Money for nothing

Although I disagree with some of the specifics of the Modi government’s initiatives on shipping, I happily concede that the newfound focus on Indian ports, shipping, inland waterways and maritime legislation was something that was long overdue. It is early days yet and many of these plans will take years to bear fruit; nonetheless, a beginning has been made.

Having said that, I can only express my extreme dismay at a report that appeared in the middle of this month that said that the Indian Shipping ministry was planning to arrange bank loans and make each cadet going out to sea pay, to shipping companies, three hundred thousand rupees for on-board training. This will apply, we are told, to about 4000 cadets who graduated in the last three years and who did not secure on-board training slots. It is not clear to me whether this will also apply to all future graduates.

The report comes in a reputed newspaper, is written by a well-known shipping journalist and quotes government sources. Nonetheless, I hope the report is not true. And if it is, I wonder who in the government thought up this hare-brained scheme first.

A spokesman from the Ministry is quoted as saying, “The Rs. 3 lakh per cadet grant will be given to the ship owners who train cadets and will be disbursed at the rate of Rs. 1 lakh for each semester backed by a tripartite agreement between the Directorate General of Shipping and MASSA and FOSMA.”  (The acronyms are industry bodies of shipowners, managers, agents etc. I)

The intention is probably noble. Thousands of pre-sea trained cadets are without shipboard training slots in the country, critically needed to complete their sea time for their competency certificates. These numbers are increasing every day. No training slot is available today unless you pay people in shipping companies- through touts- or if the cadet knows somebody in shipping really well. The only exception to this is if the youngster undergoes pre-sea training from an institute run by a reputed management company; those usually absorb their trainees on their own ships.

Yes, the intention is probably good- but as they say, the road to hell is paved with those. This solution to the problem is ill advised and ill thought. If pursued, it will be a disaster.

 Forget the fact that this plan directly seeks to institutionalise corruption. The three lakhs each student will pay a company is suspiciously close to the corrupt ‘market rate’ paid for an on-board training slot today. Forget even the fact that this plan does nothing to address the real issues of poor calibre of intake, mis-selling of a career at sea, poor training and poor motivation from all involved in the exercise. Forget the fact that students are already taking loans to cover their training and the euphemistically named ‘placement fee.’ 

Ignoring all that, two big financial reasons why this plan will not work: One, nothing changes for a trainee. His costs remain the same; the only difference is that he is paying companies directly instead of through touts. In fact, should the government enforce this notion in future, those trainees at management company run institutes who were not paying any ‘placement’ fees may find that their costs have now gone up. And two, three hundred thousand rupees is not a sum large enough to entice a shipowner or manager to take in cadets. Some cannot anyway- their ships do not have accommodation or lifeboat capacities that allow this. Moreover, those that intend to survive on this measly sum are not shipowners I would want to sail with anyway- many are crooks.

Mr Modi and Shipping Minister Gadkari have said much about reviving the Indian maritime sector. As they start doing things to do this, they must realise that all their plans- port development, inland waterway development, the Gujarat maritime cluster et al- will come to naught unless Indian maritime expertise is strengthened and widened. The backbone of this expertise has usually been, around the world, managers with seagoing experience. Frankly, I do not see, in the present state of affairs, the possibility that we will have, ten years down the line, people of sufficient calibre and competence to make these dreams a reality. Not with ideas like this planned money-for-nothing plan, we will not.

This plan is no solution. The government needs to get real. And it needs to stop consulting people who have their own axes to grind when it looks for solutions.

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Annus horribilis

All the incidents I mention below have happened on or after the last Christmas. The last two and a half weeks have been horrible for shipping. Serious accidents, with often fatal consequences, seem to be occurring almost every day. And these are just the reported ones, or the ones that have hit the headlines.

It all seemed to start in the Mediterranean, where, three days after Christmas, the ferry Norman Atlantic caught fire that killed an unknown number of people- unknown simply because nobody seems to know how many were on board. The Italian transport minister said, “We cannot say how many people may be missing.”  That figure is believed to be over a hundred.

