Worse things still happen at sea: the shipping disasters we never hear about

Eight missing from a cargo ship that sank in the Pentland Firth, another grounded near Southampton – these local accidents remind us that the ocean is the most dangerous workplace on the planet. So why do 2,000 seafarers die each year, and what can be done to make them safer?

Rose George
Sat 10 Jan 2015 03.00 EST Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 20.43 EST

I take poorly to planes. I am a nervous, panicked and unsettled passenger. In the worst moments, I take Valium, and perhaps – inadvisably – a drink, too. I sit in my seat trying not to grip things too obviously, saying my mantra as the plane rocks through turbulence: “Pretend it’s a ship. Pretend it’s a ship.” I tell myself that the air is water, and that ships rock constantly on water, so what’s the difference? Sometimes it works.

I am terrified of planes, but calm on ships. I spent five weeks on a container ship and only felt unsafe when it was in pirate waters. I was on a huge metal object, buoyant on water, operated by the latest technology and highly trained seafarers. I felt safe.

But given the past two weeks, perhaps I need a new mantra. Last year ended badly, with the fire on the ferry Norman Atlantic and at least 13 dead (not including the inevitable stowaways), and this year has already been deadly: the small cement carrier Cemfjord, carrying a cargo of cement, seven Polish crew and one Filipino, sank in the Pentland Firth near Shetland. Its crew are missing. Hoegh Osaka, a car carrier, was stuck for days on a sandbank off Southampton, after its captain and harbour pilot decided to ground the ship when she began listing alarmingly on leaving port. This was unfortunate, but actually good seamanship: it saved the day, and lives, and prevented pollution.


Even so, the public has reacted to this news with surprise, as they did with Costa Concordia. What, ships sink? But they do, and too frequently. Away from the Pentland Firth and the Solent, away from cameras and attention, five other ships have come to calamity in the first two weeks of this year. Sea Merchant, Araevo, Better Trans, Bulk Jupiter and Run Guang 9. Sea Merchant was a general cargo ship that was travelling from Bauan Port to Antique when it sank after its cargo of cement shifted suddenly, tipping the ship to a dangerous degree in heavy swells. Chief engineer Almarito Anciano died. Araevo, a Greek-owned oil tanker, was bombed by the Libyan air force while moored in the eastern Libyan port of Derna for “acting suspiciously” (although it was actually chartered by the local power station). Casualties: two crew, one Greek and one Romanian. General cargo ship Better Trans foundered in heavy weather in the Philippine sea. The Run Guang 9 had an explosion on board off Guangdong; two crew are missing. Worst, in this dismal roll-call: Bulk Jupiter, a bulk carrier travelling from Malaysia to China with a cargo of bauxite, which capsized off Vietnam. Eighteen of the 19-strong crew died.

These sinkings, fires and bombings are reported, but only in the trade press or – when Filipinos are involved, as they often are, since they provide 25% of world crews – in Filipino media. But they are there, if we look, because ships sink and founder and crash. They sink more in the bad weather of winter, whether gales off Shetland or swells and monsoon rain in the South China sea, where most ship casualties occur. In 2013, according to the World Casualty Statistics published by trade publication IHS Maritime, there were 138 “total losses” – that is, when a ship is beyond repair or recovery. According to John Thorogood, a senior analyst at IHS Maritime, 85 of those were sinkings, “in that the vessel actually went at least partially below the sea in a fairly traumatic manner”. On average, two ships a week are lost, one way or another. That doesn’t take into account smaller vessels or fishing craft.


This is the nature of shipping. The ocean is the most dangerous workplace on the planet. Commercial seafaring is considered to be the second-most dangerous occupation in the world; deep-sea fishing is the first. Each year, 2,000 seafarers lose their lives. The troubles of Cemfjord and Hoegh Osaka were only unusual because of where they happened, which is near enough to the UK mainland to be noticed by the mainstream press.

Cruise ships and passenger ferries attract more attention, because we know them better. They are often our only encounter with the sea as a place of industry: usually the ocean, and the people who work on it, transporting 90% of world trade, is nothing more than some blue on an inflight airline map, to be flown over, hopefully. Commercial shipping is more removed from us now than at any time in history. Ports have been moved out of cities to cope with bigger ships; seafarers are no longer British, western European or American, but Filipino, Polish, Romanian and Indian, as were those who died in the January calamities. That’s just the way globalisation labour pools work.

Even so, shipping is safer than it has ever been. The number of total losses per year has been falling for decades. There are, the International Maritime Organisation calculates, more than 85,000 working vessels (of over 100 gross tonnage) on the seas, so the loss of fewer than 200 is just an inevitable toll of working at sea. It is safer, and it is cleaner, too. Between 1972 and 1981, there were 223 major oil spills. Over the last decade, there were 63.


“Despite last month being a difficult one for the shipping industry,” says Thorogood, “I would say it is more a statistical blip than an indication that safety standards are slipping or any other such inferences.”

Plenty would disagree with him, though, including me. Glen Forbes, who runs the maritime intelligence agency Oceanus Live, suggested the following list of systemic troubles: “Seafarers’ safety and security is compromised by poor safety standards, old and decrepit vessels, unscrupulous owners, blacklisted flag registries, and even near-slavery on fishing vessels.” That’s without endemic piracy, or ghost ships: rust buckets usually sold for scrap value that are instead turned into migrant vessels for desperate Syrians, Eritreans and other people spat out of their country by war or desperation, then abandoned by the minimal crews to drift and be rescued – hopefully – by the nearest coastguard. This is a deliberate tactic that relies on the requirement laid out in the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) document, part of a raft of laws governing the high seas, whereby seafarers are expected to attend to anyone or any vessel in distress on the seas.

