Administered by:
Bit of an update on here for anybody following the collision (technically an allision) between the cargo ship Solong and tanker Stena Immaculate earlier today in the approaches to the Humber.
So this here was the position this morning. The blue vessels are tugs, red are generally rescue or pilot vessels, the greens are mostly high speed windfarm vessels. There's also some trawlers bimbling around. Solong is the yellow dot stuck in the side of the orange tanker, with an ocean going tug providing firefighting.
This was the situation for most of the morning, with an increasing number of tugs coming to assist, and smaller vessels searching for a crew member who was rumoured to be unaccounted for.
It was then reported, by by a local MP, that everybody had been accounted for, and the search efforts knocked off.
Then in mid-afternoon everything changed. The tugs withdrew at least a couple of miles. This might be related to the announcement that fifteen containers of sodium cyanide were loaded on Solong, or perhaps an explosion risk.
Half an hour later an obvious and ominous searchline formed of smaller vessels.
Those vessels searched until around seven pm, stopping with darkness. It's still not clear what prompted it, but an obvious concern is that they're no longer convinced the whole crew is indeed ashore.
That's more or less where we are now. A number of tugs have been released and are mooching back to Grimsby, most of the smaller vessels have also left - many of them were diverted from work duties and have been out since early morning. The RNLI and some major tugs remain nearby.
The Humber is currently closed to commercial shipping and vessels are either diverting or anchoring to wait.
As for other news you might not have caught, the vessels involved were evacuated almost immediately by a mixture of pilot vessels and windfarm support vessels - essentially the first things that could get on scene. The RNLI rightly get a lot of kudos, but seafarers of all backgrounds will kick into action to save lives where they can.
Given the situation they faced - a tanker full of jet fuel and a boxship of unknown cargo - I hope they are given the respect they deserve for this.
The tugs having to stand off isn't a problem either. The impact dragged Stena Immaculate nearly half a mile but its anchor has successfully held both vessels. By all accounts Solong is embedded firmly in its side - unsurprising as it hit square on at 16 knots with no attempt to either slow or change course.
Solong went dark on AIS a long time ago. It's been absolutely ravaged by the fire. Stena Immaculate incredibly continues to advertise its position.
Given the nature of the tanker's cargo and employment - it's shifting jet fuel for the US government - there's been a fair bit of speculation that something untoward happened here.
It's unlikely - Solong was passing exactly along its previous track through the area and was likely on autopilot to a regular waypoint. If it wanted to ensure a collision it wouldn't necessarily line it up nine hours in advance either. There's nothing suspicious in this - just incredibly stupid.
Breaking - it looks like the search wasn't a false alarm at all. This is incredibly sad news given the reports earlier that everybody was safe.
And given the shitshow of alleged seamanship from Solong's bridge team today, it sticks the absolute tin lid on things that they couldn't apparently confirm how many crew should have got off the vessel until this afternoon (search efforts were definitely wound down for a while).
I hope they have the book thrown at them.
Further update - looks like the Humber is open for business again. A lot of this is tugs etc returning, but there's ro-ro vessels and bulkers in here too.
Update late this evening - the ships are still burning, according to the coastguard agency. Pretty much everything else has left the scene although Trinity House's Alert is now on station and I'm watching a couple of tugs that are possibly going back.
The tanker is likely still anchored securely but it's been windier here in York this evening and I guess at some point Solong might detach itself.
Ok, so the news from today. Firstly, and unsurprisingly, the plod have declared their suspicion that somebody might have been a dickhead...
Solong remains on fire, and there are reports it might sink at some point.
I'm not sure what has sparked those reports, but I will note ALL ships leak, there's not going to be any working pumps in this mess, and they might occasionally be damping down with more water.
At least they can try to get it to sink somewhere that's not too inconvenient.
On which note I'm pretty sure they've moved it south of the accident site to [checks notes] the point the entrance channels converge.
Er, maybe not letting it sink right there, lads?
