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WARNING: GRAPHIC PHOTO

This week’s incident photo is not for the faint of heart. Bob Couttie’Maritime Accident Casebook gives the details:

The following photo is a disturbing image and we gave considerable thought to whether or not its publication would serve a useful purpose. It’s from the Blue Oceana website and tells more than any official report possibly could of the need to be safety conscious around containers. It is from an accident in Malaysia in 2005. As the Blue Oceana makes clear, it’s a continuing problem.

CLICK HERE for the photo.

For those curious how the editors at gCaptain research maritime incidents like the Cosco Busan’s allision with San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, here are some of the websites that provide excellent reference material.

Maritime Industry Custom Search Engine

Our first stop in researching any maritime related topic is our own Maritime Industry CSE. It’s a powerful resource since it provides search results with the aid of google’s powerful search database and algarithims. Actually the only difference between it and google.com is the fact that our tool narrows the results down and only displays sites that pertain to large ships.

*Tip: Try the “incidents” refinement to narrow down the results even further.

The Maritime Incident Casebook

If you are looking for trusted information on incidents as they happen then MAC should be your first stop. Be sure to visit their podcast section as well as their links page which contains a list of the best maritime resources for incident prevention.

Searates.com Container Shipping References

For those looking for data that specifically pertains to Container Ships, head over to Searates’ Container Ship Reference Book. Not only is it full of Web 2.0 eye candy, it also has some great hard data.

*Tip: Its shipping lines section has links to both Cosco and Hanjin. By visiting Cosco’s site you will quickly learn they have removed their official “Cosco Busan” statement from Nov 11th.

gCaptain’s Maritime News Mash-up

For breaking news your first stop should be our Maritime News Discoverer but a close second is our Maritime News Mash-up which is automatically updated with the industry’s most trusted news sources.

*Tip - Also take a look at our gCaptain News and Maritime Blog Mash-ups

The Council of American Master Mariners

For those looking for expert opinion from Ship Captain’s we hope you contact us… but your next stop should be CAMM. Contact them directly for contacts from the Maritime Expert Database.

Maritime Executive Magazine

Traditional media is know for making small errors when reporting maritime incidents. To obviate this problem subscribe to MAREX’s FREE weekly newsletter. It is published every Thursday and is written by professional journalists with maritime backgrounds. For past articles click HERE.

*Tip: If you are more interested in weekly blog postings check out Fred Fry’s Maritime Monday

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If you have a reference site of interest please submit it to our Maritime News Discoverer under the category “Links“

Breaking weather news from Russia. Bloomberg tells us;

An oil spill from a tanker that sank in a storm in waters between Russia and Ukraine threatens an “environmental catastrophe,” said Vladimir Slivyak, head of the Moscow-based Ecodefense group.

The Volgoneft-139 leaked 1,300 tons of fuel oil into the Kerch Strait linking the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, a Russian Transport Ministry spokeswoman, who declined to be identified, said in Moscow. Four other ships sank in yesterday’s storm that produced six-meter (20-foot) waves, state broadcaster Russia Today reported. Two sailors are dead and 23 are missing, it said.

“The effect will be very serious for the whole marine ecosystem, including fish, because of the high toxicity of oil products,” Slivyak said by telephone in Moscow yesterday. It will take several months to remove the oil on the surface, while the oil that sank will be “very hard” to clear, he added. Continue Reading…

1,300 tons converts to approximately 560,000 gallons of fuel oil or 10 times that which was spilt last week by the Cosco Busan in San Francisco Bay. No specifics yet but maybe Robin Storm can enlighten us.

CNN has some impressive video as well: LINK

First a note… I am publishing this short clip ahead of my next article because of its importance!

While preparing our upcoming “questions for investigators” article on the Cosco Busan incident we were asked by more than one party a question along this line; with communications failure being a leading cause of incidents and the crew of the Cosco Busan being Chinese of limited english skills (they required translators during the investigation) why do incidents of this type not happen more often?

The answer is Bridge Team Management.

Ok… so what is BRM?

Revisiting a previous post I state:

• Bridge Team (or resource) Management (called BRM in the industry) is a process to use all of your available resources during critical operations. It came from the airline industry which found an alarming number of accidents happened despite prior warning from the equipment or crew…. mostly by captains with military backgrounds and a “I can do this” attitude who did not fully use critical information from either the equipment or junior personnel.Boiled down it’s a class all officers must take in both teamwork and processing the large amounts of data (lookout reports, radar, radio comms, gps charting, weather information….) that pours into the bridge.
• Here’s a more official answer:The Bridge Team Management course introduces the concept of a navigation team to ship masters and watch officers and frames their decision making process toward establishing watch conditions during the course of the voyage. Bridge Team Management techniques will emphasize decision making based upon conditions related to workload and potential threat to the vessel. The intent of the program is to define the individual task and responsibilities of the various team members while developing a situational awareness to prevent individual errors.

In stating the importance of this post I am looking at the media reaction to the incident. In reporting disasters the public is often not satisfied until a single individual is blamed…. quickly. This was the case in the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Tampa Skyway Bridge Disaster and even in the early reports on the Empress of the North grounding where fault was placed on the Jr. Officer on watch who was only weeks out of the Maritime Academy. In the Empress of the North incident gCaptain broke from traditional media and laid the blame on management techniques rather than the “green” officer and we are happy to report he was recently clear of all charges (as was Capt. Hazelwood of the Exxon Valdez).

