Marine

Citation

(2005), "Marine", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 14 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2005.07314dac.001

Marine

19 August 2004

Robert Y. Love (USA)

An attorney for the pilot of tug Robert Y. Love that hit the Interstate 40 bridge causing a collapse that killed 14 people disagrees with the findings from a Coast Guard investigation. Joel Wohlgemuth has disputed the Coast Guard report that says tug pilot William Joe Dedmon suffered from lack of sleep on 26 May 2002, the day his tug drifted off course in the Arkansas River and two barges it was pushing struck a bridge pier. The Coast Guard report says Dedmon and his employers, Vicksburg, Miss.-based Magnolia Marine Transport Co., violated statutes that dictate the number of hours an employee can work in a day. “What we found is that the company allowed the captain to work more than 12 hours in a 24-hour period, which is a violation of federal law,” Coast Guard Commander David Stalford said yesterday. Dedmon and his employers could both face fines. Wohlgemuth argued that physicians said Dedmon suffered a blackout as a result of a heart condition, not lack of sleep. “Captain Dedmon has never been notified at any time that he’s violated these laws and that he’s subject to any type of civil enforcement proceeding,” Wohlgemuth said. “In fact, he has not violated any laws.” Federal investigators previously reported that Dedmon slept only ten hours in the two days before taking control of Robert Y. Love. The impact collapsed about 500 feet of the bridge. Several vehicles plummeted into the river below. The victims included an Arkansas family and people from Oregon, Texas, Utah and Oklahoma. Dedmon voluntarily surrendered his pilot’s license and has not worked since the accident, Wohlgemuth said. He told the NTSB investigators several days later that he only remembered waking up and suddenly seeing unaware motorists plunge one after another into the Arkansas River. Medical evidence in an NTSB report indicated that Dedmon suffered from coronary disease and had a cardioverter defibrillator implanted in his chest. He tested negative for drugs. Dedmon, Magnolia Marine and Ergon Inc., Magnolia’s parent company, settled lawsuits with the victims’ families, survivors and the state of Oklahoma. Amounts of the settlements were not disclosed. State transportation officials estimated that the bridge collapse cost Oklahoma taxpayers close to $30 million in repairs and lost revenues.

23 August 2004Sarani (India)

Fishing vessel Sarani (127 gt, built 1990), belonging to a Chennai-based company and operating from here, capsized in the sand heads area of the Bay of Bengal, about 70-80 nautical miles south of Haldia around midnight on Thursday (19 August). According to reports, 12 out of the 13-crew members were missing, while one was picked up by another fishing vessel hours after the accident. The Coast Guard with one of its vessels and two helicopters, a vessel belonging to the Reliance Company and 20 trawlers were conducting a search and rescue operation. The sea was rough and the visibility was poor, it was reported. Sarani, owned by the Chennai-based Saravanan Marine Products Pvt. Ltd was operating from here. It left here on 9 August for fishing in the sea off the Orissa coast and dropped anchor on Thursday. At around 23:30, local time, there was a big storm with winds of high velocity leading to the capsize of the vessel. The news about the accident was conveyed by Pari to the trawlers in Paradip port, who in turn informed the Managing Director of the company.

