A local pilot was in control of the ship at the time...
>The Bay pilot aboard had control of the ship at the time it ran aground. Investigators are still looking at whether it was a mechanical issue or operator error that caused it to leave the channel.
"The law of general average is a principle of maritime law whereby all stakeholders in a sea venture proportionately share any losses resulting from a voluntary sacrifice of part of the ship or cargo to save the whole in an emergency. For instance, should the crew jettison some cargo overboard to lighten the ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata by both the carrier and the cargo-owners."
gcaptain is not a train wreck, it assumes that the reader is in the maritime industry and uses terminology that is widely known to that specific industry segment. much as a network engineering or software development news site and acronyms might be even more confusing to people who hold 100 ton+ masters licenses.
look at all the weird sounding terms that might be used in an infosec/netsec publication...
It's a visual trainwreck on firefox, with elements being blocked by interstitials in the first load that have their dismissal button shifted into a weird and hard to find place. Once that was cleared up it was pretty readable.
Hmm. How does Firefox rank on netsec concerns? I would think better than Chrome and Safari since not backed by one of the oligopolists. Might be a good target for support regardless of share.
That site puts it at 7.5% if you just look at desktops- and, weirdly enough, 9.5% if you look at last month instead of this month (which is more in line with previous months). It has been trending upwards as well over the last few months.
Last month over 300 million pages were viewed with Firefox (a gross lower bound). This month an even more pages will likely be viewed with Firefox. Firefox remains the only popular independent browser. It has delegates in all web standard committees.
I don’t know what is your baseline for relevancy, but for most of us, this is more then enough to pass it.
Eh, you've got to be an absolutely awful developer if you can't have a website render properly in a browser that follows 99.5% of the same standards as the "relevant" top dawg.
I guess all the people who made sites work in fucking Internet Explorer have moved on to better positions or retired :D
I'm a bit confused by that; I'm on Firefox and I see nothing wrong with the site at all. It loaded fine and looks fine. That's with full protection turned on and the Disconnect plugin loaded as well. Any idea what was interfering with it on your setup?
> General Average is a maritime law principle requiring that the shipowner and cargo interests proportionately share in the costs associated with rescuing a vessel after a major casualty. When GA is declared, cargo owners are required to contribute to a GA fund before their cargo can be released.
... is what the article says. Is there something wrong with this?
No, the gCaptain article itself gave a good definition of General Average, a fundamental maritime principle that goes back millennia to the Code of Hammurabi in 1755 BC, at least.
General Average is a maritime law principle requiring that the shipowner and cargo interests proportionately share in the costs associated with rescuing a vessel after a major casualty. When GA is declared, cargo owners are required to contribute to a GA fund before their cargo can be released.
> General Average, a fundamental maritime principle that goes back millennia to the Code of Hammurabi in 1755 BC, at least.
Sorry? What does Hammurabi's Code say about this?
Law 238 apparently says that sinking and refloating a ship incurs a penalty equal to half the value of the ship, but that doesn't seem to bear much relationship to general average. It doesn't mention loss of goods and the penalty amount is not related to the loss amount. And all of the penalty falls on the ship operator.
Law 237 is much closer, but as far as I can see, to the extent that averaging is relevant to this case, the law explicitly rejects it:
> If a man hire a sailor and his boat, and provide it with corn, clothing, oil and dates, and other things of the kind needed for fitting it: if the sailor is careless, the boat is wrecked, and its contents ruined, then the sailor shall compensate for the boat which was wrecked and all in it that he ruined.
> If a man hire a boatman and a boat and freight it with grain, wool, oil, dates or any other kind of freight, and that boatman is careless and he sink the boat or wreck its cargo, the boatman shall replace the boat which he sank and whatever portion of the cargo he wrecked.
This makes ship operators personally liable for the full value of lost cargo, if they are "careless". I don't see any provision dealing with the (monetary) losses associated with the necessary (physical) loss of cargo.
I probably should have said had antecedents rather than goes back to. The point of 238 is a shared burden between the owner and the charterer in the case of a salvage.
> If a boatman [] has caused [a man’s boat] to sink and has raised it, silver of half of its value he shall give
I have no expertise and no opinion on how "raising" a boat might refer to either, neither, or both of refloating or salvaging the boat.
But it seems fair to read Law 238 in the context of the two laws it follows:
> 236. If a man hire his boat to a boatman and the boatman be careless and he sink or wreck the boat, the boatman shall replace the boat to the owner of the boat.
