some difference, perhaps because she wasn’t old, was operated by a crack British company, and drowned a lot of Brits, whose principled and stubborn relatives, fought for years to keep the bulkship scandal to the fore. And there was IMO Secretary-General Bill O’Neil who chose to make a personal powerful intervention to start the mechanism to get a new regulatory framework in place. Better information, class and flag working together, and a meaningful inspection regime and indeed a lot more “best practice” got the disgraceful accident statistics down to something reasonable.
Is the job done? Jack Isbester, who clearly has his ear to the ground, suggests that there are still problems with poor design, with inexperienced personnel ashore and afloat, and often a bad mismatch between ships and terminals. There are “unrealistic expectations” which may be due to downright unreasonable attitudes by charterers and terminals, bullying those aboard the ship and demanding that they do unsafe things, or expecting them to clean a ship after a coal cargo with the speed of Mary Poppins, and no time to do it. But sometimes the ship is poorly maintained and cannot deballast fast enough, or has incompetent staff aboard her.
But the new edition of Bulk Carrier Practice can only help these “workhorses of the shipping industry” , as Efthimios Mitropoulos, who hoped that “quality and not price” differentiates between charterers’ decisions, called them. But we can never say “job done”.
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