Read Seaways online at http://www.nautinst.org/seaways May 2019 | Seaways | 29
Conferences
Reporting back from conferences, seminars and discussions across the maritime
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ISU ASSOCIATES DAY
Î The International Salvage Union’s Associates’
Day always provides an interesting overview of
the major issues concerning the salvage
industry and the ways in which response is
evolving. This year concentrated on the issues
surrounding fire and recovery on ultra large
container ships. Fire has become a familiar
problem in the sector in recent years.
An intensive look at the positioning of the
industry last year has shown significant changes
on the supply side, said ISU President Charo Coll
in her opening speech. ‘We are unlikely to ever
see the return of the days of 100 LOF contracts
per year – we are seeing an average of about
40 to 50 now.’ Instead, salvors find themselves
working in a new social paradigm in which
protection of the environment and good
husbandry of resources is essential. Coll
emphasised that this represents a repositioning
rather than radical change; core salvage services
are still at the heart of the business, she said.
The ISU’s annual pollution survey also
reflected these changes. While in previous years
it was focused on oil cargoes, the scope has
now been widened to include other potential
pollutants including containers. Over the course
of 2018, ISU members provided services that
prevented pollution from an estimated 60,000
teu (at an average 15 tonnes per container, that
amounts to 898,100 tonnes overall), up from
45,600 teu in 2017. Over the past five years, the
trend has been for a clear increase in potential
pollution from containers.
Nicky Cariglia, Senior Technical Advisor at
ITOPF, continued the theme with a look at the
changing nature of ITOPF’s operations – starting
with the fact that tanker owners only represent
half of the current membership. Today, the
organisation aims to represent the shipping
industry as a whole, providing impartial
technical advice in a casualty situation.
Increasingly, responders are on site for much
longer – it may take as much as three weeks of
clean-up operations to deal with a 2,000 litre
spill. The ability to detect pollutants at smaller
and smaller levels is blurring how long an
insurer is responsible and to what extent, she
said. The more salvors get involved in
environmental response, the more they will
need to know about these areas.
While the public perception of pollution
prevention is still focused on crude oil, ‘In many
years of casualty response I’ve never done a
case involving crude oil – it’s all been bunker
fuels,’ Cariglia said. ‘Everyone is still thinking in
terms of a Deepwater Horizon spill, whereas
smaller spills are much more likely, and
potentially almost as hard to deal with – and
still very expensive!’ However, it is only a matter
of time before pollution from what is contained
in boxes has a major impact, she believes. ‘We
do have to worry about container ships. The
number of incidents has not increased, but the
average size of the vessel we are attending has.
No-one is aware of what is being transported,
as manifests are often handwritten and
incomplete, leaving shipowners, crew and
potential salvors unaware of the hazards with
which they may be dealing.’container ship? Once the crew have lost control,
they have to look to their own safety, and then
the salvors come in.’ Moreover, locating the
accommodation further forward, as is the
practice on most ULCCs, puts the crew closer
to the IMDG zone, as these goods are usually
loaded near the bow.
Few ports of refuge can take vessels this size,
so fires must be fought at sea. If, as in the case
of MOL Comfort, the vessel splits in two, there is
no fireproof bulkhead to stop the spread of
flames. This presents yet another problem for
salvors, since ‘as a responder, after the lives of
the crew, you want to maximise salved value’.
So what’s the solution? Sloane proposed
filling a whole bay with sacrificial containers
filled with fire-resistant material, which would
act as a portable firebreak. This could be easily
retrofitted, and could be moved around the
vessel depending on the composition of the
cargo, or be positioned to provide extra
protection to accommodation or engineering.
The session concluded with a presentation
from Gert-Jan Langerrak from RelyOnNutec
(previously Falke), specialists in fire training and
firefighting. He, too, emphasised the increased
time commitment needed for response work,
saying ‘we used to fight fires for days or weeks- now it might be months’. He took us through
the various stages of response to a container
fire in a presentation backed up by dramatic live
footage. Like Nick Sloane, he underlined the
extreme difficulty of fighting a fire for ships’
normal crew, emphasising that while fire
conditions may be latent for up to half a day,
‘once the fire has started you have 10 minutes
to contain it before the fire spreads to
containers above and below.’ In this situation,
containing the fire is more important than
extinguishing it – and survival is always
paramount. That may mean spraying water to
cool surrounding containers. In some places,
authorities will not allow vessels to empty
runoff from this into the ocean. It is important
to find a solution to this, as it is not practical to
keep using tankers to take runoff, while leaving
water on board is likely to affect stability.
Lucy Budd
It is only a matter of
time before pollution from
what is contained in boxes
has a major impact.
Some of the potential consequences were
looked at in the sessions after lunch, beginning
with a detailed study of post-salvage clean-up
of Maersk Honam from Smit Salvage director
Richard Janssen. The vessel caught fire while en
route from Singapore to Suez, and was
subsequently towed into Jebel Ali. A major
challenge once the initial salvage had been
completed was the removal of some 27,000
tonnes of fire-damaged containers. Salvors were
dealing with many unknowns, including the
condition and structural integrity of the
containers. Nobody knew what, if anything, had
been fumigated, or the risks to the larger public,
so storage and disposal were a major concern.
However, while clean-up is a massive job, it can
be managed more like a conventional project
than the initial LOF response, Janssen said.
While there are unknowns, to some extent you
can plan for them.
The conference chair suggested that the
pattern of events in the removal of containers
from a damaged ship is becoming sufficiently
familiar that we might be able to present
authorities with a roadmap saying ‘this is what
will happen’. Janssen agreed that we have many
of the elements of such a roadmap in place, but
emphasised that local regulations will differ, in
addition to individual unknowns in each case.
Further comment on the topic came from
Capt Nick Sloane FNI, who said the increasing
size of vessels means that intervention in the
case of disaster will increasingly have to come
from specialists. ‘Ships are getting bigger, but
crews are getting smaller,’ he pointed out. ‘Can a
crew of 14 people fight a fire on an 18,000 teu