> 237. If a man hire a boatman and a boat and freight it with grain, wool, oil, dates or any other kind of freight, and that boatman is careless and he sink the boat or wreck its cargo, the boatman shall replace the boat which he sank and whatever portion of the cargo he wrecked.
> 238. If a boatman sink a man's boat and refloat [raise] it, he shall give silver to the extent of one-half its value.
This is a straightforward set of elaborations on a basic theme, as frequently occurs in the code. So the law says:
1. If you sink someone else's boat, you replace the boat.
2. If there was cargo on the boat, you have to replace that too.
3. If you sink the boat, but then you recover it, you don't have to replace the whole boat. [Which makes sense, because the whole boat hasn't been lost. Replacing the whole thing wouldn't be fair.] But a boat that's been sunk can be safely assumed to have taken some damage. So you pay for half of it.
That's not a sharing of the burden between the owner and the operator. It's assessing -- against the operator -- a customary judgement that is notionally equal to the value of the harm that the operator caused. None of the burden is being assigned to the owner, and all of the burden is being assigned to the operator.
So does maritime law override any contract between the ship owner and cargo shipper or does it just mandate that it is included in any contract?
Also does the local pilot bear any responsibility?
>Ever Forward ran aground on March 13 outside the Craighill shipping channel in Chesapeake Bay as it departed the Port of Baltimore with a pilot on board.
From another article...
>The Bay pilot aboard had control of the ship at the time it ran aground. Investigators are still looking at whether it was a mechanical issue or operator error that caused it to leave the channel.
From what I've been told, the local pilots does not bear any responsibility.
While I don't work on container ships, every time a pilot comes onboard our vessel (87m) we maintain control. The pilot provides guidance and assistance in navigation, but the captain or a bridge officer (depending on watch) is in control of the vessel.
I think liability is removed from the pilots because ultimately the ships captain is responsible for the ship, and the officer on watch is actually in control.
I’m curious what would happen if (or when) a ship’s captain/bridge officer “disobeys” a pilot’s order? Does that happen? Are ship captains obligated to comply with the pilot’s instructions or is the pilot offering take-it-or-leave-it guidance that most captains take?
Can it be regarded as mutiny when the pilot isn't part of the crew?
I would have assumed that the captain is the master of the ship, and the pilot is there to provide guidance.
I would have guessed that if the pilot provides guidance that places the ship at risk the master is then responsible if he follows the advice without recognizing the danger.
The majority of contract case law has developed from shipping disputes. These are business transactions, not consumer ones, so there is plenty of scope to contract/indemnify out of all sorts of protections.
I have worked nearby to this area - this is a legal principle, but the way this takes force in contracts is either by including a specific clause, or via a pointer to an international shipping standard which pulls in sensible defaults. Something like what happens with force majeure clauses [1]. International shipping contracts are themselves fairly standardised; they're thick and have all kinds of things in them, accreted over literally centuries of practice.
> they're thick and have all kinds of things in them, accreted over literally centuries of practice.
Oh, so the field is ripe for disruption by a startup that will jettison all that, replace it with arbitrary anti-customer terms under a thin layer of technology, and make bank! /s
Now, anyone who's been in the biz (4.5 years of sea time in the U.S. Navy here) knows that a vessel getting underway has an experienced pilot and a full navigation detail on the bridge while in restricted waters.
Looking at the ludicrous funds already spent over the last three weeks (we must be talking hundreds of millions by now, with no end in sight) and the ripple effects of closing the channel (which costs must jump into billions almost immediately), saying "she missed her turn" is almost a middle finger to the audience.
Was it a steering casualty? Were the radars operational? Was the crew qualified? Does someone want to craft an unsavory theory?
The costs involved were quite literally among the main drivers for creating the idea of insurance[1]. Tell me what caused her to "miss her turn". With stakes that high, such mishaps really need a full-on tsunami behind them for such a simplistic explanation.
From what I could see (https://www.npr.org/2022/03/31/1089997406/ever-forward-conta..., Wikipedia), the channel is not closed? Maybe operating at reduced capacity because of the need to keep a safety distance to the stranded ship, but they still can get around her.
BTW "She missed her turn" made me think of something different, it's "she missed a turn", as in going straight forward when she should have turned right or left.
