If you’re going to make your profits by sending massive container ships darting around the world, you need to make sure you do it safely.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking more than $100 million from the two corporations that owned and operated the container ship that destroyed Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge in March.The two companies, Grace Ocean Private Limited and Synergy Marine Private Limited, “sent an ill-prepared crew on an abjectly unseaworthy vessel to navigate the United States’ waterways,” the suit reads. “They did so to reap the benefit of conducting business in American ports. Yet they cut corners in ways that risked lives and infrastructure.”
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In the civil lawsuit, the Justice Department goes into detail about how failures on the ship led to the disastrous collision and slams the two companies for not reporting issues with the ship.
“This tragedy was entirely avoidable,” the department wrote, adding that “none of the four tools that might have averted disaster—the rudder, the propeller, the anchor, or the bow thruster—was working or operating as it should have been.”
Jeezus. That’s like driving on the freeway when your steering wheel and brakes don’t work.
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10 responses to “An abjectly unseaworthy vessel”
The rudder wasn’t working correctly? The rudder?
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Well, I don’t know about Mary and Joseph, but if Jesus was there he would probably jump off the stern, repair the rudder, and then maybe walk off across the water in search of a hamburger.
I know right? “Oh just the rudder – we’ll be fine, no worries.”
Ships like the Dali should have two main steering motors, with both running in harbour and emergencies. Bearing in mind the rudder is the size of a tennis court, it takes very powerful motors to steer. Below 5 knots, even the most sophisticated rudder will not work, as it needs a flow of water around it. Tugs are usually kept secured until the ship builds up enough speed to steer (it is very scary when steering fails…).
Before the impact with the bridge, the Dali lost power (hence the blackout), which would have knocked out the steering. Even if the generators started up, it would have taken a minute to turn the motors back on.
I did wonder why the anchors were not let go; if they were faulty, then I’m surprised the USCG did not arrest the ship before sailing (the captain has to make a legal declaration that the ship is seaworthy before and whilst in US waters), recorded in the log books.
Bow thrusters only work at walking speed, and would not have pushed the ship away from the bridge at the speed they were doing. And yes, it would have failed to work without the generators.
There are far too many deathtraps on the seas, and somehow they get away with it. It has been ever thus: cheaper ships, cheaper crews and corners cut means more profit. And damn the consequences…
You would be amazed what is sailing around out there.
Decades back there was a cargo ship plying the waters around the U.S south-eastern seaboard. This ship carried sulfur. It had a bunch of holds, and one of the holds was on fire, because, you know, sulfur burns, and these kind of fires can be hard to extinguish, so they just kept sailing the ship with the hold on fire.
It would put into port with the fire going, take on more cargo, and put out to sea with the fire still going. They kept sailing it like that until finally one day it put out to sea and vanished.
People blamed the disappearance on the Bermuda Triangle.
Very informative; thank you Freeminder and Steven.
I’m guessing that would have been the Marine Sulphur Queen? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Marine_Sulphur_Queen
I remember when I was a kid I went through a Bermuda Triangle/Chariots of the Gods phase. I’m glad I grew or learned my way out of it, though the fact that I’ve remembered the name of the ship shows what an impression the Bermuda Triangle literature made on impressionable me. An early lesson in skepticism, and my first secular encounter with the precept “Never let a prosaic truth get in the way of selling a sensational story.” The penny still hadn’t dropped completely: my childhood self was still struggling with the implications that arose from the seemingly innocent hymn “God sees the little sparrow fall.” The settlement of that internal debate, and its consequences for my religious faith, or final lack thereof, was still some years off. But this was a good first taste of the ever-present potential for conflict between different sources/stories/facts/worldviews/agendas.
Pre-internet bullshit. Who would have guessed? There’s probably bullshit written on clay tablets in cuneiform, as well as bullshit cave paintings.
I found the actual document detailing the lawsuit via a link in a Washington Post article: PDF file, 53 pages.
If that is a bit much, here is an article from Associated Press with a bit more detail.
I recall years ago seeing photographs of an ocean going freighter that had so much corrosion around the bow’s outer hull that it looked like lacework with hand sized holes. Failures of electrical systems resulting in engine failures, loss of steering, thrusters and anchors are really common. We’ve had such a scandal here in New Zealand with both of the companies operating Cook Strait ferry services suffering serious incidents.
Well, that’s the way unfettered capitalism works – following in the footsteps of Thatcher & Reagan and their embrace of neo-liberal dogma as set out by such as Hayek & Friedman, the ideologically-driven ‘bonfire of regulations’ has been pushed by mysteriously funded think-tanks and political parties that favour oligarchical rule, and bugger everybody else, particularly workers (who can only be made to work by punitive measures) and ‘experts’, bugger nature, slap inflammable cladding on tower-blocks and fix things to make it difficult or impossible to hold anyone to account… It is this that has led to the extraordinary gap between the ‘lower classes’ and the filthy rich and the widespread mistrust of politics that is now tearing democracies apart.