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Unusually, it is clear who was at fault
11 March 2025 1:19pm GMT
Tom Sharpe
Yesterday morning, a merchant vessel underway collided with a ship at anchor in the North Sea off the Humber resulting in two huge fires, maritime pollution incidents and both crews abandoning ship. Most crew survived and have now been recovered, but one is still missing. This should never have happened but it could have been a lot worse. I’ll try and explain both.
For background, the ship that was underway was the MV Solong, a Portuguese flagged “feeder ship” of 140 metres length and a carrying capacity of around 500 containers. This is quite small for a container ship: the MV Ever Given of Suez Canal fame was four hundred metres long and carried over 20,000 containers. There is nothing in the Solong’s ownership, flag, crew or insurance that would give rise to a suspicion of foul play. Even the route she was on, from Grangemouth to Rotterdam, has been done by her dozens of times in the last year or so. She did have 15 containers with sodium cyanide in them onboard but ships of this type, in fact all ships, routinely carry hazardous materials in accordance with the International Maritime Dangerous Goods (IMDG) code. Nothing unusual here.
The ship that was hit is perhaps more interesting. This is the MV Stena Immaculate, a US flagged tanker, 183 metres long and carrying 35 million litres (220,000 barrels) of Jet-A-1 aviation fuel for US military use. She is operated by the American company Crowley as part of the US Government Tanker Security Programme, intended to get more ships into the American registry. Needless to say, this quasi-military status has got conspiracy theorists’ tongues wagging.
But it shouldn’t. I’ve commented on a lot maritime incidents for the Telegraph in the last year or so, from the Ever Given grounding in the canal to the superyacht Bayesian capsize, the Baltimore bridge and HMS Chiddingfold collisions, the Royal New Zealand Navy’s grounding and then sinking, the USS Harry S Truman’s recent collision off Suez and so on. The cause of this one is as clear as any I’ve seen. It was Solong’s neglect of Rule Five of the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (also known in the Royal Navy as “Rule of the Road”). Rule Five says (RN watchkeeping officers are required memorise Rules 1-19 word for word):
“Every vessel shall at all times maintain a proper look-out by sight and hearing as well as by all available means appropriate in the prevailing circumstances and conditions so as to make a full appraisal of the situation and of the risk of collision.”
Solong didn’t do this and also managed to either ignore, or not have set up correctly, any number of radar or GPS based alarm systems that would alert her (miles in advance) to the risk of impending collision.
It seems that she may have sailed from harbour, disembarked her pilot, set the helm to auto using routing information saved from previous voyages then maintained the exact same course and speed for about nine hours before driving her bows into the Stena Immaculate’s port side just abaft the beam puncturing her fuel tanks on that side. There are reports of fog at the time but this means you would consider slowing down and you certainly wouldn’t pile through a busy anchorage in reduced visibility. And in any case, it’s pretty hard to miss a 140m long ship on radar.
The radar ought to have alerted the watch officer even if he or she wasn’t looking at it just then. What of the automated alarm systems? Were they set correctly or were they muted due to constant false alarms? This is not uncommon. While it’s clear that responsibility lies with the Solong, we will need the ship’s data recorder and subsequent investigation to determine exactly how.
As for this being a deliberate attack, I think that is highly unlikely. Any attempt to collide deliberately would have required micro course adjustments as the Solong approached the target which are not evident on the various marine tracking sites. The investigation won’t rule anything out and nor should it, but for me, the likelihood of this being an attack is very low.
It will be interesting to find out what the Stena Immaculate did as the risk of collision was building. Being at anchor she would expect other vessels to avoid her and she won’t have been keeping as alert a lookout as a ship under way – though again, automatic radar alarms should have alerted the duty watch. Her base assumption would have been that transiting vessels will keep clear, even at the last minute. Even if they somehow knew the Solong wasn’t going to alter, they would have needed about 40 minutes notice to weigh anchor and get out of the way – not realistic. Again, her bridge data recorder will be instructive in the minutes prior to the collision, and horrific after it.
