A little over a year ago there was a major oil spill off the coast of SE Queensland when the Pacific Adventurer ran aground spewing 270 tonnes of oil across the Sunshine Coast and Moreton Island. Now a Chinese ship, the Shen Neng 1, plowed at full stem into a reef about 120km east of Rockhampton on the southern edge of the Great Barrier Reef.
The ship contains some 975 tonnes of oil and 65,000 tonnes of coal. So far about two tonnes have leaked from a tank containing 150 tonnes of heavy duty oil. The big worry is that the ship might break up, spilling the coal onto the sea floor and the oil into the water in an environmentally sensitive area off Shoalwater Bay and Great Keppel Island.
The ship is in Commonwealth waters, inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Maritime Safety Queensland is the lead agency dealing with the disaster with support from the Commonwealth.
The main question arising is why the carrier was in a restricted zone more than 15 nautical miles away from the nearest shipping lane. In the map provided in the Courier Mail the ship appeared to be taking a short cut.
The second question will be whether all ships traversing these waters should be guided by pilots with local knowledge.
Also there is question as to whether there should be a second vessel tracking service to complement the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait Vessel Traffic Service which provides coverage of sea lanes to the Hay Point port near Mackay to the north. We are told that the Maritime Safety Queensland and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority are already assessing these questions in view of the expected increase in vessel numbers into Gladstone associated with coal and coal seam gas exports.
There is also a question as to why it took nearly two hours to report the incident to authorities.
Well,all I can do, from what I’ve read of Brian’s post, and seen on the news, as ask WTF were they doing there? Why weren’t they apprehended before they got there? And exactly how long is it going to take before this turns into a massive disaster on the reef? Bloody dusgraceful. But, they’ll get a little rap on the knuckles no doubt – can’t upset business – and that will be it.
Hopefully draws some attention to the scale of coal exports too … I don’t envy Qld PM&C Spin Doctors right now.
The strongest possible penalty should be applied to the ship’s owners, and to the ship’s captain. Time to send a clear signal to ship captains attempting short cuts across the Great Barrier Reef.
Interesting to note that the risk of oil spills seems likely to increase with increasing traffic from ships carrying coal. There’s a pretty big signal here about fossil fuels, isn’t there? Unfortunately, there have to be people in power ready to receive it. Has anyone asked Martin Ferguson to comment?
Coal exports + oil spill + Great Barrier Reef + big ugly machines which fuel capitalism + mining company profits = environmentalist head explodgasm.
These things happen, sure it is sad for the reef and our customers who are waiting for their supply of coal however the #1 priority is to safely recover the ship.
ships captain and the company he/she works for should be fined for the amount it costs to clean up their mess. They shouldn’t have been where they were.
Here comes the spin: Bligh’s fury over Reef oil spill blunder.
Queensland was left $10 million short from the Pacific Adventurer clean-up, let’s hope it’s not the case in this one. Given this is the second oil spill in 2 years in Queensland – heads should roll.
Also interestingly, “there is no jail penalty for the offence”.
Who on earth dud this guy think he was, FFS? Even Captain James Cook couldn’t sail up the Barrier Reef without holeing his ship.
There has to be jail terms for these environmental ones, and I don’t mean 2 or 5 years. Long enough to absolutely discourage such stupidity. (Can’t see the oil and coal magnates letting government do it though.)
” the company … should be fined “…
That’ll be Cosco, the China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company, a state owned company, ( except when that legislatively precludes them from trading with the US, when somehow a lawyerly fix gets put in ) which is, in aggregate, with all it’s subsidiaries, the world’s largest shipping line.
We’ll have to line up: last month Norway issued them with a $US39 mill cleanup bill for their July 2009 anchor drag, grounding, and 1120 ton oil spill off the tourist and wildlife sanctuary Langesund coast, along about 100 miles of it. That particular ship had had safety questions asked about it on more than 30 occasions in 11 years by European harbour authorities before it finally came to grief. t
At least we know that those mountains of foreign reserves the Company With Responsibility, the PRC, holds means they won’t reneg on the bill because they can’t afford it. They’ll probably find another more legal fiction that’ll do the job. Intenational shipping is infamous for its byzantine webs of ownership and designed to obfuscate and avoid liability.
