There can be no surprise at the guilty verdict in the manslaughter trial of the master of the container vessel Solong, who was alone on the bridge on a foggy morning in March of last year when the ship ploughed into the tanker Stena Immaculate, anchored off the Humber.
One of the container ship’s crewmembers, Mark Angelo Pernic, perished in the resultant conflagration as the tanker’s cargo of aviation fuel ignited.
The trial found that the 59 year-old Russian master was guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence and awaits sentence. He has been in custody since he was charged, shortly after being brought ashore.
We should thus postpone any references to this trial, except that for years, professionals have warned about precisely this sort of accident. Goodness knows, there have been any number of what we might term rehearsals, with ships colliding and grounding, along with huge numbers of near misses.
Accident investigators have cited complacency, distraction, procedures being ignored, fatigue, equipment and bridge design, along with the fixation on schedule keeping and the remorseless reduction in crewmembers.
A containership running into a loaded tanker could have resulted in forty seafarers losing their lives, and there have been exactly such tragedies in the past.
There are little ships each with a master and mate, keeping six-hour watches, week after week, because that is what is on offer.
Who remembers some of the signposts along this road?
There were a lot of chuckles from laymen when that small feeder with its slumbering watchkeeper nearly hit the pretty holiday home on the Norwegian fjord last year. There were still longer memories of the feeder that brought silliness and hundreds of pairs of trainers to the Scilly Isles, after it failed to alter course when it should have done.
There are hard-pressed ships with exhausted lone watchkeepers sitting in their posture-perfect chairs, as their ships graunched onto the rocks of the Minch in Ireland, the European coasts and the banks around the North Sea. There are little ships each with a master and mate, keeping six-hour watches, week after week, because that is what is on offer.
There are also the inexplicable tragedies in the Heligoland Bight, when the rules of the road were ignored; the cruise ship officer of the watch desperately trying to complete the garbage reporting form, as his vessel closed a containership off the Thames; routine neglect of SMS, because there were just not enough folk on board hard-run ships to keep them legal, with an after-dark bridge lookout.
We have alarms turned off because they were too much of a nuisance, along with all the other false alerts from all the sophisticated gear, which was not so clever, after all.
Routine creativity in hours of work/rest reporting merely added to the carnage.
Practical answers and changes to the priorities and the way we operate ships are needed.
So is it really a great idea to have the master of a sizeable ship, who is the go-to person as soon as she is alongside, with all the well-rested people demanding his or her attention, having to keep regular watches?
These feeders are not exactly tiddlers. A couple of generations ago, ships of those dimensions would be ocean-going, with a crew of fifty and upwards.
Do we learn anything from these recurring accidents, well-documented by diligent investigators, with their findings helpfully promulgated to the industry? Certainly, their reports are noted down and assertions made about action to prevent recurrence by the affected parties, except that there is no real change in the incidence of such accidents, suggesting that something rather deeper and more radical needs to be done.
Nobody is really addressing the issue of manning levels, citing the prohibitive costs of adequate numbers. The “go-on, stop-on” remorseless schedules' effect upon the human beings who operate these ships might have been solemnly noted. They might be appropriately regretted for their effects on recruitment, retention, mental health and the like, but are never really confronted.
Flag states, which compete, won’t do anything, as there is always some funny flag that will facilitate short cuts. We could take a closer link between seaworthiness and the frailty of human beings and refuse to see liabilities limited more readily. Would that be so complicated? We do not need more regulations, tick-boxes, or reporting.
Practical answers and changes to the priorities and the way we operate ships are needed. The tragedy last March was a really nasty incident and a “red card” warning that changes are overdue. Next time, it could be a chemical tanker slamming into the side of a cruise ship, a scenario that is not improbable.
But as the cynics have observed for years, the shippers screw the charterers, the charterers screw the owners, and the owners screw the crew. But we, the ultimate customers, could pay just a little more for the stuff that the ships carry for us.
Screw that for an idea.