We have all made mistakes in our lives, but very few people will have done anything so dreadful, with the damage control centre indicating that the ship is filling fast, there is a total power blackout, and there are 4200 people whose lives are now in deadly danger as a consequence of a man’s misjudgement.

Where are the equivalents? A general, whose error has condemned an entire regiment to destruction can at least blame the enemy for his own miscalculation. A doctor whose blundering scalpel has killed his patient has the blood of only that single person on his hands. Even the pilot of the biggest passenger aircraft who has misjudged his approach will, like those aboard, be dead and free from recriminations and condemnation.

Can we consider, just for a moment, what Captain Schettino must have been thinking as he realised the terrible consequences of his errors and the end of his career. And we expect somebody with that terrible burden to spring into action, reassure those aboard and ensure that the evacuation of the ship goes entirely to plan. There are just a few human beings who can perhaps imagine the reality of this ultimate horror. They, without exception, will be in command of gigantic cruise ships. They won’t be robots, either. But more than four thousand people got ashore from that sinking heeling ship that night. Somebody was doing something right.

There is a job to be done on the issue of cruise ship size, and above all, their height. You don’t have to own an over-active imagination to wonder about the stability of these things. Sure, passengers don’t weigh much (at least compared to iron ore) but there is some major reassurance to be done in this department; not easy as long as the cameras are focussed upon the Italian wreck, which facilitates an easy inspection of how much ship there is under the waterline, and above. Sure, the Titanic sank on an even keel, but where’s the progress? -worried potential passengers might ask. They need precise information and something more reassuring than damaged stability calculations which are quite unbelievably complicated or experts muttering about “cross flooding arrangements”.

They did a pretty good job, all things considered, getting what boats they did away from the listing ship, so somebody was doing what they had been trained to. But that famous phrase –“everyone panics in their own language” came to mind as the reports trickle in and the nightmare of evacuating a multi-national crowd, of every age and physical ability, needs a firm explanation. Can we do it – yes we can! But exactly how, professor? And 100 years on, aren’t there better systems than those represented by lifeboats. People aren’t stupid and possibly even remember ships which have lurched violently when experiencing a steering gear malfunction and thrown pianos around, and others which, despite all the duplication of systems, had to be towed back to port. They need a cleaner bill of health for cruising, or they will be holidaying elsewhere.

Finally, there needs to be a bit more insurance in the human element department. No point in having bridge resource management, if an individual goes off on a tangent and starts to drive as the mood takes him. Cultural change may need more than a few day’s simulator training.

But as containerships go, this is a tiddler compared to the giants now entering service on the main line routes. How do salvors, and everyone else from the emergency services to the average adjusters deal with 16,000teu on the loose, when fewer than 2000 can be such a problem? There were some very pessimistic views expressed last week at a Maritime London event when Holman Fenwick & Willan Partner Andrew Chamberlain pointed out that there were already 140 “mega” containerships rushing around and not a great deal of visible preparedness evident should (perhaps we should say when) one of them comes to grief.

He had worked on the MSC Napoli salvage among others, and notes that “the whole dynamics of salvage has changed completely”, salvors having to work in an atmosphere of intense government, environmental and public and press attention. The salvage industry, with only about five globally capable salvors in being, is facing challenges with its lack of resources and the need for serious investment in plant and people if they are to respond the salvage of giant ships.

Even with such monsters, the value is now in the cargo more than the ship, which brings its own problems in a case where there is such a plethora of cargo owners, the sheer logistic problems of such numbers, the vast numbers of agencies that will need to be part of the solution, and, of course, the sheer problems of removing cargo from a huge, damaged ship with containers seven high on deck. Such equipment that can be helpful in such a situation is not found in every port – in the case of the Rena it required a crane barge to be moved for nearly three weeks, to the wreck site.

Think of the problems of disposal of spoiled or hazardous cargo, the space needed to simply sort out the wreckage once it is ashore. On the Napoli, we heard just two containers cost £100,000 to find specialist disposal. On the Chitra wreck off India, the ship had to be scuttled at sea because of the presence aboard of hazardous chemicals that could not be safely removed. Think of these problems multiplied by seven or eight times, with a giant ship in dire straits.