Maybe it's just me, but "missing your turn" sounds more like a situation from a board game, where players take turns to move and for some reason you missed your turn. While in a navigation channel, it's not "your" turn because the turn in the channel is the same for every ship that passes through. Sorry if I'm too nitpicky ;)
Eh, it's pretty analogous to the phrase "I missed my exit." There's temporal and intentional elements in addition to the spacial one you're referencing, which makes it "my exit" as opposed to just "an exit".
Well yeah, but still, "my exit" usually refers to the exit where you live, or at least where you want to go to, while a turn is something everybody driving along the road has to take. Of course, if you fail to take the turn and crash your car, then you may or may not refer to it as "my turn" in the future, but until then, it's usually not that special to you.
I have not been on the bridge of a merchant vessel.
But on a warship, there is a navigation brief, and the people involved in the transit gather to walk thorough the whole evolution. Every single turn is discussed and visualized. No matter how boring and routine the transit.
"We are on this course at this speed for this long. We are shooting this navigation aid from the pelorus. We put on this much rudder for this much time to come to this course. We have shoal water off the starboard bow here. The channel does this."
And so forth.
Even on a merchant vessel, which has an order of magnitude less crew than a warship, the COLREGS[1] will tell you that "Thou Shalt Not Jack It Up".
The costs of screwing it up, in an RMF[2] vein, are astronomical.
Hence my skepticism at the newsreader glibly stating that the vessel "missed her turn".
These media people can spaz out for days over an apparent 9 hour gap on an official phone record with zero real-world effects.
Now, how about committing an act of journalism and getting a preliminary reading.
Did the helmsman have a seizure and throw the rudder over? What?
The channel is not closed: in fact what happened is that she was supposed to turn tightly into the channel and ... didn't. So she continued on ahead, burying herself an entire boat length into the sandbar. This is why she is stuck so tightly- a ~40 ft drought in ~20 feet of water, but she's so far stuck that she's cleared the channel.
As for why, the investigation hasn't completed, there is no official ruling on who's fault it is, and a whole lot of lawyers telling people not to comment because this is big, big money.
I think a lot of this is that ships have gotten massively larger quite recently. Just to focus on the Evergreen Marine fleet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Marine_Corporation) you can see that until 2013 the largest ships they operated were about 8000 TEU. Then in 2013 the Thalassa class came online at 13k TEU, and more came in that general size (including Ever Forward, the ship in this case), then in 2018 came the G class (including Ever Given) at 20k TEU, then the A class at an even larger 23k TEU is just starting to come online. But you can see that ships of this size are less than a decade old, so you can understand why the edge cases aren't fully worked out- channels and ports can handle them in perfect conditions, but when things degrade they are more likely to have problems because they are so much bigger.
Ports and canals already have rules about what ships they accept and what fees they charge. These institutions can change their rules as they see fit.
There's no reason to make big ships illegal on the open ocean. And in any case, the economically orthodox answer for dealing negative externalities is to tax them, not ban anything. But that doesn't apply here, because there are no necessary externalities: as said above the ports and canals can deal with this just fine. (Unless there are laws that ban them from making adequate rules. In this case these laws should be fixed.)
It’s well and truly buried. Something like it plowed into the mud at 14 knots, and pushed over a full ship length into it. It’s draft is typically 40ish feet and it’s in 20ft of water at the bow. So that means it’s buried 20ft in mud up front. The strength of the suction alone is staggering. I’m starting to think it might be there for a very long time. Maybe even salvaged in place.
I think it’s impossible to refloat it without damaging the hull at this point, and you’ll know salvage is the route they’re taking when the containment booms (for fuel loss prevention) are deployed around the vessel.
The ship is dead. The owners need to write it off their books. It shall never move again. The cargo will have to be removed one container at a time. The fuel tanks will be drained. And then the hull will need to be cut into pieces in place.
It's not impossible, just expensive. It's just in mud. Expect the arrival of large suction dredges. Like these.[1] Large cranes may be brought in to remove containers and lighten the load.
This is a big job, but not that bad. It's in a harbor near shore facilities, with good weather, and it's not urgent.
There was someone on Youtube (What is Going on with Shipping? w/Sal Mercogliano) that did the math on dredging and with the capability that can be harnessed and it sounds very unlikely.
The ship is so tall that unloading it from the ocean is almost impossible--there's nothing that can really do it. There's no ability to unload from the ship itself.
Oh, that guy. In the next video he admits his math was off.
