North Sea ship crash prompts environmental concerns

Police have begun a criminal investigation into the cause of a collision between a cargo ship and a tanker in the North Sea. The Portuguese-flagged Solong and the US-registered tanker Stena Immaculate crashed off the East Yorkshire coast, with thousands of barrels of aviation fuel leaking into the sea. Simon Boxall - an oceanographer at the University of Southampton - has been telling me what happened, and what the environmental impacts might be…

Simon - As far as we can tell, the Stena Immaculate, the vessel carrying this jet fuel, was at anchor about 10 miles off the coast of Hull, and the other vessel, the Portuguese-flagged Solong, crashed into it at full speed, about 15 knots, and it was travelling from the North Southward into the North Sea. We don't know why or how the Solong managed to hit the Stena ship, but we do know that it hit its square on and it caused extensive damage, damaging both hulls and interlocking the two ships.

Chris - Are there not technologies, in fact decades-old technologies, that are at play to stop this kind of thing happening? Things as simple as radar, which these ships should by law have to be using?

Simon - There are. These days the technology is amazing. You know, on the ships we use, if I go off to the bridge, the radar is no longer the old-fashioned radar of a sweeping hand showing blips on the screen. These days, modern technology means the radar is superimposed onto a chart. The chart includes the location of the ships, so the ships don't just show up as blips, but actually show up as ships, because the ships themselves transmit a sort of an ID, a bit like aircraft do. And so you can see, as the sort of chart illuminates, you actually get a picture of the ship on the chart, with the name of the ship, what it's doing at anchor, along with its size and even its cargo sometimes.

So, if they were watching the screen, whoever was on the bridge was watching the screen, then the Stenna Immaculate should have shown up very clearly miles before the Solong hit it.

Chris - But equally, the ship at anchor would have been watching these screens. They would have seen a vessel on a collision course, and it's up to them also to be proactive, because the regulations for preventing collisions at sea say it's everyone's responsibility. So, shouldn't they have been jumping on the radio and saying: ‘Approaching vessel, you're on a collision course’?

Simon - We don't know if they were or not. There's not enough information yet, but several people have said, well, why didn't they just up anchor and move out of the way? The problem is that on a vessel like the Stenna Immaculate, first of all, you've got to raise the anchor, and that's not a trivial task. We're talking about 20 minutes, half an hour, but also you've got to fire the engines up. These aren't engines that you can sort of put the key in the ignition, turn the ignition on, and move off like a car. These things take time to fire up. I won't use the word steam, because they're not steam driven, but enough sort of power to then be able to move. So, there's no way that the Stenna Immaculate could have moved out of the way, and the rules are fairly clear. If you've got a ship that's at anchor, there will be a watch on the bridge at all times, but the watch on the bridge may not have realised that the Portuguese ship was heading straight for them until quite late on. We don't know yet whether they did send a transmission to say that the ship was on a collision course. Time will tell when the inquiry comes out.

Chris - What are we most concerned about now then?

Simon - Two ships collided, and we had this huge fireball, and the initial concern, obviously, is for life and loss of life at sea. The fact that, tragically, they lost one person from the Solong, or rather that one person's missing, and assumed dead, is terrible. But given the scale of this collision, given the number of people involved, and given the size of that fireball that we all saw, the fact that there were not more casualties or deaths, I think is quite miraculous.

The two ships were interlocked, and obviously the initial concern is to put the fire out. It's too dangerous to go onto the ship. The jet fuel itself is quite toxic, so you don't really want to get too close to it without the right equipment.

And there was, of course, early concerns that the Solong was carrying 15 containers of the very highly toxic sodium cyanide, which, when it's hot, you have a fire blazing, and it hits water, becomes quite dangerous. It becomes a sort of hydrogen cyanide. So, there was caution, I think, before rescuers could move in to actually start securing the ships.

There was concern that the Solong would sink. They were quite happy that the Stena Immaculate was stable. The concern then is in terms of pollution. Now, the Stena Immaculate didn't lose as much jet fuel as was at first feared. The other tanks remained intact. And that really is a good indication of modern rules and regulations on ship structure and construction. The Solong did lose some containers. We don't know what was in those containers. There will be some pollution incidents.There will be some impact. But I think the impact that we're going to see is far less than it would have been had the entire ship lost its cargo, both the Solong and the Stena Immaculate.

Chris - Nevertheless, there is still going to be some impact from whatever volume of aviation fuel has ended up in the sea, ending up in the sea, as well as any other boat fuel, etc, that's been lost overboard. So, what will be the immediate response to this? How do we mitigate against the environmental onward impacts of this?

Simon - There are three simple rules of spills at sea. I think the first one is obviously don't. But then we assume that accidents happened, nothing's foolproof. And so the next stage is to contain as much as possible. And that means putting booms around the vessels. It also means trying to plug the holes. And then you get to the cleanup stage, you pick up as much as you can. That's using a combination of surface pumps, and what we call skimmers. And those skimmers literally skim the surface of the water to remove oil.

And that's trying to pick up as much of the oil as possible. The final stage is down to a combination of nature taking over and using dispersants and other methods of trying to disperse the oil. Interestingly enough, people assume crude oil is about as bad as it can get. Crude oil is far less toxic than some of the refined oils like aviation fuel or jet fuel. Jet fuel is a little bit like diesel, somewhere between diesel and paraffin, really. And so it is quite toxic. And it does have a big impact on particularly fisheries in the area. So, there are concerns that we'll see impact from fisheries. And we'll also see impact on stuff on the seabed.
Now the volumes, as far as I'm aware, that have been spilt are relatively small. And a lot of the stuff that was spilt, as we saw from the fireballs, has burnt off. So it's transferred the pollution problem from the ocean to the atmosphere. And that does make life a little bit easier.

Chris - Presumably now there's going to be some scientific initiatives to try to gather as much data and learn as much from this unfortunate incident as we can.

Simon - Absolutely. I mean, when we work in oil spills, and we're looking at the science of oil spills, which we do, we are ambulance chasers at the end of the day. Obviously, and rightly, the public get concerned if we would go around and dump loads of oil into the ocean for research purposes. So we have to make the best of incidents like this just to look at, first of all, how the oil behaves. At Southampton I spend a lot of time looking at trying to measure the thickness and type of oil from aircraft so we can look at focusing cleanup operations. But at the same time, learning how the environment, how nature, copes with this oil. And although we can do laboratory tests and things on certain types of shellfish and things, ultimately the only way we really learn about oil spills is by being on the ground and measuring, observing and seeing the impact of these terrible incidents.