Appoint responsible agency to deal with maritime accidents: CMM
View(s):Sri Lanka’s main Master Mariners have made several recommendations pertaining the MV X-Press Pearl shipping tragedy including establishing a responsible party to deal with maritime emergencies and encouraging the private sector to have suitably trained emergency teams.
These were made by the Company of Master Mariners of Sri Lanka (CMM) which has a membership of over 350 ship captains, some employed on ships, both local and foreign, and some in the shore-based shipping industry.
The CMM recently conducted a webinar to enlighten the public on the numerous aspects of shipboard operations in general and required preparedness towards possible maritime emergencies in local waters such as the incident of the MV X-Press Pearl.
The MV X-Press Pearl is a 3-month old ship with carrying capacity and ability to accommodate 2,700 TEUs. This was the third time the X-Press Pearl called at the Colombo port in her short life span.
It was stated that the ship’s crew had noticed a leak from a container after leaving Jebel Ali in UAE for Port Hamad in Qatar. It was identified to contain Nitric Acid. In Hamad, the Ship’s Captain had requested the port to arrange the discharge of the container which had been refused owing to unavailability of resources. In the Port of Hazira, a port in Gujarat, India, it was refused to discharge the said container for reasons unknown. Finally, she arrived in Colombo as the next scheduled port and not as “a port of refuge”, where the disaster occurred.
It was pointed out that carriage of dangerous cargo onboard ships is a very common occurrence. Identifying the dangers involved in the process, the entire membership of states of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the body of the UN on maritime matters, has agreed to adopt and comply with a set of mandatory requirements named the IMDG Code (International Maritime Dangerous Goods Code) which deals with all the dangerous cargoes carried on ships in packaged form the world over.
No country can handle dangerous cargo in packaged form without adhering to the said IMDG Code. The responsibility of shippers is to ensure that the cargo is correctly packed, labelled, separated and segregated from possible contaminants or reactors as described in the Code. The smaller, individual packages of cargo are then packed into containers,
if to be shipped by container ships.
In the case of the X-Press Pearl, with a leaking Nitric Acid container, it seems that the Master of the ship has acted prudently in reaching out for shore assistance from the subsequent ports of call when there was still no fire on board, the webinar was told.
Among the recommendations made by the CMM are to bring the Merchant Shipping Secretariat and Marine Environment Protection Authority under one Ministry making their functions more defined but cohesive; under the revised Merchant Shipping Act, define the roles of the connected agencies as applicable in maritime affairs and defining and delegating the roles of the Ports Authority, the SL Navy, the SL Coast Guard, the National Aquatic Resource Agency, the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, the SL Customs, and Immigration, etc; identify and document the emergency response roles of other agencies such as the Air Force, the Airport Authority, any other local authorities; ensure that proper legal status of all international conventions that have been ratified by Sri Lanka and the relevant regulations are gazetted; and have an effective and responsible communication mechanism to conduct the dissemination of appropriate and accurate information
as required.