There are cranes more than big enough to remove containers. The Left Coast Lifter, which was used to install some of the spans of the new SF Bay Bridge, is for sale.[1] That's far more crane than needed to lift a container. Look at that, and you'll see that there are machines big enough for the job. Available, even.
Smit Salvage was going to bring in cranes to unload the Ever Given, but didn't have to. They're on this job, and if they need the big cranes, they have access to them. It takes a small fleet - cranes, crane barges, container-carrying barges, tugboats, etc.
Container unloading is starting, using two barge-mounted cranes.[1] As expected. Two large dredges are on scene, removing mud around the ship. Donjon-Smit, the salvage firm, sent divers down and report the hull is intact, so they'll probably be able to float the ship out after enough lightening and dredging.
All parties agree the salvage bill will be huge, and litigation over who pays for what is starting.
If I am understanding this correctly -- if I ship cargo across oceans via container, I am potentially accepting some piece of liability for fixing any accident that occurs? Is this true?
Or are they just saying, oopsie, your costs are your own costs due to this lost cargo, we will not recompensate.
You bear the risk that you’ll have to pay your pro-rata share of any cargo sacrificed to save the ship.
You can (and probably should) have your own insurance that will pay you in case this happens. The insurer can pay cash to the cargo owners ASAP, and then sort out the equitable sale of the actual cargo and distribution of the proceeds. Kind of like a bankruptcy for a ship’s voyage.
If they have to wreck some stuff to save everybody else, and that works, everybody else has to pay something. Fair-ish, but I suspect Insurers start to call foul on Evergreen’s repeated groundings.
It is surprising how even "professionals" (read: companies shipping loads of containers every month) don't get that insurance part. And that insurance is dirt cheap, I used to have one as a basis for my now closed company. It covered all losses, globally, for all modes of transportation for solar modules (and some other electronics falling into the same class of products), covered warehousing. For a projected transported value of appr. 100k € per months I paid roughly 1k per year. And still people for go that, relying on the suppliers "insurance" based on Incoterms... Well, those insurance is usually very limited and leaves some holes, especially if people don't get what incoterms to use and what they mean...
If you're shipping "loads of containers every month" but you don't send them all on the same ship, perhaps you can afford to self-insure. Insurance is so cheap because only a tiny fraction of freight is lost.
It took one un-loading incident in Rotterdam to cause damage north of what 10 years worth of insurance premiums would have cost, in the case I mentioned above. And that's excluding the added benefits of your insurance handling all the administrative stuff, from on-site haverie commissars (transportation acident investigators) to sorting out claims against any third parties. Or claims from any third parties.
If I understand it correctly, this is mostly about cargo losses resulting from voluntary actions, i. e. throwing containers overboard to lighten the ship to get it unstuck.
The idea is that the crew should not be put into a position where they argue which cargo to jettison, and the customers should not have to care about the position of their cargo on board. Averaging out partial losses makes everyone's interests align. If all cargo is lost, the result of following the process would be identical to everyone losing the value of their cargo.
Costs from environmental damage are excluded. Some of the salvage operations are included. Not sure if it's limited to the value of your cargo somewhere, but it doesn't seem to be a risk of unlimited liability.
In any shipping, part of the risk is that your cargo may arrive late, damaged or never - you may get insurance for that, but that risk exists.
GA means that if due to some issue they throw away half of the cargo to save the other half (which is a good thing - you want them to be permitted to do that without going bankrupt, because otherwise there is no motivation to save the half that can be saved) then instead of some people getting their cargo and some losing it, those whose cargo was saved pay a proportional value to those whose cargo got thrown away, so after the settlement all of them get the same average lost cargo value.
> which is a good thing - you want them to be permitted to do that without going bankrupt, because otherwise there is no motivation to save the half that can be saved
You also don’t want them to have any incentive to treat one customer’s cargo more carefully than another’s. You want them to jettison cargo indiscriminately with the only incentive being to save the ship.
There is some incentive to discriminate - it is advantageous to everyone to jettison the cheapest cargo in order to save the more valuable cargo, no matter to whom which cargo belongs.
For some ratio of cost to weight, with consideration as to where on the ship it is... if you have time to calculate such things. In this case they probably do, if they really care to.
At the scale of these ships, though, if you have to jettison cargo you're probably looking at hundreds of containers or more. At that point it probably doesn't make that much difference which containers you jettison, it'll mostly average out.
There's an interesting wrinkle: the system works on self-declared value of cargo, and is set up in such a way that people have an incentive to declare the true value of the cargo.