Welcome to the down side of having nothing happening in terms of our foreign exchange earning capacity ‘cept digging up dirt, and fleecing international students who’ll accept, and pay through the teeth for, any old scam as an education if it gets a permananet visa. Like Confucius say, you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
In terms of environmental responsibility, mining companies and shipping have a marriage made in hell.
Makes you wonder.
Either the skipper wasn’t checking his charts and sat nav or he was. And I don’t know which is worse. Either he knew where he was and didn’t give a toss or else he didn’t and still didn’t give a toss. Either way he should’t have been steaming at full speed.
Sounds like gross negligence to me.
What was this guy’s last command? The Exxon Valdez?
Apparently the captain in charge of the containment/salvage operation goes by the name of Captain Quirk. I’m hoping he has someone at his side with the Celtic inflection to say if and when the time arises Cap’n … she’s nor gorny horld …
Capt’n Cook’s Third Rule of Navigation: In a contest between a ships hull and a reef, the reef will always win.
As Scotty might say: Ya canna change the laws o’ physics, laws ‘o physics, laws ‘o physics….
Commercial realities will ensure that nothing of consequence will change in regard to the range of ‘product’ which transits the sensitve areas of the GBR.
Clearly what should change is the pilotage requirements: simply extend the compulsory pilotage area – which is currently nth from Cairns – to Gladstone including passages to the open sea. A very straitforward exercise given that it would be simply an amendment to existing legislation.
BTW 15 nm off course is about 40 minutes sailing time!
It is now almost 48 hours since she hit the reef…………So why has no attempt been made to pump the remaining 950 tonnes of fuel-oil still on-board, off the ship ?? The sea conditions look good so why are people arguing about who will pay…FFS just get a bunker barge out there from Gladstone & get it off the ship instead of waiting for the ship to break up & then crying about the reef having been totally destroyed !!
This seems to be beyond stupidity. Given the litany of problems supplied by Danny @ 9, is there any chance of this being an insurance job? If not, one or more of the crew must have been on the piss.
Even with a pilot, the Cosco Busan ( no legal relation to the Cosco in question here) in Nov 2007 managed to allide ( crash into stationary object) with the Golden Gate bridge, spilling 200000 liters bunker oil causing damage that ran to close to $100m for the ecological clean-up, the bridge, the ship, etc. So that’s not the answer.
How hard would it be to have mandatory GPS driven systems that simply won’t allow ships to stray outside defined opportunities? Otherwise engines automatically shut down to just maintain steerage, alarms go off all over the place, and phone calls get made to authorities, owners etc.
Do we have a system whereby any firm that wants to traffic in our waters has to lodge an insurance bond into a fund that is of a size that effective rapid reponses can be made to environmental insults like this? California requires ships to have a 300 $million insurance policy.
I’m with P Bele, they should be decanting the oil off the vessel ASAP in case she breaks up. Maybe we don’t have those sort of skills in our maritime workforce anymore, so we’re not up for it.
What I find particularly disturbing is Bligh’s reasoning “6000 a year manage to do it without running aground, therefore our regulatory efforts are sufficient”. More like we’ve been lucky so far, been living on borrowed time, a fools paradise.
I guess the fact that the firm she’s got to play hard ball with, throw the book at, is one of China’s many sovereign companies, ( is there really any other sort?) as are the ones buying the coal that is propping up her, and our, treasury. They could spit the diplomatic dummy, and decide their stockpiling efforts have built up a coal mountain big enough to run a boycott against us if they are hit with too big a bill or too onerous conditions are placed upon them. She can join Rio Tinto in having an attack of the vapour over that scenario, china’s iron ore buyers are urging it.
danny @ 16 – from news reports it sounds like they do have a tracking system for ships just like that – I think some mix of gps beacons, satellite, radar etc. But the system doesn’t start for a couple of hundred km to the north of where the accident happened because its considered such a low risk area.