The fact is that people don’t want to think about these realities. The term “in denial” has moved from the realms of psychology to marine operations. Maybe one of the 140 monsters will end up wrecked. Fingers crossed that it won’t be mine.

The useful British enthusiasts’ journal Ships Monthly notes in its latest edition that the 17,676gt fully laden vessel departed Seattle on 3 February 1987,  bound Pusan, and was never seen again. She was the first sizeable purpose-built containership to be lost in the open seas ,when she disappeared in terrible weather around ten days later somewhere off the Kurile Islands. Only a single container, some wreckage and one body from the eight year old ship, which had a complement of 23, were found by the searchers. The $26m loss to the insurers would be one of the largest of that year and the most substantial ever associated with container shipping up to that date.

The Hanjin Incheon loss was attributed to extreme weather, but raised some eyebrows as, while a tiddler in today’s terms, this was a sizeable “first generation” container vessel and a good deal bigger than the general cargo ships she and her cellular sisters replaced.

It is instructive to relate this loss to some of the other problems which have raised their exceedingly ugly heads in the years since her disappearance. Sure, weather was certainly a contributory factor, but might the phenomenon known these days as parametric rolling have seen the ship lose her positive stability in the fearsome storm, fall into a trough and be rolled over by the waves? It is tempting to speculate by applying modern knowledge to this old casualty.

And while the containers were normally stacked only three high on the foredeck of the accommodation aft vessel, one wonders whether the cavalier attitude to container weights that has been recently remarked upon was prevalent in 1987? She sailed from a US port, and it was the US Coast Guard which first blew the whistle on the huge disparities between declared weights and contents and the “real thing” in the 1990s, when a survey revealed that a very high proportion of containers were misdeclared.

Weights would matter a very great deal on a ship of such a size when computing her stability. They still do, but are we any nearer in persuading those stuffing containers that accuracy matters?

There will invariably be no weighbridge, or weighing device available to tell of the shipper’s crime, and despite menacing creaking noises coming from the reach stacker in the terminal, or the noises of protest from the shiploader, this wretched box may then find its way high onto the stack aboard ship. And this, alas will be the straw that metaphorically breaks the camel’s back, collapsing the stow as the ships works in the seaway, and taking several dozen other boxes to a watery grave.

This may cause only anger and disappointment, but people who couldn’t care less about the weights they stuff into a container have already capsized feeder container ships, smashed up cranes, had forklifts standing on their forks and very likely subjected large ships to fatal structural stresses. The MSC Napoli’s loss was at least contributed to by a large number of overweight boxes, while that of the feeder Dongedyk which could have drowned her crew if her capsize had occurred in deeper water, was certainly caused by her chief officer not having a clue about the weight of their cargo.

It is going on all the time, as any containership Mate who has compared the draught with the tonnage of cargo declared will confirm. Terminals seem powerless to intervene, and everyone seems unwilling to be nasty to the shippers. So it is good that the IAPH has joined the World Shipping Council, ICS and BIMCO in calling on IMO to have the SOLAS Convention amended to require accurate and verified weights of containers. About time too.

It could be argued that shippers ought to be the guilty party that is brought to heel here and that shippers’ organisations, which spend inordinate amounts of time whining and protesting about carriers might be considered the missing guest at the feast. It is shippers that cause the damage, who risk people’s lives, and who fundamentally cheat over container weights. So let’s hear it from them. Weighing containers is not rocket science. They are doing it in the US, where there is less generosity towards cheats and it ought to be made universal.

The spectre at the feast tends to be the professional salvor, who looks at the huge new ship with eyes not of other men, as he considers how his existing capabilities can be employed should the worst thing happen and this jewel in the shipowner’s crown become impaled on a rock, or explode, or catch fire. Salvors have been quietly asking this difficult question for some time now, as the scale economics have kicked into container shipping, and cruise operations.

Container ships occasionally do come to grief, not least because of the pressures the lines are under to deliver, necessitating rather less prudence in navigation than might once have been expected from smart cargo lines. And as we have seen with even ships of modest size, they are the very devil to salve, should there be any water ingress into their sleek holds. Look at the trouble the Rena is giving salvors as she lies wrecked off New Zealand. Remember the MSC Napoli which lay on the English coasts for months before she was dragged off in bits.

