Container ships pose a risk to salvors because of their size, cargo complexity and mis-declared cargo. In this contribution, Christopher Morgan, Lead-Bunker Credit, GP Global, examines maritime safety for ocean container vessels. He looks at instances, implications and counter-measures to fight fires on board vessels-Editor
Seemingly, barely a month goes by now without a major container vessel fire. These are not new–some of the biggest maritime forfeitures ever in terms of underwritten loss and reinsurance body blows have been down to box ship fires.
We have instances in Hanjin Pennsylvania, Hyundai Fortune, plus MSC Flaminia and Maersk Honam in which several crew members on both vessels tragically lost their lives trying to fight flames and explosions they were neither equipped nor trained to handle.
The list goes on. Yantian Express, APL Vancouver, Grande America, Grande Europa….and recently the TT Club reported that ‘a major container ship fire is happening roughly every sixty days’.
In most or all these cases the fire started in a container with the shipboard fire systems unable to contain or control the blaze. Standard protocol suggests that if there is a heat or smoke alarm you visually inspect the container in question with a damage control party, equipped in most cases with powerful water lances designed to pierce the side of the box from a safe distance and fill the box with a mixture of ultra-high pressure seawater and aerated spray to douse and snuff any fire.
Weather and fire perils
Well, that’s the plan. The problem is that in poor weather conditions these things are not very easy or practical to use and completely useless if your fire party cannot get close enough to the box or boxes in question to make any difference because of intense heat and explosions.
At that point it is an uphill and extremely dangerous battle to stop the fire spreading to other boxes nearby.
So, you have to check the manifest and see what is in the adjoining containers to assess any possible explosion risk. Chillingly, you can have very little confidence in the manifest itself because of the grim spectre of mis-declared cargo.
Picture your fire control party with the hoses bravely standing their ground, unknowingly next to a box of Chinese fireworks that says ‘car parts’ on the manifest, as happened on Hanjin Pennsylvania.
Sadly, this is a much-lamented and all-too-common fact of life for modern box shipping. The lines and ports handle far too many boxes to check all but a tiny fraction for their actual contents and so have in most cases to trust in what the shipper has listed on the Bill Of Lading.
Falsification
Since it costs more to ship International Maritime Dangerous Goods (IMDG), unscrupulous operators can, and very regularly do lie on the Bill of Lading (BOL) to avoid the extra charges, knowing they are unlikely to be caught and face no real sanction if they are. There is a lethal phantom menace lurking amongst the stacks.
Lines do what they can. Any IMDG cargoes tend to be stowed up front. The original thinking for this was that the superstructure was a long way aft and so the nasty stuff was as far from the crew as possible, and also that it is easier to trim the ship with flooding from the hoses as far as possible from the balancing moment midships.
Most reading this will know that modern boxship design for anything 10,000 TEU or bigger has moved toward a dual island design, with the superstructure much further forward. This puts the crew and bridge much closer to the perilous stuff and sadly appears to have been a major factor in the loss of life in the Maersk Honam disaster last year where an uncontrolled fire and explosions in the IMDG stacks reached back almost as far as the superstructure.
The fire was so intense that it melted structural steel. How do two or three crew members with a hose fight a fire like that?
Battery jeopardy
Another reason we have seen an increase in box ship fires is the massive expansion of the use of lithium ion power cells for our electronics. The price of having longer battery life and lighter weight phones is flimsy batteries that are prone to ‘thermal runaways’ if damaged or exposed to extremes of temperature.
There is a reason you cannot carry them in your checked luggage on commercial airliners anymore and why cabin crew are now trained to handle them with a hardened steel box of rock sand and a pair of oversize fireproof gloves.
Our insatiable appetite for cheaper and cheaper mass-produced personal electronics means components are produced at the lowest certifiable tolerances. It really is no surprise these innocuous-looking phantom menaces catch fire as often as they do.
Culprit-batteries
Lithium Ion batteries have been implicated in several major boxship fires over the years. Lithium Ion batteries encountering a thermal runaway event can burn at up to 900 degrees Celsius and it is not possible to realistically fight a large shipboard fire that hot.
You are basically along for the ride at that point. Plastics, alloys and metals that do not readily burn normally go up easily in 900 degree fires. Worse, Lithium Ion batteries (and a lot of other things besides) give off poisonous gases when they burn. This means your damage control efforts can continue only as long as your breathing apparatus air lasts, and the ship has power to drive the compressors to refill the tanks.
Lose power and it is all over. The vessel then swings, the wind whips up the fire and at that point the ship is almost certainly lost. You just have to get the crew off and concentrate on saving everyone.
What can be done about this?
Container lines have been developing firefighting robots that can visually check boxes and persist in fire control efforts where no human crew ever could. But this costs huge amounts of money and the container market is too competitive for any of its major players to have big sums available for this, ironically not least because of the sky-rocketing cost of P&I cover for the bigger box ships in the first place. It is a downward spiral.
If we take as unavoidable fact that many shippers will lie like politicians on the BOL or that IMDG goods and Lithium Ion batteries have to be carried on box ships, then clearly the onus is on the shipping lines themselves and the ports they operate from.
They must improve screening and take measures to make fighting fires on container vessels easier and more practical. One idea I had was to put a motion to the IMO to see if the container lines would be prepared to harmonize charges for IMDG and normal cargoes so that in theory at least, there would be no reason for shippers to lie on the BOL.
Change takes time
Until then, the unfair struggle will continue. Crews will not know exactly what is in the boxes they are transporting and fighting the all-too-common fires at sea will continue to be a lethal game of chance that will continue to claim lives of the very poorly-paid seafarers who keep our global trade moving.
BOX OUT
Christopher Morgan has over 17 years of experience as a credit specialist across the shipping, oil & gas, transport, logistics and aviation sectors.
He is an insightful natural analyst and manager with experience in collections, business development and working with banks and credit insurers.