Stena Immaculate meanwhile looks surprisingly healthy, considering its imminent reduction to razor blades. You can see how deeply Solong cut into it - double hulls are great and all, but they're never going to withstand this.
It remains at anchor, at a location that had probably been briefed on every passage plan going right now, with heavy amounts of underlining saying "do not hit"
It's accompanied by a tug, presumably as insurance, and also the pollution control vessel Mellum, which has come over from Germany.
I've not heard much about pollution so far - it's going to depend on what has burnt off, what has already spilled, and what remains in breached tanks.
Finally for now the concern about sodium cyanide has abated.
I'm not entirely sure what's going on there, but it's possible it took some time to confirm which containers had been loaded and what they contained. There's a long history of contents and weights being utterly different to the manifest too - potentially dangerous for both stability and not going spontaneously on fire.
And even without the sodium cyanide there'll be plenty of other things in there that you don't want in your sushi.
Further update for anybody who cares...
Solong continues to drift generally southwards, attended by various tugs. Given the AIS tracks I suspect they've not got a brilliant tow on it and don't want to shove it around too much. It's now well clear of both the approaches and the Lincolnshire coast though.
Stena Immaculate remains at anchor - you can see how far Solong has now drifted.
As for Stena Immaculate itself, the owners said yesterday there's seems to be no current pollution being released and no sheen around the vessel, which is encouraging. I've no reason to expect they'd be bullshitting as they're not on the hook for it. It's also no longer on fire at all.
I did hear scuttlebutt that they want to get people aboard today if possible to assess its condition and hopefully get it moved so it can offload and be surveyed properly.
In that context it's possibly significant that the seriously meaty and brilliantly Chris Foss-esque Brage Viking is currently alongside.
An Anchor Handling Tug Supply vessel, it's an ice-capable beast with about four times the pulling power of the smaller harbour tug that's also on scene still. If Stena Immaculate moves today I wouldn't be surprised.
Also, incredibly, it appears the accident was captured on video by a nearby ship. I don't think this adds much - it shows how bad visibility was though, as the operator switches to infrared to see it.
It's been confirmed that salvors were able to board Immaculate today to start assessing damage and ensure the ship is safe.
Once that's complete and they know what they're dragging with they'll then work out a plan for towing and salvaging it.
Not much of an update today - everything is more or less where it was in terms of position. In a further sign of confidence that neither vessel is in danger of sinking Alert and Pharos (of Trinity House and the Northern Light Board) have been released. Pharos had come south as THV Patricia is going into dry dock for planned maintenance, as I understand it.
Here's Alert's track on its way home to Harwich - it did pop over to one of the wrecks to say for a bit of Solong and goodbye on the way...
Breaking (late Friday 14th) - the master of Solong has tonight been charged with gross negligence manslaughter
Must admit I'm slightly surprised by the speed of this, just in context of how reluctant the police and CPS generally are to prosecute this particular offence.
This also means certain commentary is now sub judice, which is awkward because a few people have mentioned the pressures and demands on seafarers from shipowners etc.
Ignoring this case for a moment, all I'll say is that it's possible for the maritime industry to have major issues AND for individual seamanship to be bloody awful.
Saturday update - Solong and Stena Immaculate remain more or less as they were, and there's been no news released that I've seen. An insurer yesterday suggested that less than ten percent of the jet fuel aboard Immaculate had been lost, with just two tanks damaged.
But you might remember H&S Wisdom, which had unwisely stranded itself in the upper reaches of the Humber - and whilst everyone was looking the other way it's quietly been dragged back off!
It seems efforts to reduce the amount of cargo onboard and today's spring tides were sufficient to free the vessel, which is now heading down the river in the company of a tug.
Here's a bit on the lightening operation:
@DreadShips was it converted or still running on HFO?
@gsuberland don't know, I'm afraid. Right now neither vessel seems in danger of releasing much else so hopefully we've dodged a major pollution incident.
