10) What Are You Sinking About?

9) Download YouTube Videos

8 ) Top 10 Rescue at Sea Videos from the U.S. Coast Guard

7) Ship “MSC Napoli” Salvage with Explosives

6) Windoc Incident – Photos, Video & TSB Report

5) Piper Alpha Disaster – 19 Year Anniversary of Tragedy

4) Disaster At Sea – Photos of Maritime Destruction

3) The Wartsila-Sulzer Super Engine

2) Pasha Bulker – Photo Slideshow

1) Emma Maersk – From Shipyard Fire to the World Records

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Meadows said problems also cropped up in “bridge management,” the communication between the pilot, who had years of experience on the bay, and the ship’s officers, who had never navigated the bay in the Cosco Busan. All were supposed to work together and exchange information on how to successfully navigate the harbor.
“While some information was exchanged, perhaps it could be said it wasn’t a full transfer of information. It was enough for the pilot to work with the master and get the ship ready for sea,” Meadows said.

We have previously reported on bridge management also know as Bridge Team Management or BRM.

gCaptain’s BRM related articles;

• Cosco Busan – Bridge Resource Management
• Environmental Catastrophe Possible Averted – M/V Pasha Bulker
  
• Pasha Bulker Incident Report – Nearly Unbelievable
• What Went Wrong Aboard the MV Pasha Bulker? (Telstar Logistics)

The article continues;

The Cosco Busan’s radar “conked out” twice – first before departure and again as the ship was near the lighthouse on Yerba Buena Island.

Cota was forced to rely on an electronic chart display, showing the track of the vessel and its speed, plus charts of San Francisco Bay. Meadows said the pilot told him he was “not familiar” with the electronic system on the Cosco Busan. “They are all different,” Meadows said.

Cota asked Mao Cai Sun, the captain of the Cosco Busan, to point on the display to the center of the bridge span between the Delta and Echo towers on the western side of the Bay Bridge.

“The master pointed that out,” Meadows said. “In fact, several times during the trip. That’s what the pilot was heading for.”

…

“The pilot had to go along with what the master indicated on the electronic chart display was the center of the span,” Meadows said. “That turned out to be the tower instead.”

We have received email asking; Should the vessel have left without a working radar? and Did the second radar work? …unfortunately those are questions we can’t answer. You will have to wait until the NTSB investigation report is complete.

Read the full SF Chronicle article HERE.

Related Maritime Blog Posts;

Pilot Terror by Bob Couttie

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? Simply because it’s an increase focus of incident investigation and watchkeeping.

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.

________

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.

After pouring over the media reports and available facts I’ve decided the story can best be said by our resident maritime experts, gCaptian’s r. Here is MarkL‘s insightful and humorous take:

Observations of a relative indicates that the second gale ( which was more from the south and which coincided with a reasonably high tide) pushed her off the reef and 200-300 yards north, into even shallower water.

This will make life interesting for the salvage effort [being performed by Svitzer Salvage, a division of A.P. Moller-Maersk], as she is now between the shoreline and a line of shallow reefs offshore.

If this effort succeeds in such an exposed spot in winter, it will be one of those quiet epics of salvage we hear so little about in general media. A joke presently being bandied about Newcastle is that the city should forbid salvage, buy the wreck and convert it into ‘apartments with a 360 degree ocean view to sell to idiots from Sydney’.

Ian brings us a Salvage update:

Salvage specialists saying very little except that they are still in “assessment/planning” stage. They confirm that there is a damage to outer hull on starboard side and some seepage of seawater. They also advise that there is a metre gap between outer and inner hull structures and that fuel and lubricants tanks are not in the same area. A specialized salvage tug has arrived from Sydney and another is due in port from Melbourne on Wednesday. It is surmised that fuel etc will be removed prior to any attempt to drag the ship off. It is interesting that the Pasha Bulker is lying roughly parallel to the causeway that connects to Nobbies head and the resulting beach formed against the causeway. The ship is said to “flat bottomed” and firmly lodged on sand rather than adjacent reef, sand that no doubt complicates possible salvage depending on wind and sea over the next few days.

My take? I standby my request for answers regarding the extent to which the human element and incident chain played in the grounding. It is also apparent that modernization of the fleet with advancements like dynamic positioning, real time weather data and redundancy of systems is starting to positively mitigate the damage resulting from a maritime incident. To clarify there are two type of prevention systems; active and passive. The former being systems that require positive effort. In this case did the crew used their satellite comms to discuss the weather patterns with meteorologists or did they simply ignore the port authority’s warnings? Did the captain use his AIS to identify the surrounding ships and call fellow captains via GMDSS to discuss the situation? Did they have access to and use real-time weather data or wait for a 2-dimensional weather fax?

These situations should be a wake up call for the industry to re-evaluate procedure. The titanic saved countless subsequent lives by making the industry think safety and develop SOLAS regulations. The Exxon Valdez made us think about design enhancements most notably double hulls and a series of aviation tragedies linked to human error were the impetus for developing Bridge Resource Management. Each advancement has lead to significant improvements in safety and provided clear, positive results.

Ships Captains have historically needed to be strong in their opinions and self reliant but times are changing. We now live in a small, connected world. The negative result are micro management by marine superintendents detached from the situation and real time monitoring by both regulatory and news organizations. The positive results? Most mariners would say there are few, but why?

In a world where experts and amateurs can work together to write encyclopedias and master mariners from Australia can visit gCaptain to discuss topics with mariners thousands of miles away (in real time!) I question that self-reliance is still the most important trait for a ship’s master. Instead captains need to embrace technology and work on their social skills. They need to use real time monitoring to understand conditions and communication technology to call field experts

The phone number of the man who’s the foremost expert on heavy weather anchoring needs to be posted on every bridge and then conferenced in with the local pilot and a meteorologist, each sharing information on same computer screen. Then the ship’s master should be able to log-on to a conference call with the nearby captains.

Decisiveness and the ability to make the final decision, however, can not change. A captain needs to be able to make decisions even when contrary to expert opinion without fear of jail time. He also needs support and his crew needs passive safety measures. The reason an environmental catastrophe has not occurred in Newcastle is the same reason the 100% of the passengers were able to abandon the “Empress of the North”, the ship’s double hull, an expensive but invaluable passive feature.

Finally I would like to say that without internet connections, bridge technology and investment in ideas little of this can happen. Company’s must take action at a level surpassing that of master mariners and encourage advancement of ideas.

We have the opportunity to increase the scope of Bridge Team Management beyond the bridge and if we do so the savings in life and the environment will easily surpass the investment.

For more of gCaptain’s Coverage of the Pasha Bulker click HERE.

John Konrad is a USCG licensed Master Mariner of Unlimited Tonnage currently working as Chief Mate aboard a 865′ ship in the Gulf of Mexico. Since graduating from SUNY Maritime College he has sailed in all 4 of the worlds oceans and reports from his ship via satellite.

Related Links:

• Example of using technology & ideas to overt crisis.
• A very funny post about a shipping company’s response to a collision.
• A story about Marine Salvage
• Discussion on the criminalization of the Master Mariner

Pasha Bulker Links:

• Newcastle ‘to lose 2m tonnes in coal’
  
• Newcaste Port CEO Question and Answer
• Newcastle Coal Port Resumes `Limited’ Operations
• Shifting the ship will be trial-and-error

UPDATE: A new gCaptain post to this story has been written – Pasha Bulker Incident Report – Nearly Unbelievable