- According to a Dutch safety watchdog it is “undesirable” for large container ships to use a shipping route through an environmentally sensitive and shallow sea.
- These shallow sea routes are off the coast of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark in heavy northwesterly storms because of the heightened risk of them losing their cargo.
- The conclusion came in a report by the Dutch Safety Board into the loss of hundreds of containers from a ship, the MSC Zoe, on New Year’s Day 2019, that led to tons of cargo washing up on nearby beaches.
A recently reported news article in the Insurance Journal by Mike Corder deals with the undesirable shipping routes for large container ships which end up in losing the containers.
Lesson learnt
The ship, carrying more than 8,000 containers, was sailing north of a chain of islands in the Wadden Sea on a route from the Portuguese port of Sines to Bremerhaven, Germany, when it was battered by waves kicked up by a northwesterly storm. It lost 342 containers and 3,000 tons of cargo overboard, the Safety Board report said.
There are two shipping routes north of the Wadden Islands – a southern passage, which is shallower and closer to the islands, and a northern route. The Zoe was using the southern route.
“The lessons to be learned from this accident must result in a better risk management of container transport on the shipping routes,” the report said.
A series of recommendations
The safety board made a series of recommendations, including that the governments of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark work together to make a proposal to the International Maritime Organization to safeguard the environmentally sensitive Wadden area.
“The aim of this proposal should be to minimize the loss of containers north of the Wadden Islands and to protect the Wadden area,” the Dutch report said.
“This may include measures for (a specific category of) container ships, and if necessary alteration of the two shipping routes north of the Wadden Islands.”
Continuous danger of shipping in shallow sea
Bernd-Carsten Hiebing, a lawmaker for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right party in the state of Lower Saxony, said the report highlighted the continued dangers of shipping. But he pushed back against calls by the opposition Green party for a ban on `mega container ships,’ saying it wouldn’t help improve security for people and the environment.
Instead, he said it would be better to consider more closely which routes are navigable by which types and classes of ships. He also backed stricter rules for securing freight and the use of location transmitters for hazardous cargo containers.
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Source: Insurance Journal
