Trump’s Return to OPEC Politics Muddies Oil Talks Next Month
US President Donald Trump has raised the stakes for a meeting of an OPEC+ ministerial panel next month, with his call for the group to lower oil prices.
Yet another containership mishap was caught on video over the weekend and it has already racked up tens of thousands of views online in just a few days.
This latest incident occurred on Saturday, March 24, at the Port of Callao in Peru and involved the inbound Laura Maersk, which collided with the stern of the moored MSC Shuba B. You can see the incident in the video below:
It is hard to tell from the video above exactly what happened, but a look at an AIS replay of the incident helps provide some clarity about how the accident went down. As you can see from the replay below, the Laura Maersk was maneuvering into port with the help of three tugs when she struck the stern of the moored MSC vessel.
No major damage or pollution has been reported as a result of the incident and ship tracking data on Monday showed that the Laura Maersk has since departed the Port of Callao, as has the MSC Shuba B.
Although this latest incident was far less severe than (and completely unrelated to) other accidents we have reported on in recent weeks, it is never-the-less the latest on the list of what seems to be high-profile accidents involving large containerships or, to be more specific, large Maersk containerships.
The string of accidents we’re referring to started in early March when more than 70 shipping containers were lost from a Maersk ship during a storm off the U.S. East Coast (it was later reported that one of the containers lost at sea was carrying 5,900 pounds of sulfuric acid).
Of course then was the Maersk Honam incident (still ongoing), which caught fire in the Arabian Sea on March 6, killing five people and resulting in the loss of what is sure to be a few thousand shipping containers.
On March 16, another fire was reported in a below-deck container aboard the Maersk Kensington, which is operated to the U.S.-flag arm of Maersk Line, as the ship was underway in the Gulf of Aden. Thankfully that fire was contained and the ship made it back to port safely.
Lastly, a dramatic collision last Monday involving two containerships at Pakistan’s port of Karachi was caught on video which ended up going viral. In that incident, the Hapag-Lloyd container ship Tolten caused dozens of containers to fall overboard or become damaged when it sideswiped a moored MSC ship while mooring.
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