@DreadShips I'd like at this moment to make a shout out to the people who designed the tanker such that it was able to survive a broadside ram from a container ship, this could easily have been so much worse.
@DreadShips Weights not matching the manifest because of a logistics cockup, fine. Contents, not so fine, for these exact reasons, not to mention the problems that creates for salvage & environmental safety.
I doubt this one idiot skipper was the only one breaking the rules.
@BashStKid oh sure, I'm not condoning it - just aware of the nature of the beast. It might also be that they filed paperwork for the expected hazardous cargo, and that's what they went off rather than the final manifest? Will be interesting to see the section on the response within the final report.
@DreadShips Oh, not a criticism in any way. Just such a big fuckup as this is probably going to turn into a can of worms as the investigation gets going.
@BashStKid latest scuttlebutt on it is that it was *empty* sodium cyanide packaging going for recycling/reuse. Lethal to anybody sticking their nose into one, not especially dangerous outside the environment, as the old sketch has it.
@DreadShips That Clarke & Dawe minister looks positively competent compared to current ones.
@DreadShips the scorching on the tanker suggests very much that the fire it experienced was largely spilled fuel from the punctured tank sitting on the surface of the water.
The fire on the freighter... Suggests that it was flooded with that same fuel from the punctured tank.
How long does the backup electrical system stay running to keep the AIS transponder working on the tanker? Or is a generator still working?
@greem@cyberplace.social @DreadShips@mastodon.me.uk I was saying that to my wife the other day... it looks terribly burnt from the outside, but the deck, house, and fire suppression is still in good order and working.
Quite fantastic to see modern safety systems potentially doing their job, and doing it well.
The Solong though... that's wrecked.
@greem I've no idea to be honest - I've been pretty impressed though.
@DreadShips Bonus points for use of the words "scuttlebutt". 
@DreadShips Lovely dazzle ship inspired paint.
@DreadShips Ok, now I understand the tug paint scheme. Visible even by one-eyed 
captains.
@DreadShips Radars anybody?
@mihamarkic you should be looking out of the window as well, all things being equal (and low visibility implies you should moderate your speed etc if necessary to remain safe). Also if it's foggy there's no chance of anybody else seeing what's going on and asking if it's terribly wise to keep heading towards that stationary object.
@DreadShips Sure, but I can imagine radar based detection sounding a loud alarm. How is this not implemented on big boats is beyond me.
@mihamarkic it is (or at least it can be set to go off for a given radius around a potential collision). You can't do it automatically because navigating in ports and rivers etc would be almost impossible.
The crew had loads of tools at their disposal to prevent this happening. For whatever reason they didn't use them.
@DreadShips We won't find out until the trial, but I'd be astonished if they didn't breathalyze the captain pretty early. Which might explain the rapidity of the charge being brought (that and it being a major news event).
@cstross @DreadShips You’d imagine things had improved since the days of the Valdez, but maybe not.
“ten thousand barrels of oil fell out
and a case or two of gin”
@cstross gross negligence manslaughter goes well beyond being pissed though (and if they just wanted to charge him to prevent him absconding there's separate charges available there).
@cstross One thing that only occurred to me this evening though is that legally nobody has been declared dead yet. I've not given Russian conspiracy theories the time of day up until now, but banging him up on remand ASAP before Putin can try to spring him out the country would make a certain kind of sense.
It's impossible it was ordered by Russia, but interfering after the fact to stir up trouble and boost the conspiracy theorists is exactly the sort of thing they'd do.
@DreadShips @cstross I'm wondering how far you'd have to go. I don't know the safety protocols, but... going for a piss while the bridge is otherwise unmanned? Going full throttle with minimal visibility? Not having a watch on the radar set?
What sort of things (without speculating on the exact circumstances) might lead to such a charge?