And they do: in every accident report, whether a sinking ship, a distressed ferry or a daft yachter, there is usually a merchant vessel coming to its rescue, even now that crews are under enormous pressure to stick to schedules and routes because of the pressure of just-in-time globalisation. Shipping, and containerisation, has given us our cheap T-shirts and our televisions, but at a cost. Even the biggest ships now operate with crews as small as 13. The shortfall is supposed to be taken up by automation, which is one worry. “So many experienced professionals,” wrote former Lloyd’s List editor Michael Grey recently, “have expressed their concern about overreliance on these clever machines, and a generation of computer-savvy officers who fail to look out of the window at the crucial moment.”

A greater problem is fatigue: working seafarers tell me they are routinely knackered because there are no longer enough crew on board. “Safe manning” certificates are part of the oceans of documents that modern ships and masters must carry on board, but Branko Berlan of the International Transport Workers Federation thinks this inadequate. The size of modern crews, he says, “is not about safety, but about commercial pressures”. Crew wages are the easiest thing to cut.


I don’t know why Cemfjord sank. Maybe the crew was exhausted. Maybe the dry cement powder shifted too quickly. Maybe it was a straightforward swamping by atrocious waves. But 60% of ship accidents are due to errors made by what the industry curiously calls “the human element”, and much of that is due to fatigue. As for Hoegh Osaka, the senior national secretary of Nautilus, the UK seafarers’ union, told the BBC that “vehicle and livestock carriers are built to the edge of safety for commercial reasons”. Built to maximise cargo capacity, they go against good naval architecture principles, say critics, and can lose stability far too easily.

Because the Cemfjord and Hoegh Osaka events happened in or near UK waters, I won’t have to wait too long for answers, as they will be immediately investigated by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and the Marine Accident Investigation Branch. That is often not the case, because of how shipping works. Nearly 70% of the global fleet now flies a flag that often has nothing to do with the ship, the route, the crew or the owner. Open registries, or flags of convenience, allow owners to pay fees to a foreign state, fly its flags and then be governed by the laws of that state while on the high seas. (I’m baffled by cruise passengers who carefully check where they can store their valuables but never check the flag their ship is flying, even though that flag would be responsible for investigating anything that goes wrong.)

Investigations are up to the flag state, and there is no higher authority to push them into publishing accident reports. There are many good flags who do this promptly. Then there are others. I don’t even mean the dreadful ones such as Tanzania, North Korea or Mongolia, increasingly found flying on the migrant ghost ships. What of Danny FII, a livestock carrier flying the flag of Panama, the largest ship registry in the world? In 2009, it sank off Lebanon with its crew of 76, six passengers, 17,932 cattle and 10,224 sheep. The captain, a Scot named John Milloy, went down with his ship; 11 other crew were definitely lost, and 32 crew are still unaccounted for. I was intrigued by it, especially after discovering a forum on a site named Uglyships that, in a quirk of modern technology, had become the most popular meeting place for relatives and former crew.


Why did Uglyships become a meeting place for grieving and desperate relatives? Because, like many other relatives of crew who sailed on Danny FII, they had been given no answers. Compare this to a plane crash, when resources and attention rush to the crash site. Of course, that’s because planes carry people, and more than cargo ships. (Cargo plane crashes rarely get such assiduous attention.) It’s because planes are how we travel now.

A few days after Danny FII sank, Ethiopian Airlines flight ET409 crashed into the same sea. Everyone on board was killed. International aviation rules require accident investigation authorities to make an accident report publicly available “as soon as possible and, if possible, within 12 months”. Posting on the internet is acceptable. I tested these guidelines: the accident report into ET409, although it is disputed by Ethiopian Airlines, was published by the Lebanese authorities in January 2012. It is easily available online to anyone who cares to read it. But the relatives of those aboard Danny FII had to wait six years for Panama to first file the report with the IMO, and then another several months for it to be made public (and only after sustained pressure from seafarers’ unions and the British government). No wonder the International Chamber of Shipping last year suggested that shipping could learn something from aviation authorities, and expressed a need to stop flag states interpreting the IMO guidelines “with considerable latitude”.

Why do accident reports matter? Because although ships will continue to sink – the ocean will continue to defeat some of them – the toll of loss should not be increased by the pressures of commerce, by seafarers exhausted by their job or by old, corroded ships. Port inspections had found 29 deficiencies in Danny FII in 2009 alone, including widespread corrosion, but she was classed as safe. Shipping is a vast, complicated and wonderful industry without which modern life would be unthinkable and unthinkably different. It can do better.


So, I’m going to keep my flying mantra, although I know it’s skewed risk perception. I know I’m more likely to be killed behind the steering wheel of my car than in a plane or a ship. I’ll learn to steer my perceptions in another direction, like the young British radio officer, sitting in a lifeboat after the ship he was on was torpedoed in 1942, who asked a Dutch crewman how far the nearest land was. “Two miles away,” said the man. “Straight down.”