21 September 2004High Aim 6 (Indonesia)

The mystery of what happened aboard Taiwanese fishing vessel High Aim 6 found floating abandoned with tonnes of rotting fish on board may never be known, with the vessel destined for a West Australian scrap heap. The owners of High Aim 6 reported it missing in mid-December 2002, several days after the last contact with the captain. The US Coast Guard searched for the 24 metre fishing vessel but failed to find it. The closest they got was a brief sighting of one life raft. The whereabouts of the vessel remained a mystery until it was spotted steaming, crewless, towards the Western Australia coast on 4 January 2003. The vessel has been docked in Broome since 10 January last year but international efforts to solve the mystery of what happened to its vanished crew have failed. Nothing has been heard from High Aim 6’s Taiwanese captain, engineer and ten Indonesian crew since December 2002, when the vessel was near the Marshall Islands, halfway between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii. The vessel will now be junked and taken to Broome tip. Broome Port Authority chief executive officer Stefan Frodsham said “We’ll be very happy to see it go. As far as we’re concerned it has overstayed its welcome.” Mr Frodsham said “its been a worry for us because of the environmental risks It poses, and also because it does represent a potential marine hazard.” “We’ve got a cyclone season coming up and if it did break away from its moorings, it could cause havoc.” Hopes that the vessel would live on as an underwater tourist attraction for divers, or a fish habitat, were scuppered when authorities concluded that they could not guarantee that once sunk, High Aim 6 would stay sunk. “Normally these sort of fishing vessels are burnt, but in this case that wasn’t appropriate because of its construction,” Mr Frodsham said. “So we then spent some time looking at sinking it as an artificial reef, but again that was ruled out because nobody could guarantee that the vessel would stay sunk because of its naturally buoyant hull”. Mr Frodsham said there were few alternatives, but when it was noticed last week that hull deterioration had led to a diesel fuel leak from the vessel, its fate was sealed. “It became clear that we needed to move quickly to prevent any risk to the environment,” he said. “There’s no facility in the region capable of pulling it out of the water so that left us the only option of breaking it up and hauling it to the tip.”

28 September 2004Number One (St Vincent and Grenadines)

A French appeal court has reduced the sentences pronounced against the owners, manager and classification society of general cargo Number One, which sank with its master and ten other members of its 18-man crew off the coast of Sri Lanka in June 1999. The owners and manager of the vessel have escaped the prison sentence to which they were originally sentenced for manslaughter in March 2003, while Japanese classification society Nippon Kaiji Kyokai has had the fine imposed on it for its part in the disaster reduced from €225,000 to €200,000. Industrialist brothers Raoul and Andre Spitzer had been sentenced to three years in prison, of which two were suspended, and shipping consultant Jean Le Coz, who acted as manager of Number One, to three years suspended for 18 months. At the appeal court hearing last June at Rennes in Brittany the prosecutor called for unsuspended prison sentences for the two brothers and the consultant, all in their late 60s or early 70s. However, giving its judgment last week, the court opted to give them lighter fully suspended sentences. The Spitzer brothers were given one-year suspended sentences while Le Coz received an 18-month suspended sentence. The appeal court found that the loss of the vessel was due to the “poor state of the ship and a series of human errors.” It noted that the 24-years-old vessel, described by the prosecutor in the original court case as a “floating wreck”, had been letting in water and experiencing increasingly severe corrosion at the time of the sinking. It said that Le Coz, who acted as adviser to the brothers for the purchase of the vessel, must have been aware of the vessel’s condition and had been informed that it was not watertight. As for class NK, the court said that it had been aware of the grave corrosion which the vessel had been experiencing and the reticence of its owners to carry out necessary repairs. The Spitzer brothers claimed that they had acted for an absent partner in acquiring Number One for US$425,000 in October, 1998, while Le Coz argued that he had recommended acquisition of the vessel on the basis of a report which gave no indication that there were rust holes in its hull. Number One, which was carrying a cargo of timber from Malaysia to India, sank in a monsoon storm after fighting a losing battle against flooding and engine and pump breakdowns 160 miles off the Sri Lankan coast. Only seven of its 18-man Senegalese-Ukrainian crew survived after boarding a life raft which was subsequently spotted by a passing vessel. Four Senegalese crew members, six Ukrainians and the French master lost their lives. The case came to court in France after the family of the deceased master, Captain Jacques Richardeau, who was 63 at the time of the sinking, started legal proceedings. Questions were raised, however, about his conduct at both the original and appeal court hearings. It was claimed in June that he had failed to slow the vessel and seek assistance when it got into difficulty and that he had failed to put covers over its cargo holds.

22 November 2004Algeria

The body of the ninth victim of the general cargo Bechar shipwreck was recovered yesterday and transferred to El-Alia mortuary for its identification. Thus, the number of the bodies recovered since last Saturday (13 November) near Algiers port, reached nine victims whereas seven sailors are still missing, according to the list released by the CNAN. According to the person in charge of communication at the general direction for civil defence in Algiers, Bakhti Sofiane, the searching operations have not stopped since the disaster. The same person said “two rescue teams of ten divers are taking turns to search for the missing bodies.” Moreover, Bakhti declared, “a diving team is assisting CNAN technical team for the towing of bulk Batna offshore.”