maglog >
By Terry McMullan Publisher
AMSA Insecure load: containers dangling from the APL England
S
ailing or fishing off the New South Wales central coast is more hazardous now than it was before May 24, when a ship sailing from the Chinese port of Ningbo to Melbourne lost about 50 containers overboard. A few containers have already been recovered and others have drifted ashore. How quickly a container will sink depends on what it’s carrying. But empty containers can drift a long way, floating just below the surface and representing a distinct risk to smaller vessels like fishing trawlers and yachts. The ship involved in this latest spill is the APL England, which is registered in Singapore to APL, formerly known as American President Lines, which is now part of the French shipping giant CMA CGM. It was being operated by ANL, formerly the government-owned Australian National Line. The ANL brand and operations were sold in 1998 to CMA CGM, which is in turn owned by Merit Corporation, a massive conglomerate based in Beirut, Lebanon. The APL England lost power in the middle of a severe storm, and after losing the containers somewhere between Port Stephens and Wollongong turned north, presumably to run with the swell, and limped into Brisbane where it was promptly arrested by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA). The authority is demanding $22 million for the clean-up to be paid by the ship’s owner and its insurer, London-based Steamship
74
insuranceNEWS
June/July 2020
Mutual, the largest protection & indemnity (P&I) insurer. AMSA says the ship’s “lashing arrangements” were inadequate and some securing points for containers on the deck of the ship were allegedly corroded. Apart from arresting the ship, the authority has also hit the ship’s hapless captain with charges carrying fines of up to $300,000. If that all sounds a bit heavy-handed, AMSA has another recent container spill to use as a yardstick as to how slippery the business of recovering money from ship operators and P&I insurers can be. On May 15 insuranceNEWS.com.au reported AMSA accusing London-based marine P&I insurer Britannia of obfuscation and denial of the facts to avoid paying for the cost of cleaning up pollution caused by a ship it covers. It has engaged in legal proceedings in the Federal Court against Britannia and the Taiwanese owner of the YM Efficiency, which lost what was at first thought to be “about 50” containers off Newcastle NSW in June 2018. The cleanup operation involved the recovery and disposal of 63 containers and their contents, which was completed in May. The exercise cost AMSA about $17 million. Chief Executive Mick Kinley didn’t hide his frustration when he said Yang Ming and Britannia “have tried every trick in the book to attempt to shirk their responsibilities to clean up their mess”. Containers have been around now for 64 years, and losing them overboard is nothing
new. Each year around 130 million containers carrying goods with an estimated value of more than $4.5 trillion move between ports around the world on about 50,000 ships. The World Shipping Council, which represents about 80% of the container shipping industry, says an average of 1582 containers are lost at sea each year. Some 64% of those are due to “catastrophic events” like a collision, running aground or sinking. Containers falling off while under way aren’t regarded as catastrophic. Reports say the APL England suffered a stack collapse or collapses, which involve lashings and/or the “twistlocks” that secure the containers together failing, presumably due to the extreme torque generated on the top of outer stacks by the ship’s excessive rolling. The insurer will undoubtedly be looking very closely at AMSA’s claim that the lashings and fastenings weren’t as good as they should have been. There are other possible causes, of course. The fact that AMSA is saying the lashings were inadequate and the securing points on the APL England were corroded may well result in a lengthy exchange of correspondence between insurer and shipowner. And that’s why having a valuable ship tied up in Brisbane provides AMSA with some hefty leverage that will presumably encourage APL and Britannia to focus on sorting this out with rather more urgency than the owner and the insurer of the 0 YM Efficiency.
