MOL Comfort Report Coming Soon -ClassNK

MOL Comfort showing severe hogging on June 17, 2013.

Classification society ClassNK says the investigation report into the 2013 MOL Comfort casualty in the Indian Ocean will be released this month.

The MOL Comfort broke up, caught fire and sank over three-week period in June and July of 2013 while the ship was underway the Indian Ocean with over 7,000 TEU’s. The incident is considered the worst containership loss in history.

Following the incident, ClassNK established the Investigative Panel on Large Containership Safety comprised of shipbuilding experts, shipowners and academic institutions in order to determine what may have caused the disaster and examine the safety of larger containership structure. ClassNK says that the panel has now met six times over the course of the investigation and is currently consolidating its findings into a report, which it expects to release by the end of September.

An initial report into the disaster by the Committee on Large Container Ship Safety, which was established by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, released an interim report into the disaster revealing that the investigation committee was unable to replicate the disaster and additional simulations would need to be carried out in order to determine what specifically went wrong.

ClassNK says the final report will be released on its website in both English and Japanese once it becomes available.