Basically, if you declare a value that's too low, you don't get enough money when your cargo gets thrown overboard. If you declare too high, you pay more, if somebody else's cargo gets thrown overboard.
Evergreen Marine? Isn't this the same company that ran aground in the suez canal? What gives? How would they not prevent this from happening so close to that last huge nightmare, and bottleneck in global shipping?
Yeah, same company and same class of ships. The ship that got stuck in the Suez had gotten stuck other places previous and might have gotten stuck afterwards too faik. Huge ships played a part in the bottlenecking of LA/Long Beach also.
In the last time years, all of the largest shipping companies have built ships that are essentially way too big, just to save some marginal amount. A big part of this is that these shipping lines mostly don't have to pay the downside of this absurdity.
Knowing absolutely nothing about this industry, I wonder if it’s just a matter of there being only a few big players, such that any accident would always be one of a couple companies.
Alternatively, because the Suez canal incident was so widespread news, you're now hearing about incidents with this company that otherwise would have stayed as footnotes in specialty media
They're getting the Boeing treatment. Their name now has mind share among the people with high class, high dollar eyeballs that everyone wants their ads in front of. So every time they do anything even marginally newsworthy it will be written about because the subject has a great clicks to effort ratio for the people who produce content in order to sell ad time.
So for anyone curious, the article mentions very briefly that there was a pilot onboard. A pilot is someone who comes onboard to help the ship navigate, and is usually required in areas like this (areas with shallow waters, etc). Transiting the Suez also requires a pilot come onboard. They come on to prevent these issues.
Battleship USS Missouri also ran aground in Chesapeake Bay in 1950.
the battleship remained stuck for over two weeks before being freed from the sand. The ship was so damaged that she had to return to port and enter dry dock for repairs.
Does anyone have a reputable resource for how General Average actually works under today's international law?
Some questions I'm curious about are:
(1) What constitutes an "emergency"? If the ship is stuck but not otherwise in imminent danger, would GA apply? It would appear to me that Evergreen could safely transport the cargo off the ship, but would rather just throw it overboard to save time and effort. Doesn't that just unnecessarily pass the costs on to cargo-owners?
(2) Many places refer to the idea that GA only applies if jettisoning cargo actually saves the ship. It sounds like the ship is really stuck - if they jettison cargo but the ship still doesn't budge, would that nullify GA?
(3) Is the GA liability limited by the declared value of your own cargo on that ship? What happens if the total declared value of the "saved" cargo is less than the value of the "discarded" cargo?
(4) Do cargo-owners have an option to say "you know what, I don't really want my cargo anymore" and avoid paying GA?
(5) What country would have jurisdiction over any litigation in this instance? Would it be the country whose territorial waters this happened in, the flag country of the ship, the country of ownership of the ship, contract-defined, etc?
I'm not an expert but 3 and 4 seem to have been answered: the point of GA is everyone gets X% of their cargo value back, and we decide what X is. Either you get X in cash, or you pay 100-X into the fund. So yes, your liability is limited to 100% of your cargo, and you wouldn't generally want to exercise any option to walk away from it. (Maybe you would in some edge cases around fraud, or financing difficulties, or where the market value of your cargo has suddenly declined).
The Odd Lots podcast did an episode on this ship—partly motivated by the fact that one of the co-host's (Tracy Alloway) recently moved from Hong Kong to New York and all her stuff is on it:
> It's happened again. Another container ship owned by the Evergreen Maritime Corp. has gotten stuck a year after the Ever Given became lodged in the Suez Canal and briefly halted the flow of global trade. This time the grounding happened in the Chesapeake Bay and involves the Ever Forward -- a 1000-foot container ship which happens to be carrying the contents of Tracy's entire Hong Kong apartment. On this episode of Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with maritime historian Sal Mercogliano about why another ship has gotten stuck, what it says about shipping and infrastructure, and how long Tracy might have to wait to get her stuff.
Odd Lots has done a number of episode on logistics over the last little while (ports (multiple times), rail, trucking, the Suez Canal and Ever Given, shipping pallets, shipping containers, etc), so this is just continuing the 'series' in a way.
I would like to see General Average be used for more than just shipping.
For example, I would happily insure my house with a 'General Average' based insurance. I would pay no premium upfront for said insurance, but I would be committing to pay a proportional share of anyone's house that is part of the scheme that gets damaged.
