Hopefully, the two halves of the severed ship remaining afloat will be salved and ought to provide plenty of useful forensic evidence about this casualty, while the limited conflagration on the larger ship ought also to provide information on why such a fire started. The industry needs to know more about the chains of events that caused such casualties, with so much investment (and seafarers’ lives) at stake on the oceans of the world.
One possible line of inquiry, which coincidentally might involve both these very separate accidents, could involve the weight and contents of containers, which has long been a matter of contention throughout the industry. The limited ability to verify container weights has been a concern, virtually as long as these ubiquitous boxes have been carried by sea, while imprecision of the descriptions of contents, notably when this involves hazardous cargo, has long been a scandal and has contributed to the loss and serious damage of a worrying list of ships.
It might seem difficult to believe that overweight boxes might have contributed to a very large ship breaking in half, except that such has been identified before, most notably after the structural failure that led to the loss of the MSC Napoli in 2007. In this case, the accident investigators endeavoured to weigh all the boxes that were recovered from the beached wreck and a substantial number of these were found to be in excess of the manifested weight, which of course was used to plan the stow.
And while the Napoli was a much smaller ship (albeit a post-Panamax) than the MOL Comfort, containership Masters have become quite accustomed to finding substantial discrepancies between the weight that is “stated” to be aboard their vessels and the weight as indicated from their draught and own calculations. A recent report told of a discrepancy of no less than 6,000 tonnes, aboard a large containership, which seemed to indicate something of a cavalier attitude to the need to provide accurate weights.
BIMCO, in conjunction with its partner organisations, has been working hard to ensure that both weights and contents are subjected to a greater degree of precision, notably at the IMO, as members know exactly what is at stake when there is structural failure, stability problems or indeed a fire at sea caused by the ignition of hazardous goods. And while it will doubtless take some time to discover the origins of these two very different accidents, the fact that they have happened at all ought to provide some necessary emphasis to those concerned with container cargo declarations. Five year old containerships ought not to be breaking in half any more than one of the biggest ships in the world should be menaced by fire. Metallurgy, strength of materials and design parameters will all be scrutinised in the case of the Comfort, but the weight of the boxes as shipped, will surely be one important track for the investigators to follow.