A Long, Rough Voyage To The Bottom
By Stan Cox
06 April, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Late on the night of December 22, 2001, a mammoth merchant vessel, the Christopher , was caught in a North Atlantic storm. Captain Deepak Gulati radioed to shore that his ship was “taking a beating” from fifteen-meter waves but otherwise was in good shape. On that or a later call, he said the hatch cover closest to the ship's bow had become dislodged. That was his final transmission.
It is hard to believe that a ship the length of three football fields could have gone from fully afloat to fully submerged in as little as five minutes, but that may well have been how it happened. The search was called off on Christmas Day. The Christopher 's twenty-seven crew members—citizens of Ukraine, the Philippines, and India—were all dead.
Deepak Gulati was my brother-in-law. A resident of Mumbai, he had been taking the Greek-owned, Cyprus-flagged, coal-laden bulk carrier from Puerto Bolívar, Colombia to a steelworks in the north of England when, west of the Azores, he and his crew ran into the storm that ended their lives. But it was not an entire natural tragedy. For decades, the world of merchant shipping has been falling victim to two other overpowering forces: breakneck growth in the volume of trade and ruthless cost-cutting by shipping-company owners.
The boom years of the 1990s and early 2000s pushed the world's sea-transport system to its limits. By early 2008, ships and crews were “being driven harder than anyone can remember.” As one result, the number of “major, serious, or partial losses” of ships had shot up by 270 percent since 1998. Overall, the decade from 1996 to 2005 saw 420 fatal sinkings, groundings, collisions, and other wrecks of cargo vessels, resulting in 2500 deaths.
Then, in late 2008, thousands of ships were suddenly idled when the global economic crisis struck. But that did not mean that industry workers got a breather. Cost-cutting meant continued reductions in crew sizes and turnaround times in port, with rushed loading and maintenance and widespread seafarer exhaustion as inevitable results. By mid-2009, the number of ships detained by Asian port authorities for safety or labor violations had begun rising, after years of decline.
Today, cargo ships continue to go down with grim frequency. Late last year, three bulk carriers —the Hong Wei , the Nasco Diamond , and the Jian Fu Star —sank off the southeastern coast of Asia, all within about a month. All three flew the Panamanian flag and all were carrying nickel ore from Indonesian mines to China for use in steelmaking. A total of forty-four crewmembers, all Chinese, lost their lives.
The terrible convergence of forces that sank the Christopher in 2001 will never be fully sorted out. In fact, the last bulk-carrier loss on the open seas to be subjected to thorough investigation was that of the UK-owned Derbyshire , which sank way back in 1980 in the North Pacific. Its entire crew of forty-four, all British citizens, perished. It took fourteen years of pressure from the British public before a remote-camera search and investigation were finally done.
Since 1980, ships, crews, and flags engaged in dry bulk shipping have been shifted almost entirely from the wealthy nations of Europe and North America to low-wage countries. Owners play shells games with their ships, constantly changing the countries of registrations and nominal ownership and acquiring crews as cheaply as possible through often shadowy manning agencies. When today's rootless ships sink, taking faceless crews to the bottom with them, full investigations simply don't happen.
The open ocean takes a toll on ships, and many stay at sea beyond a safe age. Based on the Derbyshire investigation and other studies, industry experts believe that the most common scenario in bulk-carrier sinkings goes like this : In rough seas, water crashes over the ship's bow, and a possibly faulty hatch cover on the foremost cargo hold is dislodged to the point that seawater is able to pour into the hold. Ore or coal in the hold mixes with the water to form a highly dense slurry that, with the ship's motion, sloshes with enough force to break the bulkhead between the first and second holds—a structure that has already been weakened by corrosion. Should that happen, according to the International Maritime Organization, “progressive flooding could rapidly occur throughout the length of the ship and the vessel would sink in a matter of minutes.”
International ship-safety standards are codified in the Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS). Over the past century, SOLAS has been repeatedly amended to keep pace with new hazards and new potential solutions. Resolutions on improved hatch covers, double-skin hulls, hull coatings, stronger frames, water-ingress alarms, better cargo-loading procedures, and more frequent, thorough, and consistent inspections by port authorities all have been passed. Some measures apply to new ship construction, some to existing ships; some apply only to the largest bulk carriers, others to all; some are mandatory, other are only recommendations or reminders.
The selection of which measures to mandate, which to recommend, and which to set aside has been based on a procedure called “ formal safety assessment ” carried out by a group of industry experts. If such an analysis indicates that for a given improvement, the cost will exceed $3 million per life saved, that improvement is generally considered too expensive.
Such cold calculations are considered necessary in order to achieve consensus in the shipping industry. But they also mean that technologies or regulations that might well have kept the Christopher , the Hong Wei , the Nasco Diamond , the Jian Fu Star , and so many other lost cargo ships afloat will not be adopted. If decades of experience should have taught us anything, it's that in the search for a way to put an end to shipping tragedies, the profit and loss columns of the global marketplace hold no answers.
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Stan Cox is a writer and a plant breeder at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, USA. His most recent book is “ Losing Our Cool : Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World.” An extended version of this story ran first in the print edition of Counterpunch. Read it at ColdType.net to see the larger story about death in the world cargo trade.
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