It is clear to us the Cosco Busan allided with the Bay Bridge because of a breakdown in Bridge Team Management. For example while VTS contacted the ship questing its course did the mate on watch, captain, helmsman or assist tug captain also voice concern? Was the equipment operational and set up properly? As the primary fault for the Exxon Valdez incident was not with Captain Hazelwood (he was cleared of charges and his license was reinstated) John Cota, Pilot aboard the Cosco Busan is not solely at fault for this incident.

The team failed the Cosco Busan not the ship’s Chinese Captain or American Pilot alone. Lets just hope the court of public opinion does not convict either person before the long and thorough investigation is completed. Otherwise they might stand the fate of Captain Hazelwood, cleared of charges and fully licensed to pilot a ship but unable to find a company willing to hire him.

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Asking yourself how a ship 131 wide could have such trouble in a channel 737 metres wide? Read a more unbelievable story HERE then watch the amazing slideshow HERE.

UPDATE: Bob Couttie of the Maritime Accident Casebook has a very interesting article along similar lines. You can find it HERE.

UPDATE 2:
Criminal probe opened in Bay oil spill

The entire crew of the cargo ship that sideswiped a bridge, causing San Francisco Bay’s worst oil spill in nearly two decades, has been detained as part of a criminal investigation, a Coast Guard official said Sunday.

Capt. William Uberti said he notified the U.S. attorney’s office on Saturday about issues involving management and communication among members of the bridge crew: the helmsman, the watch officer, the ship’s master and the pilot.

UPDATE: BoatingSF has a new animation that can be found here: COSCO BUSAN’S TRACK - UPDATED

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Our friend John of VesselTrax.com submitted this link to our Maritime News Discoverer. Click on the picture below and watch as the Cosco Busan leaves the dock and embarks on its fateful voyage.

From BoatingSF.com:

Path of the Cosco Busan Hitting the Bay Bridge

The animation below shows the Cosco Busan as it leaves the Port of Oakland on November 7, 2007, and hits the Bay Bridge at 8:30 am on its way to the Golden Gate.

The Cosco Busan is the bright red arrow. (Hover over a ship to see its information.)

You can see that the ship was traveling at an acute angle to the bridge and then turned sharply, directly into the center tower of the bridge. (The towers are highlighted with red dots to make them more visible.)

No cleanup ships show up in our AIS records. It is not clear whether they arrived later, did not have their AIS transponders on, or if for some reason our receiver did not detect their signals. (Coast Guard ships generally do not turn on their AIS transponders, so they do not show up.)

Click here for FULL ANIMATION

Stay Tuned as our licensed ship captain John Konrad is preparing a play-by-play video of this AIS data. In the meantime CLICK HERE for the SFGate’s excellent coverage of the incident.

UPDATE 2:

You can find a complete article on how this animation was made HERE.

The M/V Duncan Island.

Details and photos can be found HERE and a translation HERE.

In covering the recent San Francisco Bay Bridge incident I have noticed most (but not all) of the news articles have made a small error in terminology. In describing the incident where the Cosco Busan hit the Bay Bridge many prominent news organizations referred to event as a collision when in fact it was an allision.

For clarification: A vessel collides with another moving vessel…. A vessel allides with a fixed object (unless it is submerged) and is presumed at fault.

Marine Dictionary - Allision

For those interested in learning more about the incident here are some good links;

• San Francisco Bay Bridge - gCaptain coverage
• Ooops! Container Ship Collides with SF Bay Bridge
• Bridge Left Undamaged
• Chief Engineer Underestimates Environmental Impact
• Two Coasts - Two Allisions | MAREX
• Official Coast Guard Cosco Busan Updates (right column)
• Shipping firms to pay for oil spill
• San Francisco Shuts Beaches After Ship Spills Fuel
  

For future articles stay tuned with our Maritime News Discoverer’s Upcoming Links

Here is a photo of the environmental damage;

Kurt Rogers / San Francisco Chronicle

Update: [Continue Reading →]

“At 8:30 am this morning, the Cosco Busan, an 810-foot container ship, collided with the base of one of the towers of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge while the ship was under the control of a Bar Pilot. The crash created a huge gash in the side of the ship and triggered an oil leak that created an environmental mess in San Francisco Bay.” More to come but Telstar Logistics has the full story from a local perspective LINK.

In related news New York’s Ambrose Light experienced an allision earlier this week but this one seems to be part of a trend. I don’t have specifics on this particular incident but the previous ones we’ve heard of were due to failed crash astern tests, a requirement of the port, that were conducted too close to the pilot station. Gothamist has the details on this one LINK.

If you have the inside scoop or would like an experts opinion for your article or post please contact us;

• email: tips (at) gcaptain.com
• phone: 805-456-8644

For a look at the worst case scenario for pilots read our post titled: May 9, 1980, Tampa - Skyway Bridge Disaster

[Continue Reading →]

“This video contains a lot of (very old) pictures on Titanic, and even two short (original) films”

Related Post:

Was the titanic sunk by a small key?

Photo of the Norwegian Dream after encoutering a sucession of 25+ foot waves in 2005 colliding with the ‘Ever Decent’ while transiting the the English Channel in 1999.

The report: [Continue Reading →]