I too find it pretty amazing that with gps systems that the crew did not notice they were so far off course though. Perhaps the whole crew were off celebrating easter!
China will be seeking the arrest of Australian maritime officials ship and hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.
From the TV news tonight I gather the shipping channel is 10 miles wide and navigation is not particularly difficult. From the timetable given in the Courier Mail it seems that there was a pilot on board for the first 4 hours of the trip. The accident happened a little over two hours after the pilot left. The ship must have begun to diverge from the proper path very soon after the pilot left.
The shipping channel at that point heads north and then loops to the east and then heads south. From there it presumably heads north again. The Shen Neng 1 veered to the east on the northern leg so it looked as though it was taking a short cut. If the course taken was unintentional the degree of error stretches credibility.
They also said that the chance of the ship breaking up is now considered small.
The government asks common people to reduce their carbon emissions by walking to the nearby stores & by using recyclable products. The governments in turn keep on spilling tons of oils every year into the sea. WTF is this?? Cant they be more careful.
It looks as though it was taking a shortcut. Fishermen say at least one bulk carrier a day takes the ‘rat route’. I guess I was wrong. Simple stupidity while trying to be smart. If these shortcuts were well known there will be questions asked of certain authorities.
Salient Green, in a later ABC bulletin they reckon that ships have been caught and charged for the short cut caper further south, but not here, it seems.
The Exxon Valdez leaked 40 million litres of oil. The leak in the great barrier reef is at about 2.5 tonnes.
This did not stop one of the commercial networks stating that the reef spill is comparable in potential devastation to the Exxon Valdez.
However those of green hue also never learn.
“QUEENSLAND authorities had failed to heed the lessons of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and have responded inadequately to the massive catastrophe unfolding on Moreton Bay, experts said yesterday. Occupational and environmental medical specialist, Andrew Jeremijenko said history was repeating itself off the southeast Queensland coast. “Moreton Bay is just as vulnerable as Prince William Sound. As more of the oil gets to shore, we are going to see the same effects occur [as in Alaska],” he said. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/environmentalists-play-the-exxon-valdez-oil-spill-card-again-on-the-great-barrier-reef/story-e6frg6zo-1225850084293”
We should keep this in perspective and imprison rat running captains just the same.
However don’t hold your breath. ” Hazelwood (Captain of the Exxon Valdez) was convicted of a misdemeanor charge of negligent discharge of oil, fined $50,000, and sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hazelwood
Huggy
Rationalist @ 5:
I don’t give a flying f*** about “our customers waiting for their supply of coal”. They can wait. They can claim on their insurance if they have it. A national, no global, treasure could be trashed and you’re concerned about some minor inconvenience? In what way is that “rational” Rationalist?
These incidents will happen more often as our glorious coal exports grow ever larger. Yay Australia! Just remember how keen Anna Bligh was to stand next to Clive Palmer back in February. Never get between a State Premier and a bucket of money.
“Never get between a State Premier and a bucket of money”
Never get between a state premier (who has been threatened with a plausible lawsuit by someone with very deep pockets, a penchant for litigation, and a a self-serving agenda that can be brought forward by said premier) and that someone’s wishes.
It is a legitimate consideration to make, carbonsink.
First priority is the safety of the people involved, we don’t want to see injuries or deaths of the crew or others involved in the rescue. Second priority is the integrity of the ship and recovering it in tact to ensure the payload and the vessel are not lost. Our customers have paid for the coal and as a result it is in our and their interests that they get the coal ASAP as well as their vessel. Third priority is ensuring damage is minimal to surrounding areas.
it is sick rudd is sitting on his bumm, looser, and the Aussie public even tolerate him, the bottom line is piss poor leadership, the could go way out to see and back without being so close
my heart goes out too the australian people in this disaster, and as a Yankee, i greeve for this national treasure LOSS, the policy of the RUDD leadership should be held accountable. blessings to you and the efforts to clean up effort, sincerly YANKEE
w, or YANKEE @ 26, see Huggybunny @ 23. He says 2.5 tonnes, I’ve heard reliable reports of 3 or 4 tonnes. But no more. The dispersant seems to have been entirely effective and there is no major damage so far.