Salvors worry about what might happen if a 16000 teu containership is wrecked and they have to pick up the pieces. Containers piled seven high on deck, 24 across and water gradually spreading through the underdeck spaces, which are still largely uncompartmented. Think of the sort of plant that will have to assembled, from somewhere, to empty such a monster.

But is this not just being alarmist? Andreas Tsavliris, who knows a thing about salvage and is the president of the International Salvage Union suggests that it is a statistical certainty that one of these monsters will come to grief. He worries about a salvage sector that is not exactly prospering, with the difficulty of re-investment in the sort of plant that is needed to dewater giant ships, and all the other extraordinary things salvors are tasked to do. He is concerned about where the money is coming from for new salvage tugs, and from where a new generation of clever salvors is to be recruited.

And it is not helped, he suggests, by the salvors having to fight tooth and nail in the courts to get awards, which are then appealed by the insurers, postponing the days of payment for hard and expensive jobs for years. For salvors, it is all money up front.  And while there might be suggestions that such complaints are a sort of ritual for ISU presidents, it is worth while standing back and just looking at the realities, because Mr Tsavliris insists they are real and deserve consideration at the highest level. Calamities do happen, and when they do, we need a fall back position and adequate salvage capabilities.

The European Commission has embraced this curious terminology and in connection with its upcoming environmental requirements for Emission Control Areas, offers the shipping industry a “toolbox” of technical and financial solutions to facilitate compliance in meeting the 0.1% limits on fuel sulphur content. Despite the repeated concerns of the shipping industry at the impracticality or even the need to reducing to this level in the proposed 2015 timescale, no derogation or postponement, it is insisted, is going to occur. Orders must be obeyed.

The tools in the Commission’s “toolbox” are but three in number – the option of fuelling ships with LNG, the employment of scrubbers where heavy oil usage is retained or EU funding initiatives or state aid.

The ferry operator’s trade organisation Interferry has been examining the practicality of these options and remains singularly unimpressed as are six major North European ferry operator members, which between them operate 108 vessels around this part of the world. The feasibility study which was carried out by Brittany Ferries, DFDS, Grimaldi Group, P&O Ferries, Stena Line and TT-Line reported back to Johan Roos, the organisation’s man in Europe, that the toolbox is completely empty.

LNG, which seems a grand option in the long term, is judged impractical due to the prohibitive cost of converting existing vessels, and the inadequate infrastructure for supplying LNG as bunkers. Scrubber technology is not a “miracle cure” (not least because of the huge weight of the devices high in the funnel casing of existing ships) and the operators say that for 60% of the existing fleet it would be neither technically or financially viable. And as for the EU funding, it only applies to newbuilds or new routes.

So the only possibility is to shift to using gasoil, which will push costs up by 70% and could lose 50% of the ferry market as the customers go back to road haulage, all traffic that has been won from land transport routes by solid hard work in recent years. The 2015 deadline says everyone who needs to deal with it is “mission impossible”, but will this study of practical issues make any difference. What do they say?  -“I’m from the Commission, I’m here to help”.

He had perceived that seafarers, who only ever seemed to be noticed by landsmen when something had gone badly wrong, deserved some recognition, especially for some of the quite amazing things that they do in the hostile environment in which they work.

This year, the first day of the 27^th IMO Assembly, along with some heavy diplomatic representation, was treated to a truly amazing true tale of courage, with the award being presented to Captain Seog Hae-gyun, who had been master of the chemical tanker Samho Jewelry when she was seized by a large gang of Somali pirates. The crew had been in their designated citadel, but the pirates had broken in and detained them on the bridge of the ship which they ordered to be taken to the Somali coast.

The Republic of Korea master had other ideas, and in an effort to delay progress of the vessel so that Korean Navy vessels might catch up and attempt a rescue, he undertook all manner of highly risky strategems, such as steering a zig-zag course, interfering with the fuel mixture so that the engine misfired, pretending the steering gear was broken and slowing the ship down to six knots. Ordered to communicate to the owners in English, he surreptitiously inserted information in Korean about the true situation, hugely assisting the pursuing naval units. But the pirates realised that they were being duped and viciously attacked the master, causing serious fractures to his shoulders and legs.

