This weeks incident photo comes to us via cargolaw.com’s Photo Gallery of Cargo Loss.  The photos above taken at The Port of Auckland show that the rails of M/V Vega Gotland are bent.  So what happened? Has someone or something gone overboard? 

Yes – something to be precise! While at The Port of Auckland, Maersk Container MWCU5747674 fell off the Vega Gotland and into the water when the container next to it was lifted with one twist lock still locked.

More on this incident can be found at Cargo Law HERE.

Yesterday the 450ft Russian flagged vessel, Sinegorsk, lost 1,500 tonnes of timber in a major shipping lane of the English Channel.  The cargo was lost 14 miles off Newhaven, East Sussex, at 0815 GMT and it is now being reported that the wood has spread across eight miles with the main bulk of it is 12 miles south of Rye, East Sussex.  The vessel has since been escorted to Southampton were it was anchored while damage to the ship was assessed and the remaining cargo secured.

The time and location predicted for the drifting timber to was ashore is still uncertain.  Now let’s take a look at some video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The law of general average is a legal principle of maritime law according to which all parties in a sea venture proportionally share any losses resulting from a voluntary sacrifice of part of the ship or cargo to save the whole in an emergency.In the exigencies of hazards faced at sea, crewmembers often have precious little time in which to determine precisely whose cargo they are jettisoning. Thus, to avoid quarreling that could waste valuable time, there arose the equitable practice whereby all the merchants whose cargo was on board would be called on to contribute a portion, based upon a share or percentage, to the merchant or merchants whose goods had been tossed overboard to avert imminent peril.

Source: Wikipedia