Sadly nothing like this seems to exist. Instead we're stuck with regular insurance which on average spends more on admin and overheads than it actually pays out!
112 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] thread>The Bay pilot aboard had control of the ship at the time it ran aground. Investigators are still looking at whether it was a mechanical issue or operator error that caused it to leave the channel.
https://chesapeakebaymagazine.com/container-ship-aground-out...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_average
I had no idea that ship was still stuck. I guess now they have to dismantle it in place? What's process here?
look at all the weird sounding terms that might be used in an infosec/netsec publication...
I stand corrected, it's hovering just under 4% on average per https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2021...
I don’t know what is your baseline for relevancy, but for most of us, this is more then enough to pass it.
I guess all the people who made sites work in fucking Internet Explorer have moved on to better positions or retired :D
... is what the article says. Is there something wrong with this?
Sorry? What does Hammurabi's Code say about this?
Law 238 apparently says that sinking and refloating a ship incurs a penalty equal to half the value of the ship, but that doesn't seem to bear much relationship to general average. It doesn't mention loss of goods and the penalty amount is not related to the loss amount. And all of the penalty falls on the ship operator.
Law 237 is much closer, but as far as I can see, to the extent that averaging is relevant to this case, the law explicitly rejects it:
> If a man hire a sailor and his boat, and provide it with corn, clothing, oil and dates, and other things of the kind needed for fitting it: if the sailor is careless, the boat is wrecked, and its contents ruined, then the sailor shall compensate for the boat which was wrecked and all in it that he ruined.
( http://www.general-intelligence.com/library/hr.pdf )
> If a man hire a boatman and a boat and freight it with grain, wool, oil, dates or any other kind of freight, and that boatman is careless and he sink the boat or wreck its cargo, the boatman shall replace the boat which he sank and whatever portion of the cargo he wrecked.
( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Code_of_Hammurabi_(Harper... )
This makes ship operators personally liable for the full value of lost cargo, if they are "careless". I don't see any provision dealing with the (monetary) losses associated with the necessary (physical) loss of cargo.
This is not obvious. From what appears to be a very literal translation at https://www.cdli.ucla.edu/search/search_results.php?SearchMo... :
> If a boatman [] has caused [a man’s boat] to sink and has raised it, silver of half of its value he shall give
I have no expertise and no opinion on how "raising" a boat might refer to either, neither, or both of refloating or salvaging the boat.
But it seems fair to read Law 238 in the context of the two laws it follows:
> 236. If a man hire his boat to a boatman and the boatman be careless and he sink or wreck the boat, the boatman shall replace the boat to the owner of the boat.
> 237. If a man hire a boatman and a boat and freight it with grain, wool, oil, dates or any other kind of freight, and that boatman is careless and he sink the boat or wreck its cargo, the boatman shall replace the boat which he sank and whatever portion of the cargo he wrecked.
> 238. If a boatman sink a man's boat and refloat [raise] it, he shall give silver to the extent of one-half its value.
This is a straightforward set of elaborations on a basic theme, as frequently occurs in the code. So the law says:
1. If you sink someone else's boat, you replace the boat.
2. If there was cargo on the boat, you have to replace that too.
3. If you sink the boat, but then you recover it, you don't have to replace the whole boat. [Which makes sense, because the whole boat hasn't been lost. Replacing the whole thing wouldn't be fair.] But a boat that's been sunk can be safely assumed to have taken some damage. So you pay for half of it.
That's not a sharing of the burden between the owner and the operator. It's assessing -- against the operator -- a customary judgement that is notionally equal to the value of the harm that the operator caused. None of the burden is being assigned to the owner, and all of the burden is being assigned to the operator.
Also does the local pilot bear any responsibility?
>Ever Forward ran aground on March 13 outside the Craighill shipping channel in Chesapeake Bay as it departed the Port of Baltimore with a pilot on board.
From another article...
>The Bay pilot aboard had control of the ship at the time it ran aground. Investigators are still looking at whether it was a mechanical issue or operator error that caused it to leave the channel.
While I don't work on container ships, every time a pilot comes onboard our vessel (87m) we maintain control. The pilot provides guidance and assistance in navigation, but the captain or a bridge officer (depending on watch) is in control of the vessel.
I think liability is removed from the pilots because ultimately the ships captain is responsible for the ship, and the officer on watch is actually in control.
I would have assumed that the captain is the master of the ship, and the pilot is there to provide guidance.