Most of the things I can think of are either "shouldn't happen because there are other people around", or "actively engaging in sabotage of standards". 1/2
@DreadShips @cstross ... neither of which sounds like "negligence" to me. (One shouldn't happen at all, unless there's been some major scheduling problem, and the other is more of a conscious decision than "mere" negligence).
But maybe I just don't understand the processes or the law here. 2/2
[edit: speeling]
@darkling @cstross ok, so first up I am not a lawyer. Treat anything I say accordingly.
I think you can work backwards to an extent though. If you crash into a really obvious hazard, say the Isles of Scilly, prima facie you've not been keeping an adequate watch. You've got hours to respond - it's not just popping to the loo as the wrong time.
Also if you're not seeing the Isles of Scilly, it's only providence that stopped you hitting a small vessel instead. You've not had your eyes open.
@darkling @cstross So right off the bat I think it's fair to say - absent mechanical issues etc - there's been a failure under the COLREGs, whether or not that meets a criminal standard.
Gross negligence manslaughter is generally a corporate thing, as I understand it. The captain's on the hook as the CEO there, regardless of whether he's on the bridge or not, although again here the speed of charging him is maybe telling us something?
@darkling @cstross it's also the same offence that was leveled against the woman behind the Haverfordwest paddlebosrd tragedy, and who was convicted this week. She was in charge, made criminally stupid decisions, people died... here comes the consequence.
In both cases it's likely not just a moment's lapse that resulted in a terrible outcome.
@darkling @cstross and to go back to your question, I think that's where the answer lies. The examples you came up with vary from unwise to hell no (leaving the bridge unmanned, in close quarters, in fog? Oh fuck no) but none of them would have been critical here because there's at least nine whole hours to do something about a very, very obvious problem.
And nobody did.
@DreadShips @cstross The only way I can see this failing this hard is if the entirety of the crew (plus/minus the captain) was completely inexperienced, which seems unlikely, or wholly cowed to the captain's whim.
I suppose captain rostering an entire watch of noobs with no competent supervision would do it, or captain explicitly overriding strong objections from other crew.
All the control systems I've worked in (software dev, systems eng) have been more robust than this. Hence my confusion.
@darkling @cstross let's step away from this incident.
A few years back a ship grounded off Norfolk. The autopilot had been set to take it straight across a sandbank.
You can't blame most of the crew. It's not their job or responsibility. They have a right to assume the officers are competent.
You can certainly blame the OOW for failing to avoid the hazard. It was on his charts, he was OOW, case closed.
BUT it's the master's ship and he signed off on a shit passage plan, so he cops it too.
@DreadShips @cstross And, I guess, even in days before automation having [some number of senior people] say "sure, let's go that way, over the big lumps in the chart" is a major failure mode.
I suppose with enough possible cases of that, one's going to happen every so often. At which point, the question is how to reduce the probability of it happening again (which is a really, really hard sociological problem unrelated to technical means).
@darkling @cstross yeah, and that's where things like the MAIB come in. At least you get to read where somebody else screwed up, and maybe learn from it. I highly recommend their accident reports - if you read a few you'll likely understand much more about this specific incident. There's a twice-yearly digest that'll give you a really good feel fit what goes wrong at sea without getting into the details.
@DreadShips @cstross This example clarifies a lot of the failure modes for me, though. It's really helpful.
@DreadShips @cstross So it's a case of really bad management? Where the whole safety process has failed ("not keeping adequate watch"), and even the subordinates who might have had a clue have not been given the opportunity to correct the problem.
I'm kind of struggling to see how the entire system of 15-20 crew could fail to spot that there's nobody to spot (as it were).
@DreadShips @cstross
Even if the captain's failed to get the rosters right, someone should have been able to say "wait a mo, we've only got two men up here.. Where are the others?"
@darkling @cstross ok, so the situation here is likely that you've got two or possibly three officers capable of acting as officer of the watch (OOW). And they can ask the other crew to help out as a pair of eyes etc.