The GBR remains one of the best preserved in the world, but this won’t help if we don’t do something significant about reducing CO2 emissions quite soon.
A few interesting facts have emerged (don’t have time to find the links).
It seems that the “short cut” was a legitimate sea channel which the Shen Neng fully intended to take. So it did nothing illegal until it strayed out of that channel, which puts a whole new perspective on the incident.
Captain Quirk said that taking this channel is not “best practice” but sailing it is not rocket science.
An expert in law applying to the GBR says it is a mess, with all sorts of state and Commonwealth acts applying. This, he said, needs to be cleaned up.
The plan now is to extract the oil which will be done with a two-metre boom in place to contain any further spillage. Consideration will then be given to the question of whether the coal needs to be unloaded.
Well “w”, not sure if your obviously heartfelt diatribe will shift domestic policy on the extension of cabotage regulations to flags of convenience transiting through national parks, but this line:
“the could go way out to see and back without being so close”
is definitely a keeper – in an Burroughs Beckett kinda way.
Brian,
“but this won’t help if we don’t do something significant about reducing CO2 emissions quite soon”
did you read about the current bleaching event at Lord Howe Island, way further south?
BilB, I heard about it. Recently I read that the world’s reefs would be pretty well stuffed with a temperature rise of 1.5C, pretty much inevitable even if we stopped emissions now.
They do come back eventually. I understand that in the past this has taken about 4 million years after major extinction events.
Take another look at the carbon clock
http://co2now.org/
and apply some probabilities.
Thanks, BilB. The usual figure is 0.5C or 0.6C in the pipeline in terms of short term feedbacks. Add that to 0.8C and the problem is evident.
With long term feedbacks we get 25m of sea level rise at about 390ppm and the reefs drown, even if they are not done in from other causes.
Authorities have confirmed that the Shen Neng 1 was using a legitimate channel, a channel used by 63 ships since October. But even so they were almost 11km off course.
As I said earlier, the CM tells us that the pilot left the ship a bit over 2 hours before it ran aground. That’s some effort to stray 11km in two hours. We await the findings, but the word “incompetence” is being used. I’d suggest of the “gross” kind.
BTW coal exports from Qld are said to double in the next decade.
The CM today has a map showing the two channels and the path the ship took. There is a bend in the channel the ship was in where it veers to the east. Instead of taking the bend the ship plowed straight ahead.
Brian?
“Captain Quirk” is this for real??
was Mr. Sulue taking a leak when all of the action happened?
BiB, I wasn’t sure about the “Captain” bit so I googled. Lookee here:
He’s definitely the bloke leading the charge in the rescue operations. Google gives multiple references.
I wonder if he has a favourite beamingly happy engineer called Scotty?
While you were reading up on Captain Quirk, Brian, did you notice this
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/huge-methane-leak-in-arctic-ocean-study-20100305-pmsi.html
article? OMG
Didn’t read post 11 eh BilB?
Fran, I saw post 11, but still wanted to verify the “Captain” bit.
BilB, that link doesn’t go anywhere, but I think it refers to the study by Natalia Shakhova et al. If so I’ve seen the study and was on track to do a post on it, but didn’t get it done before I went to NZ.
It’s on the list. I just have to get my head back into it.
Fran I missed the earlier observation.
Brian, The link works for me, but yes you are right. The news is not exactly new but it has finally hit home with the media brought on by a broader awareness. This is the big climate tipping mechanism that Sir Ian Axford spent many years warning of with his influence and in his writings. Once this gas release gets fully underway over the next decade our government cannot pretend that they did not know about its coming because I personally handed the Scientific American article about the presence of the threat to Kerry Bartlett, the then government whip.