I would have guessed that if the pilot provides guidance that places the ship at risk the master is then responsible if he follows the advice without recognizing the danger.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure
Oh, so the field is ripe for disruption by a startup that will jettison all that, replace it with arbitrary anti-customer terms under a thin layer of technology, and make bank! /s
Now, anyone who's been in the biz (4.5 years of sea time in the U.S. Navy here) knows that a vessel getting underway has an experienced pilot and a full navigation detail on the bridge while in restricted waters.
Looking at the ludicrous funds already spent over the last three weeks (we must be talking hundreds of millions by now, with no end in sight) and the ripple effects of closing the channel (which costs must jump into billions almost immediately), saying "she missed her turn" is almost a middle finger to the audience.
Was it a steering casualty? Were the radars operational? Was the crew qualified? Does someone want to craft an unsavory theory?
The costs involved were quite literally among the main drivers for creating the idea of insurance[1]. Tell me what caused her to "miss her turn". With stakes that high, such mishaps really need a full-on tsunami behind them for such a simplistic explanation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_insurance
BTW "She missed her turn" made me think of something different, it's "she missed a turn", as in going straight forward when she should have turned right or left.
But now I'm really overthinking it ;)
But on a warship, there is a navigation brief, and the people involved in the transit gather to walk thorough the whole evolution. Every single turn is discussed and visualized. No matter how boring and routine the transit.
"We are on this course at this speed for this long. We are shooting this navigation aid from the pelorus. We put on this much rudder for this much time to come to this course. We have shoal water off the starboard bow here. The channel does this."
And so forth.
Even on a merchant vessel, which has an order of magnitude less crew than a warship, the COLREGS[1] will tell you that "Thou Shalt Not Jack It Up".
The costs of screwing it up, in an RMF[2] vein, are astronomical.
Hence my skepticism at the newsreader glibly stating that the vessel "missed her turn".
These media people can spaz out for days over an apparent 9 hour gap on an official phone record with zero real-world effects.
Now, how about committing an act of journalism and getting a preliminary reading.
Did the helmsman have a seizure and throw the rudder over? What?
[1] https://www.imo.org/en/About/Conventions/Pages/COLREG.aspx
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_Management_Framework
As for why, the investigation hasn't completed, there is no official ruling on who's fault it is, and a whole lot of lawyers telling people not to comment because this is big, big money.
Perhaps you could either make more substantial comments, or alternatively make worse comments so we can flag them?
Ports and canals already have rules about what ships they accept and what fees they charge. These institutions can change their rules as they see fit.
There's no reason to make big ships illegal on the open ocean. And in any case, the economically orthodox answer for dealing negative externalities is to tax them, not ban anything. But that doesn't apply here, because there are no necessary externalities: as said above the ports and canals can deal with this just fine. (Unless there are laws that ban them from making adequate rules. In this case these laws should be fixed.)
This has now been 2 weeks. I guess that since it's not blocking anything they don't have to move as quickly.
This is a big job, but not that bad. It's in a harbor near shore facilities, with good weather, and it's not urgent.
[1] https://boskalis.com/about-us/fleet-and-equipment/dredgers.h...
The ship is so tall that unloading it from the ocean is almost impossible--there's nothing that can really do it. There's no ability to unload from the ship itself.
Video from the guy going into depth (hah) on the 2nd refloat attempt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbWq7zlMKZQ
There are cranes more than big enough to remove containers. The Left Coast Lifter, which was used to install some of the spans of the new SF Bay Bridge, is for sale.[1] That's far more crane than needed to lift a container. Look at that, and you'll see that there are machines big enough for the job. Available, even.
Smit Salvage was going to bring in cranes to unload the Ever Given, but didn't have to. They're on this job, and if they need the big cranes, they have access to them. It takes a small fleet - cranes, crane barges, container-carrying barges, tugboats, etc.
Somebody is going to have a huge salvage bill.
[1] http://www.leftcoastlifter.com/
All parties agree the salvage bill will be huge, and litigation over who pays for what is starting.
[1] https://www.workboat.com/coastal-inland-waterways/new-detail...
2. You drive, at speed, into four feet of mud.
Which is easier to get out of?
Depends massively on other yet unknown facts about the situation, but generally the snow.
Or are they just saying, oopsie, your costs are your own costs due to this lost cargo, we will not recompensate.