They'll be on a rotating watch of perhaps four hours on/off, with the captain either taking the odd watch or just handing the high risk bits like port entry. There's a few ways to arrange it - and with just two other officers the captain will definitely be taking watches.
@darkling @cstross having just one person on the bridge is frowned upon these days, to say the least.
And you're right to be incredulous. If this had happened at three in the morning I'd instantly think "early hours, likely just one person on the bridge, probably having turned off the alarms because they're trying to snooze". I'd think that as soon as I saw the time it happened.
Ten in the morning though? That's really special...
@DreadShips @cstross I guess anything this spectacular is going to have some equally spectacular systemic failures behind it. The stuff that H&S rules are made of. (Every H&S rule is a piece of institutional memory written in blood).
I've been lucky enough in my life not to have been through a spectacular national-press clusterfuck. So far. The worst I've seen is "oopsy, I deleted a database in live, let's restore".
I'm just struggling to see the possible chains of events (because above).
@darkling @cstross Check the COLREGs - they're not complicated and apply to all vessels. I had to prove I knew the basics to get my Dayskipper ticket, the minimum level of "can probably get sails up and not immediately kill themselves" competence, and even THAT knowledge would have prevented this.
Which in a nutshell is why every informed observer was happy to blame the container ship for causing it.
(Again, for clarity, this is not a comment on criminal responsibility etc)
@DreadShips @cstross Mmmm... I've just skimmed them on Wikipedia. There's a big gap here between "how the system should behave" and ""how to ensure the system behaves that way".
And that gap is the hole from which negligence flows.
(In terms I could explain, it's the difference between, say, ISO 1400x and ISO 900x. The first says what you should be achieving; the second says how you set up a system that can correct things when you're not achieving it).
@darkling @DreadShips @cstross@wandering.shop
(Apols for late joining this conversation)
I like your phrase re: "rules written in blood".
Even at a basic admin level the UK insurance company I worked for as a travelling auditor in the 1980s had seemingly petty rules about handling cash and cheques, not mixing up different weeks' money, to reduce confusions that usually led to tears.
In the modern age such simple stuff lay at the heart of the post office scandal, albeit on complex systems.
Ancient wisdom.
@RobertJackson58585858 @darkling it's even more explicit on the railways, where certain rules are known by the name of the accident that caused them to be implemented.
@darkling @DreadShips @cstross Non-military ships are run with surprisingly small crews. "Only" two on the bridge is not an unreasonable number; two, because one might have a heart attack. The remaining 12 crew aren't there because they are asleep, off duty, or have jobs elsewhere. They're not popping into the bridge every ten minutes to see if anyone's awake.
@denisbloodnok @darkling @cstross if running a watch were as simple as remembering to put up a rota each morning we wouldn't be in this pickle!
And yes, I forget how normal it seems to just have a couple of people on the bridge. That seems like plenty to me!
@darkling @DreadShips @cstross
I will start by pointing out that I am not in any way qualified to offer legal advice, and you should take my personal opinions with a pinch of salt.
The media are pointing at the collision and failure yo maintain a proper watch.
But there's credible evidence that the ship did not maintain a proper crew roster and they failed to ensure that all aboard were accounted for when they abandoned ship.
That's on the captain if, in court, it is found to be the truth.
Yes, that would be pretty shocking.
The authorities are perfectly happy to prosecute particularly egregious accidents though. This one in the Humber was another bit of a shocker in terms of competence, especially as a pilot was onboard.
(That said, I still think he was stitched up somewhat by the bridge design on this particular ship)
https://qsc.law/news/oliver-willmott-prosecuted-collision-river-humber/
Failure to maintain a bridge watch while underway and relying on the autopilot would definitely do it, (if that's what caused it).
@DreadShips In the video, the guy at the end says it's an extremely rare occurrence. That's probably because most captains can follow basic channel markers. 
@DreadShips big boat unstuck!
P.S. I’m happy to see the word “lightening” used correctly, instead of a typo for “lightning”.