Eventually as dawn broke on the second day of their captured passage, the ROK destroyer Choi Young launched their rescue operation and quickly captured most of the ship. However three armed pirates remained in the wheelhouse, and despite his serious injuries the master managed to get to the VHF and warn the rescuers of the dangers they still faced. Furious, the pirates shot the master four times, two bullets hitting him in the abdomen, as the bridge was stormed.

Eight pirates were killed and five captured in the operation but the master, near to death, was rushed ashore, first to Oman and then to his home country, where he underwent major surgery over an extensive period. As he accepted his award in London, ten months after the outrage, he still required a cane to help him walk.

Captain Seog did what he believed was best to protect his crew and his ship and very nearly died at the hands of these criminals who are making seafarers’ lives so difficult. He is a true hero of our times. There were also 38 different nominations for the award, which seems to show that there is still a great deal of courage being shown by people at sea. It is just that the Award helps to illuminate it all, for everyone’s benefit.

One of the real scandals which has disfigured marine safety for several years has been the terrible loss of life and serious injury that has occurred with accidents involving lifeboats and launching mechanisms, mostly involving the on-load release hooks which seemed such a good idea at the time. It took far too long for the industry to agree the mandatory guidelines for the release and retrieval systems now found in MSC.1/Circ.1392; several years of fruitless arguing, during which time a lot more seafarers and others were killed and injured in needless accidents.

But at least there is now a requirement for all operators to test the equipment they have fitted to their ships, and to replace it where necessary, and the manufacturers have also had to comply with far more rigorous testing than hitherto. The manufacturers Schat-Harding helpfully point out that these rules apply to new boats from 1 July 2014, but there are also tests to be applied to existing hooks and if they fail to meet the set standards, they will have to be upgraded at the first drydocking after this date, but no later than 1 July 2019.

This major manufacturer has now completed testing its SeaCure lifeboat release and retrieval system, and also developed a Secondary Safety System for this hook. It seems likely that other reputable major manufacturers will be also ensuring that their equipment meets the new criteria.

But it is worth pointing out that there are literally hundreds of types of on load hooks in service, often supplied by shipyards, which is of course one of the problems, and which has contributed to this loss of life and injury among the people who ought to be able to depend on their LSA in extremis. There will be thousands of hooks which, although accepted by owners in good faith when they took delivery of their ships, will be potentially dangerous and require upgrading. There is also scope to kill and maim quite a lot of seafarers before the mandatory dates of 2014 and 2019.

Good shipowners will not be waiting for these “test and replace-by” dates but will be hurrying to ensure that their own equipment is thoroughly safe, just as soon as it is possible. Schat-Harding tells us that more than 100 owners have already re-hooked their lifeboats with their equipment. Good shipowners all!

A recent survey in New Zealand, where ships’ gear tends to be used extensively for non-containerised trades like forest product revealed a great deal of hazardous machinery, which is curious in a country where the wharfies take a fairly robust attitude to anything that is not to their liking. Just imagine the consternation in the charterer’s office when it is revealed that some ship that has steamed half way around the world to pick up a cargo, has had its cargo gear condemned. It’s not a lot of use and the ship will be offhire before you can say “Whakatipu”.

There was a revealing meeting in London this week on the occasion of the launch of a Lloyd’s Register and UK P&I Club guide to the survey and examination of ships’ lifting appliances, which takes in cargo gear, stores and engineroom cranes and even davits for lifesaving equipment. There is a sort of gap in oversight that has been perceived as this equipment is more often than not regarded as an “optional” class item, while flags states vary greatly in their treatment of this survey. You would think that bearing in mind the importance of much of this stuff, it would be treated more seriously than it is.

There is, as the UK Club’s Karl Lumbers points out, few instances of an incident involving this equipment that does not end up with deaths and injuries. He has a gruesome collection of pictures of cranes which have ended up in the hold, or on the wharf, along with their drivers and others dead and injured. He also offers a list of reasons for this happening, which ranges from neglect of maintenance to bad design.

The new guide is a pocket sized compendium of useful advice on what surveyors and others need to look at in this equipment. Considering how important it all is, it might be considered overdue, but if it induces a new awareness, it will have been well worth while.