The only good news, in all the mayhem, came from the UK, where the ro-ro ship Hoegh Osaka was intentionally (and, if I may add, professionally) grounded by the Captain and the pilot in the Solent after she started listing on departure from port. She has- to the surprise of her salvors- been refloated since she was beached on January 3.

Sadly, in another incident north of Scotland, the trouble prone cement carrier Cemfjord was not so lucky. She was found capsized with all eight crewmembers now feared dead. Off Vietnam, the bulk carrier Bulk Jupiter went down with 18 crew dead; just one survived. Preliminary reports suggest that the liquefaction of her bauxite cargo did her in. 

In the South China Sea near Singapore, a tanker and a bulker carrier collided on January 2, with 4500 barrels of oil spilled. In Libya, amidst the civil war, anchored Greek-operated tanker Araevo was bombed by aircraft under the control of the internationally recognised government. Two crewmembers died; two more were injured. 

In lesser-reported incidents, three crewmembers died on Christmas when the Cambodia-registered Ming Guang sprang a leak and sank off Japan. The cement carrying Sea Merchant killed one of her crew when she sank off Batangas in the Philippines in rough seas on New Year’s Day. The next day, the Better Trans went down off the same country with one casualty.

Two days later, the tanker Run Guang 9 exploded off China; two crew missing- and the boxship Helene Rickmers ran aground in the Solomon Sea. Four days later, the Maersk LNG tanker Magellan Spirit ran aground off Bonny, Nigeria.

Finally (fingers crossed) the Gulf Rio ran aground in the Black Sea on Jan 8. There were, fortunately, no casualties. Not so lucky were the three souls on the catamaran Pura Vida Princess, who died when she capsized off Venezuela the same day.

This litany of ship casualties is as fantastic as it is grotesque; I cannot recall, in the last thirty years, a two-week period with such horrendous statistics. (I may be wrong, though; I was sailing much of that time, when information was more difficult to come by).

No doubt, there will be enquiries into at least the more high profile accidents, and we will –hopefully- learn from those. Meanwhile, 2015 has started on a terrible note, and brings to mind the British Queen’s 1992 ‘annus horribilis' (a horrible year) speech.

The disastrous start to the year should also serve as a reminder to all of us- especially those who believe that the issue of safety can be mastered by just legislation or checklists- that the sea remains a dangerously capricious mistress for those of us that sail, and that enhanced mariner competence is the only way we can hope to keep things safe.

Or safe enough, at least.

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The sailor and the bumblebee

Yet another shipmanager gave me, yesterday, the same shop-soiled reasons for the decline in Indian seamen. Some I agreed with- lower quality, calibre, training and commitment, for example. Others were laughable.

His litany of complaints of unethical behaviour (his words, not mine) was long. It included Indian seamen having the temerity to seek shorter contracts, more money, family carriage options and internet at sea. Also, he told me, ‘They want to sign on when it suits them; they don’t want to cut short their leave’. He went on (and on!) talking, with thinly disguised disdain,  lambasting seafarer behaviour before he remembered to give me glowing ‘retention figures’ for his company as proof that it was somehow special and implying that the same seamen that he was cursing were actually lining up outside his door.

Let me say, first, that I dispute that ‘retention’ is a term that can be applied to the shipmanning business. Retention is a concept that applies to permanent employees, not contractual labour that – each time, between contracts- spends months at home unemployed and unpaid with no guarantee of a new contract. Body shoppers cannot claim retention for the simple reason that the employee is let go- each time, without exception- at the end of his contract. (I will not dignify with a response those who claim, always disingenuously, that they offer ‘permanent employment.’ And for heaven’s sakes, let us stop using, finally, the word ‘leave’- another term that does not apply to contractual workers.)

I did not point out to this expert that the negotiation of terms between a potential employee and employer are an inherent part of any business. The employer is free to dismiss demands if he finds them ridiculous, just as the employee is free to go elsewhere if his terms are not met. Supply and demand. Colour of skin. Affordability versus competence. It has always been like that; it always will.

