Ports as System Integrators, Not Just Ship Service Providers – Part 4

operations were family concerns, now they belong to groups that expect an adequate return on their investment, and as salvaging is not part of their core business they do not invest more than is necessary. Smit forms part of the Boskalis group, Mammoet of the Steenkolen Handels Vereniging group, Svitzer is part of Maersk, and Titan of Crowley. Titan’s owner, asked why he had sold his company to Crowley, replied: “because I did not have the capital outlay required nowadays to perform the long and complicated salvage or wreck removal operations.” Since there is no foreseeable return on the investment made, firms no longer invest in the modernisation of necessary systems and technologies. “Consequently behemoths of container vessels cannot be offloaded when such a vessel has been involved in a collision and subsequent grounding, stranding, explosion or fire, or being partly submerged”, Reinigert said, adding: “only the big crane vessels operating in the offshore oil and gas industry are capable of discharging these ships, but these cranes are either not available, too expensive or cannot come alongside due to their draft”. Fifteen years ago the P&I Club, the consortium of maritime insurance companies, came up with the idea of financing salvage companies, working together in close cooperation: where one did not have the means or the possibility of adequately intervening, another would step in to assist. “Imagine if this was the case ashore with regard to the ambulance service, or your house was on fire, and first you had to phone a broker or negotiate who was permitted to take you to the hospital or would be allowed to extinguish the fire of your house”, Reinigert goes on, and adds, “Time will come when the maritime world will be faced with a huge containership casualty (…) and what will be the means then to handle such a calamity?”. The new generations of salvage experts will have to have very different training for systems that that cannot remain those in place today.
Giant ships may therefore be of some utility to shipowners, to operators, but they are currently of little use to the market, to the logistics chain, or to the economy. On the subject of safety they are a serious unknown. The “Emma Maersk”, towed to the shipyards of Palermo with 13,000 m3 of contaminated seawater in its engine room, 13,537 Teu onboard, 7,112 of which empty, is emblematical of this senseless business. (22)