You can (and probably should) have your own insurance that will pay you in case this happens. The insurer can pay cash to the cargo owners ASAP, and then sort out the equitable sale of the actual cargo and distribution of the proceeds. Kind of like a bankruptcy for a ship’s voyage.
If they have to wreck some stuff to save everybody else, and that works, everybody else has to pay something. Fair-ish, but I suspect Insurers start to call foul on Evergreen’s repeated groundings.
The idea is that the crew should not be put into a position where they argue which cargo to jettison, and the customers should not have to care about the position of their cargo on board. Averaging out partial losses makes everyone's interests align. If all cargo is lost, the result of following the process would be identical to everyone losing the value of their cargo.
Costs from environmental damage are excluded. Some of the salvage operations are included. Not sure if it's limited to the value of your cargo somewhere, but it doesn't seem to be a risk of unlimited liability.
GA means that if due to some issue they throw away half of the cargo to save the other half (which is a good thing - you want them to be permitted to do that without going bankrupt, because otherwise there is no motivation to save the half that can be saved) then instead of some people getting their cargo and some losing it, those whose cargo was saved pay a proportional value to those whose cargo got thrown away, so after the settlement all of them get the same average lost cargo value.
You also don’t want them to have any incentive to treat one customer’s cargo more carefully than another’s. You want them to jettison cargo indiscriminately with the only incentive being to save the ship.
At the scale of these ships, though, if you have to jettison cargo you're probably looking at hundreds of containers or more. At that point it probably doesn't make that much difference which containers you jettison, it'll mostly average out.
Basically, if you declare a value that's too low, you don't get enough money when your cargo gets thrown overboard. If you declare too high, you pay more, if somebody else's cargo gets thrown overboard.
The beauty of General Average is that (in insurance terms) the thing you are insuring is also the premium you pay.
In the last time years, all of the largest shipping companies have built ships that are essentially way too big, just to save some marginal amount. A big part of this is that these shipping lines mostly don't have to pay the downside of this absurdity.
Not to speak to the specifics of the incidents, but "the company is irrelevant because they are distant from the ship" wouldn't wash.
Even if there are no other else's that have ships that big, they controlled that they built ships that big at the very least.
A ship that draws 40 foot of water is in 25 foot of water.
Get it?
the battleship remained stuck for over two weeks before being freed from the sand. The ship was so damaged that she had to return to port and enter dry dock for repairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_USS_Missouri_grounding
Some questions I'm curious about are:
(1) What constitutes an "emergency"? If the ship is stuck but not otherwise in imminent danger, would GA apply? It would appear to me that Evergreen could safely transport the cargo off the ship, but would rather just throw it overboard to save time and effort. Doesn't that just unnecessarily pass the costs on to cargo-owners?
(2) Many places refer to the idea that GA only applies if jettisoning cargo actually saves the ship. It sounds like the ship is really stuck - if they jettison cargo but the ship still doesn't budge, would that nullify GA?
(3) Is the GA liability limited by the declared value of your own cargo on that ship? What happens if the total declared value of the "saved" cargo is less than the value of the "discarded" cargo?
(4) Do cargo-owners have an option to say "you know what, I don't really want my cargo anymore" and avoid paying GA?
(5) What country would have jurisdiction over any litigation in this instance? Would it be the country whose territorial waters this happened in, the flag country of the ship, the country of ownership of the ship, contract-defined, etc?
> It's happened again. Another container ship owned by the Evergreen Maritime Corp. has gotten stuck a year after the Ever Given became lodged in the Suez Canal and briefly halted the flow of global trade. This time the grounding happened in the Chesapeake Bay and involves the Ever Forward -- a 1000-foot container ship which happens to be carrying the contents of Tracy's entire Hong Kong apartment. On this episode of Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with maritime historian Sal Mercogliano about why another ship has gotten stuck, what it says about shipping and infrastructure, and how long Tracy might have to wait to get her stuff.
* https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/5abecebe-aa98-11ec-9133-1f4...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-tracys-furniture-i...
Odd Lots has done a number of episode on logistics over the last little while (ports (multiple times), rail, trucking, the Suez Canal and Ever Given, shipping pallets, shipping containers, etc), so this is just continuing the 'series' in a way.
For example, I would happily insure my house with a 'General Average' based insurance. I would pay no premium upfront for said insurance, but I would be committing to pay a proportional share of anyone's house that is part of the scheme that gets damaged.
Sadly nothing like this seems to exist. Instead we're stuck with regular insurance which on average spends more on admin and overheads than it actually pays out!