BilB, there seems to be genuine disagreement between scientists about the significance of the study. There’s a post at RealClimate which seriously downplays the importance, whereas Joe Romm at Climate Progress pretty much says, “We’ve tipped!” The RealClimate author, David Archer, has written stuff about methane himself and is not coming to the issue new. Joe Romm, of course, is not a climate scientist as such.
The amounts are small in the context of methane emissions worldwide. Also there is no real evidence as to whether the Arctic leaking is new and increasing or whether it has been going on for some time.
The study itself says we need more research.
The whole issue is quite a conundrum. I think there needs to be a new look at the CO2 equivalence of methane, which has been underestimated IMHO even by the more alarmist amongst the scientists on this topic.
I am wondering who has political accountability for this incident? At the moment we have outrage expressed by Anna Bligh and Kevin Rudd and a fly over by Peter Garrett and Martin Ferguson is Minister for Coal.
Noise and interest is fine, but who is responsible? Who will take action to ensure such a disaster never happens again?
Putting a $200 GPS on all ships and mandating they use it would be a good start.
It is a complex interplay with the Atlantic conveyor. The melting ice in the northern continents runs off into the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean diluting the salinity as does the ice melt from the polar cap. This dilution weakens the conveyor at its northern extremity. We saw the effects of this earlier with the northern hemisphere winter blast while the capital of Greenland experienced temperature of 35 degC. This happened because the weakened conveyor changed course along with other atmospheric restructuring.
So there is a bit of a dual outcome option here. The conveyor shuts down and the northern temperatures decline arresting the northern melt, or the conveyor holds up albeit in a weakened state until the Arctic Polar ice has fully dissipated at which point the conveyor strengthens and punches higher into the Artic Ocean further softening the methyl hydrates on the continental shelves and the permafrost on the Bering Sea floor shallows. At that point the methane release goes turbulent. A very early article that I read on this transformation said that this flip can happen in just a few years. No time left to say “oh gosh, we had better do something fast”. It is that moment when you realise that you have overbalanced and there is nothing to hold onto. As adults this happens so rarely that we forget what that feels like. And nobody knows what it will feel like on a global scale, except perhaps for when all of the US realised that they we at war when Pearl Harbour was bombed (my dad was there). With the war there was something that could be won. This one there will be no hope, only the desperate struggle to cope.
I have to say that this is all conjecture on my part. Please find 5 scientists who will absolutely refute this, so that I can sleep better at night.
Peterc, ships have had GPS (or earlier systems like NAVSTAR) for at least 40 years. It’s been a looooong time since anyone used a sextant and chronometer to work out where they were.
I think the problem was not that the captain didn’t know where he was, there was just some uncertainty about the location of the channel he was supposed to be in. An up-to-date chart, or a pilot, might have helped.
I’m sure that this one is simply human error. I did that one myself in yaught in the 70′s. I was blasting around Sydney harbour heading into Rose bay when I suddenly had a doubt about where the sand bar was, and was heading below to get the chart when we came to a sudden, sliding uplifting halt. Aha, this is where it is!
Brian when you do your article this
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Atlantic-Conveyor-Belt-at-Full-Speed-138523.shtml
does not challenge the conveyor theories because as you know the conveyor is not about its speed, it is about where it sinks to return to the Pacific. But the article does give an interesting clue of how oscillations may operate, and that is in the comment about varying ocean height. This together with the kinetic energy of masses of water can clearly lead to oscillation opportunities. Fascinating stuff.
BilB, the area of concern is the Laptev and East Siberian Seas, which are immediately to the left as you go north through the Bering Strait. So it’s a bit hard to see that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation thing has much directly to do with it. However that early article might make all clear if you can dig it up.
