Pushing the Boundaries by Michael Grey

One Apus coming into Kobe

Pushing the boundaries

Following the astonishing sight of the ONE Apus arriving in the port of Kobe, there has been plenty of speculation as to why half her deck cargo suddenly hurled itself into the sea. I don’t know any better than anyone else but would venture a guess that it might just be the old story of a fatal flaw that eventually emerges with any clever departure from long-established design norms.[You can see a video of the ship coming into Kobe here] 

There is nothing new about adventurous risk-takers skewing traditional design or operational compromises to what might appear to produce the best profit for the least capital cost. Think of the extreme clippers, which were lethal when handled badly, or the “hell or Melbourne” skippers who took ridiculous risks with their ships and the lives of those aboard, for a record-breaking passage.

“If you push your luck, you will come unstuck”, said one of those little rhymes we learned to instil in us the value of professional prudence. And if you have been around in the shipping industry for a good few decades, there is no shortage of examples where snags have emerged after the introduction of something new or clever. It seems almost inevitable.

I might go back to the late 60s, when nobody bothered about fuel price or emissions and to the fine-lined cargo liners that started to appear. Sure, they reached their destination faster and were greatly admired for their passage making. One of ours was roaring down the Atlantic off the Azores one night when she dipped her bow into a swell and about 2000 tons of sea ended up on the foredeck, which was set down a couple of feet, before they got the way off her. Then a Ben liner was bent like a banana and a Neptune ship lost most of the bow, so word got about that these beauties needed some rather careful handling, compared to their simpler predecessors.

With Suez closed and everyone screaming for oil, tanker sizes were extrapolated to extraordinary levels, somebody deciding that it was a great economy idea to equip these monsters with a single boiler and bring them up estuaries on the top of the tide to sit in holes dredged off a terminal. It worked a dream, until they started to break down off lee shores and spectacularly explode, when washing their tanks in the tropical microclimate of their vast internal spaces.

Roll-on, roll-off ships would have been prohibited in a more cautious age – class would never have permitted a huge hole in a shell plate- but they provided so many solutions to cargo-handling problems that old horrors of free surface or watertightness were thought easily manageable.  Boundaries were literally pushed and we soon saw ro-ros where the main deck was under the load waterline, so a few degrees of list with the ramp open could prove fatal, requiring a new understanding (better later than never) of this type’s vulnerability.

Big bulk carriers were the cat’s pyjamas; too large, alas, for the crew to make the slightest impression on their maintenance requirements, while pliable regulators permitted deep loading, longer intervals between drydocks and a new and malevolent philosophy of “permissible levels of steel wastage” emerged. That took a lot of ships to the bottom, along with the lives of those who worked aboard them. And that’s before we considered issues of metal fatigue, weaker scantlings (who would pay for a stronger bulk carrier?) and cargo liquefaction.

Car carriers appeared to be a design that could be endlessly extrapolated, their specific vulnerabilities of instability and fire spread, contributed to by too much haste in port, eventually becoming apparent – after they had grown to huge sizes.

Maybe we shouldn’t frighten potential passengers about what cruise ship operators have learned the hard way and to their cost, over the years. As a simple seaman, it always seemed to me that there was something wrong when you couldn’t put the helm hard over without the grand piano carrying away and crushing half a dozen insufficiently nimble passengers. We won’t go into flammable balconies and careless captains getting too close to the shore.

And so to giant containerships, the current conduits of international trade, which have grown like Topsy, both in dimensions and capacity, where boundaries have been pushed in all directions. To somebody aged enough to have written about 1500 teu ships with “too many eggs in one basket”, and who can recall agonised debates about whether a third tier of boxes would be a hazard in the winter North Atlantic, it could be better to exercise caution about the current generation of monsters and their vicissitudes.

I recall a friend who had been in at the very birth of containerisation telling me about the experiments he took part in where they piled loaded boxes on top of one another and tilted stacks to test their lashings and design fastenings. Now, of course they have computer-aided design tools of remarkable sophistication, but you just wonder whether there is anything that really replicates the terrifying forces produced by an instantaneous 40 degree lurch, as the whole length of the ship finds itself unsupported, to stop dead and hurtle the other way, as green seas crash aboard and a hellish wind blows on the ten-high stack.

Maybe it would help a little if designers spent some time at sea. But looking at some of these recent incidents, it is surely not unreasonable to ask whether lashing rules and the equipment they prescribe are really fit for purpose aboard the ships on which they are now installed? Are the ships too long and the stacks too high? Or like so much else in an industry, where development is exponential and prototypes unknown, are the designers pushing their luck, in this case, too far?

Michael Grey is a former editor of Lloyd’s List.