This week’s ship collision off the Humber could have been much worse. Just one person is unaccounted for and one other needed hospital treatment. The fire is mostly extinguished, the two ships are disentangled from each other and the damage to the tanker is less than feared. It is early days, but there are reasons to be optimistic that the event will not prove to be the catastrophe that some feared.
First, it’s likely to be cock-up rather than conspiracy. True, it may seem suspicious that a US government jet-fuel cargo is involved: Iran and others would enjoy that. Plus there has been a spate of suspicious anchor-dragging, cable-breaking incidents involving Russian and Chinese ships, and it’s pretty difficult to crash ships by accident these days what with all the sat-nav, radar and radio they possess. So it’s right not to rule out foul play yet. But tracking shows that the container ship Solong sailed in a straight line for around a hundred miles, along a course it has regularly travelled before. If it was aiming to hit the Stena Immaculate tanker it would have adjusted course, probably at the last minute, to aim at it.
Fog or not, it’s almost certainly the Solong’s fault. As Eamon Moloney, a veteran marine-casualty-response specialist lawyer, confirms to me, in a collision involving a ship underway and a ship at anchor, the underway vessel is presumed 100 per cent responsible unless there is compelling evidence that the anchored vessel contributed to the incident. Investigators place greater weight on early mistakes; last-minute errors made in the heat of the moment are treated as less causative.
But the Stena Immaculate’s failure to notice the approaching container ship is also a mistake. If both vessels had followed the International Regulations for the Prevention of Collision at Sea, then the accident would not have happened.
Complacency by ships’ crews is a growing problem. Moloney puts it thus:
A collision at sea generally follows a chain of mistakes, the most common and serious of which is failure by the watchkeepers to continually assess the risk of collision. There is a growing tendency for young watchkeepers to maintain the course set out in their electronic gadgetry and be unwilling to take early action to avoid the risk of collision, even if that involves only a minor deviation from the planned route.
Remember John Adams’s concept of the risk thermostat paradox. Relying on technology makes human activities safer, but people respond by taking safety for granted, which makes human activity less safe again. Wearing a helmet on a motorcycle or a seatbelt in a car causes people to take slightly more risks. The Air France plane crash of 2009 was caused by the senior pilot sleeping off a hangover while trusting junior colleagues because of the autopilot.
Oil spills were once common and are now rare. There were 245 large spills and 543 medium ones in the 1970s. In the 2010s there were just 18 and 45 respectively; in the 2020s, 11 and 26 so far. The quantity of oil spilled per decade fell by 95 per cent between the 1970s and the 2010s despite a doubling of the amount of oil transported by sea. Double-hulled tankers and satellite navigation have made a huge difference. That the Solong was carrying cyanide has not been confirmed. Even if it was, the ship appears to have shed no containers. So the worst fears of toxic chemicals being spilled may not be realised.
In the past, efforts to disperse oil or ‘clean’ the shore with detergents made things worse
This spill will probably not be a big disaster. It looks like being less than 3,000 tons if as it seems only one of the 16 compartments of the tanker was breached, and two other factors will help: the oil is volatile jet fuel which evaporates fairly fast, and the North Sea is rough this week, which disperses and breaks up slicks. As the saying goes, the solution to pollution is usually dilution. Unlike viruses from Chinese labs… dispersal helps.
Even big, bad oil spills that cause high-profile animal-welfare disasters rarely do long term conservation harm if they are not repeated. This time some birds may be killed but it’s unlikely to impact their populations. Wildlife charities are saying otherwise, but that’s their job. (The BBC interviewed Greenpeace’s scientists ‘at Exeter University’, as if they were academics when that is where they happen to rent an office.) It’s early in the year and auks, shags, gannets and terns are yet to gather at their breeding sites. Arctic-breeding waders, such as knots, on the mud flats of the Wash and Humber are more concentrated but with luck the oil will not come ashore. The Torrey Canyon, Amoco Cadiz, Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon spills dominated the news for weeks and produced awful deaths of oiled birds but wildlife populations in the area soon recovered.
In the past, efforts to disperse the oil or ‘clean’ the shore with detergents often made things worse. That lesson has been learned. Moloney says the Humber in particular has a world-class response capability that will do much to mitigate harm to the environment. They have a well-tested decision-making process that will avoid the risk of making the situation worse by a well-intentioned but mistaken response.