Brian, they are connected. The Russian thaw is sending huge amounts of fresh water into the Bering Sea. This flows west towards the north sea. Fresh water is lighter than Salt water so it flows over the top of the Conveyor current forcing it to sink to return south sooner than it otherwise would. Once the bulk of the easy melt water has dispersed ie the Artic Sea ice and glacial runoff, the conveyor current will be able to reach further into the Arctic Ocean. The issue for the submerged permafrost is that the water temperature is warming and softening the submerged permafrost faster than the terestrial permafrost. However where water collects on the land the permafrost is thawing underneath.
There are plenty of pointers to the Scientific American articles. Perhaps the way to get them is to go to ScientificAmerican.com and search for methane hydrates.
“http://www.womensradio.com/articles/Arctic-Ocean-Methane-Hydrates–Scariest-Event-Ever-(Its-Real!):-Part-4/3147.html”
“http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/200409_methane/”
“http://www.oceanconserve.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=135206&keybold=methane%20AND%20%20Arctic%20AND%20%20science”
“http://www.countercurrents.org/mims060210.htm”
You will have to remove the parentahses to use the links.
Thanks, BilB, that should give me plenty to chew on!
BilB” “I did that one myself in yaught ” …
I thought it was well nigh impossible to run aground in Sydney Harbour while under way, that’s part of it’s awesomeness… but…
I managed it too, back as a lad in the seventies… a gorgeous 36 ft old wooden ketch, we brought it down from Brisbane, a maiden voyage for the new owner and, ahem, skipper, whose previous experience was just chopping around moreton bay in a hartley 16 trailer sailer…. He was nervous to lose site of land, I was extremely nervous to be in sight of it, we had to mutiny when he finally went to sleep,… we were making good way, with a lot of south, i knew there was a few knots to be had in the east australian current a bit offshore, so we just kept on that tack while he snored. We finally made it through the heads, popped a cork under the bridge, and a bit later, with the skipper at the helm, a tad full of himself, we found a shallow patch , perhaps the only other one in the harbour apart from your Rose Bay one, just off the point at Rushcutters Bay. Embarassing, what. We just lay down on side with the tide for the night, it came up in the morning and we were off as if nothing had happened. Irony is we spent the first night of the voyage on our side as well, having gone aground in the marina at mooloolaba … yes i know we started in brisbane, yes moololoba is north, lesson is : pick your skipper’s with great care.
You got a boat these days?
Danny,
“He was nervous to lose site of land, I was extremely nervous to be in sight of it”
that is going to be respoken often.
Running aground is all part of the fun as long as you don’t damage anything. I’ve also run aground in the Lane Cove River (back off no problem) and in Rozelle Bay near my berth this time the propeller was too fouled to pull off so spent the night on the side. That night was one of those exquisite warm still summer nights when the phosphoresence in the water was at its maximum. Just a total fun experience. My boat was a ferro 44′ Samson Sequoia centre board (4’6 draft). I am starting to build another (40 years later) this time a 32′ Bristol Channel Cutter design that I have loved just about forever, which, for the sake of relevence to the thread, I hope to never run aground on the barrier reef or create an oil spill.
Only 17 and a half hours after the Shen Neng 1 ran aground a second ship, heading for Bowen, was found sailing through the Reef 50 nautical miles away from the nearest official passage.
The AFP have now caught up with the miscreants.
I reckon we should confiscate the ship.
David Irving (no relation) @ 46,
I guess I figured ships had GPS units. It is very easy to program in routes which the device can then “follow” (navigate).
There is no excuse that for captain not knowing where he was, other than rank incompetence and/or the apparent total lack of an obvious mandatory legal requirement to have an use a certified GPS unit with required routes loaded in it.
Peterc, I agree, only incompetence explains it.
This saga is drawing to a close with the arrest and charging by the AFP of the captain and the chief watch officer of the ship, essentially for failing to take a corner in the shipping channel.
Meanwhile the ship has been moved to a more sheltered place. It was pure luck that the weather remained relatively placid during the incident. Nevertheless the ship did move while stuck on the reef and has left a scar 3km long and 250m wide of damaged coral. This is likely to take 20 years to recover.