Once the two ships collided at that speed and angle, a major fire and flood on both was almost guaranteed. Ship tracking suggests that the Solong was tangled with the Stena for a full four minutes, pushing her sideways from her anchorage as she decelerated. This would have been a nightmarish mix of violent deceleration (the first sign of trouble for most onboard), grinding metal and fires and floods breaking out. Whilst we can question the competence of the Solong’s bridge team prior to the incident, that both ships safely evacuated all people is impressive. Humber Coastguard should get credit here as it’s clear that their running of the incident was excellent and would have also saved lives. Controlling a situation like this is fraught as dozens of vessels, aircraft, lifeboats and even onlookers all jump on the radio and phones to try and “help”. Cutting through the noise to make accurate decisions with ships on fire and people in the water is not easy at all.
With nearly everyone safe, the next immediate concern is maritime pollution (Marpol). Whilst cyanide on one ship and aviation fuel on another doesn’t sound like a dream scenario, it could have been a lot worse. Both things disperse from water to atmosphere quite quickly, certainly compared to other hazardous materials and heavier oils. Both could still “cook off” which is why support ships have been withdrawn for now and the Solong is probably drifting and will need to be monitored. The situation is far from over but it’s already clear that in terms of what the ships were carrying, the Marpol bill could have been higher.
By now the UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) will be on scene. They need to get there as fast as possible to gather perishable evidence where possible although looking at photos of both ships it’s not clear if much will be left that is of use. Data recorders might be recoverable but not for some time.
Although the MAIB arrive quickly, they take their time to report, normally over a year. This is because accidents like this always have a tail reaching some way back into the culture of the various organisations that needs to be examined in as much detail as what happened on the day. What was the safety culture in the Solong, how long had that crew been at sea and with what rest periods, how experienced were the master and bridge watchkeepers, what was the anti-collision set up on the bridge, why did their plan take them so close to a busy port and so on. Were any of the bridge team using their phones or other devices at the time? There will be a rich seam of cultural and systemic reasons predating why, on the day, they ignored Rule Five.
If it feels like incidents at sea are increasing, that may not in fact be the case. In 2022 and 2023 there were 6,000 incidents at sea globally, resulting in 67 total losses. So it happens a lot, we just don’t hear about it. Whilst the sort of macro statistics needed to prove trends one way or the other often lag by about a year, in general, they are slowly improving.
Attacks in the Red Sea and sabotage in the Baltic have raised awareness of the issues, but these are not accidents. Merchant mariners I know generally report a reduction in crew experience and in turn, competence, but this does sometimes feel as much like “not as good as in my day” syndrome as anything backed by hard evidence.
And we shouldn’t forget the parties who have a vested financial interest in painting a gloomy picture. The technology used to control and navigate ships is generally old and basic, certainly if you compare it to what’s available for your car these days. One day ships will operate in “full auto” much of the time – and indeed this is actually a simpler problem than making cars do so – but the merchant navies of the world are a long way from spending the money to make that happen. Besides, they do spend money training people to look out of the window or into the radar to stop it in the first place. Personally, I don’t think the sky is falling in but I’m happy to be proven wrong as the figures for this year mature.
This collision was an accident and unusually, it is clear who was at fault. The investigation will rule nothing out but I would put a very low probability of this having been an attack, despite the US vessel being linked to their Department of Defence.
But there is a clear message here nonetheless. This may not have been an attack, but attacks and reconnaissance for attacks are underway on a routine basis all around this sea-blind island nation. If this news wakes us up and makes us realise just how critically dependent we are on control of the waters around us, the safety of those who move our goods – and yes, in this case, important military supplies – and those who protect them, then so much the better.
In this case the fact that we have saved nearly every mariner and the pollution won’t be too bad is just the cherry on top.
Commander Tom Sharpe OBE served in the Royal Navy for 27 years, and commanded four different warships
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