drama at sea

i can't stop following this story of the collision between the stena immaculate (a product tanker, not an oil tanker, as all the news reports keep saying) and the solong (a smaller container vessel) off the east coast of england yesterday. it's in the area of immingham, where i've spent a lot of time filming ships, so when i first heard about it yesterday, i rushed to the report to see if a dfds ship was involved. it was not. 

i am inordinately fascinated by a shipping accident and kept refreshing the bbc app all day yesterday, as well as following the string of rescue and firefighting vessels that converged on the scene in my marine traffic app. the product tanker was loaded with 220,000 barrels of jet fuel and sitting in an anchorage off immingham when the solong came along and rammed into the side of it at 16 knots. the crew of the stena immaculate abandoned ship within about 30 minutes because it turns out that jet fuel is quite flammable. there were reports that the container vessel was carrying containers of sodium cyanide, but those were apparently false. they had some containers on board that had once had that substance in them, but which were currently empty. 

the captain of the solong has been arrested for "gross negligence manslaughter "(one crew member of the solong is missing and presumed dead). it will be interesting to know more of the story. the crew of the solong was russian and filipino and it was americans onboard the stena immaculate since it was chartered by the us navy. 

both ships are still smoldering today, but expected to remain intact. there were rumors that the solong would sink, but they've been debunked. it has disappeared from marine traffic, but someone probably turned off the ais. it will be very interesting to learn how they could have missed a large product tanker at anchor in an official anchorage, but i guess that will come out in the coming days. and i will be glued to the news, ship geek that i still am at heart.

you can put the girl in the kitchen, but you can't take her off the ship. or something like that. 

added - this guy does a good early analysis using marine traffic.