Body shoppers would love negotiations to be a one way street where they produce a contract- out of thin air- that is signed without demur. Fortunately, it does not always work that way. I find nothing wrong in a seaman seeking more money, shorter contracts, internet or whatever else. I also invite blinkered shipmanagers to see what kind of hard negotiations take place between prospective employees and employers in other industries. It will be a revelation, I promise.

But I did not tell this man all that; at my age, I must conserve my breath. I finished my drink, wished him a Merry Christmas, and left. It was only later, while driving home, that it occurred to me that, by ignoring his rant, I had behaved towards this shipmanager in exactly the way many seamen generally behave towards employers in the industry. And I remembered the bumblebee story from my college days.

Which goes like this. You see, according to the laws of physics, the bumblebee cannot fly- aerodynamics experts have studied the bumblebee for a long time and come to this conclusion. This is because, these experts tell us, the bee’s body mass is too large for its limited wingspan.

The thing is, the bumblebee does not know this. So it disregards these experts and flies anyway.  

I have heard the oh-so unreasonable Indian seamen- stories for decades. I have sailed through many of these years, and I suspect many of the younger generation will sail through the rest of them, despite the best efforts of all these experts with their own fishy agendas.

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Accident and Design

Why the MOL Comfort casualty has not resulted in a more widespread re-examination of ship design and construction is a mystery to me.

A year and a half after the Mitsui OSK Lines owned containership broke up and sank in the Indian Ocean because of hull girder failure, a hundred companies including the insurers and owners are in court claiming that shipbuilder Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) was responsible for faulty design and for not reporting a relevant crack on another similar ship. Included in this lawsuit, now in progress in Tokyo, are costs paid by Mitsui for retrofitting sister ships of the Comfort post the incident. Claims against MHI exceed $500 million dollars.

The case is expected to take years to reach a conclusion; meanwhile, the fallout is being felt elsewhere too. For one, the International Association of Classification Societies set up an expert group to assess the safety of Post-Panamax containerships, developing two new unified requirements for containerships. And of course, the IMO has made amendments to SOLAS that will make weighing of containers before shipment mandatory by 2016.

Meanwhile, in Denmark, as part of a thesis leading to a PhD, Ingrid Marie Vincent Andersen said in November 2014 that clues had been found that suggested that the catastrophic failure of the Comfort’s hull girders was a possibility more real than was previously thought and had ‘very likely a lot to do with the cargo loading condition of the ship, but the full answer was quite a bit more complicated than that’. Anderson says that the Comfort and her sister vessels were under engineered by naval architects that did not fully account for enormous additional loads that were being placed on the ship.

The Tokyo litigation will, I expect, follow expected lines, with each side blaming somebody else. No doubt MHI is claiming innocence, pointing out that the widespread container weight misdeclaration issue in the trade was a factor in the casualty.  No doubt the owners will dispute this.

The fact will remain, however, that the MOL Comfort, at 8000 odd TEUs, was not a very large ship by any stretch of the imagination. The 'CSCL Globe'- on its maiden voyage last month- is, at 19000 TEU, a giant in comparison. The fact is, also, that recent structural failure has not been restricted to containerships; remember the 2011 Vale Beijing near-catastrophe in Brazil immediately after her first loading?

Which brings me back to my original question. Why aren’t we doing more?

This is a time when bigger and bigger ships are being built. Scientists tell us- and seamen sense- that worse weather is being encountered at sea with every passing year. Despite this, it appears to me that we continue to design and build mammoth ships with incomplete understanding of required strength at sea or of potentially fatal stresses caused by fraudulent weight declarations and the like. The beginning of the mandated container weight regulations are still two years away, and we know how lethargically maritime regulations are implemented even after they come into force.

Perhaps it is time to react before catastrophe, for once. Perhaps it is time to strengthen ship design and construction research and build ships that are more fit for purpose. Perhaps install

real-time monitoring sensor systems – like CHESS, the composite hull embedded sensor system already available- that will lead to a better understanding of the effects of both short term and long-term stresses we subject our ships to in the harsh marine and commercial environments we operate in.

All that has happened, after the Vale Beijing and the MOL Comfort incidents, is that two owners have been pushed to retrofit and strengthen a few of their ships after the event. Shipping can surely do better than that.

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