Phosphate ship breaks up at Xmas Island

[skuthorp]

A bulk phosphate ship has broken it's moorings, hit the cliff and broken in two leaking tons of diesel and lubricating oil into the sea. Coral reefs are under extreme threat, I suspect that clean up facilities are minimal on the island.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-0...island/3763852

[The Bigfella]

Before she broke up






Local joke... sorry.

[George Ray]

Wonder what failed, boat's gear or an onsite mooring provided and maintained by ???

[The Bigfella]

There's video of someone chopping the mooring line with an axe

[The Bigfella]

From The Australian:

THE wind began to pick up over Christmas Island shortly after 3am last Sunday.
Soon it was howling, and by about 4am savage gusts in Flying Fish Cove threatened to slam the Panama-flagged freighter MV Tycoon into the island's deadly cliffs.

With 260 tonnes of bagged phosphate onboard, the 85m vessel was - relatively speaking - almost empty and flailing about in the swell as it was moored to the berth at the wharf in Flying Fish Cove, ready to be loaded with 4000 tonnes of phosphate.

Burmese Captain Maung Myind-Maung, whom The Weekend Australian understands had been to Christmas Island before, tried to steady the ship as the weather worsened.

But after breaking free from its mooring and smashing against the cliffs, the ship is now sunk. The wreck is preventing the delivery of food and other supplies to residents and its cargo is strewn over the fragile reef.

Residents are angry about the effects on the environment, already under strain from the pressures of the federal government's detention facilities.

Investigators sent to the island to pick over the wreck have been told Captain Myind-Maung made his first call for help at 6.18am to the island's stevedore manager Kalana Arshad, but it was already too rough to deploy barges to move the MV Tycoon.

What happened next is the subject of an inquiry that involves three government agencies, including the Australian Federal Police.

The chief operating officer of the island's phosphate mine, Kevin Edwards, said he believed a crew member cut the ship's mooring lines with an axe as Mr Arshad and the island's harbour master, Dave Robinson, gave instructions on how to better secure the ship to the wharf using a winch.

Mr Edwards said the mine's operations manager, Mahmood Ismael, was on the wharf and was one of several people who filmed what happened.

"Our people have video material which supports their observations that members of the crew cut the mooring lines with an axe," Mr Edwards said.

"They (mine employees) were interviewed by authorities and they have handed the material over to the relevant authorities."

Last night, Nick Haslam of London Offshore Consultants, representing the ship's owners, said the crew did everything they could to get the MV Tycoon clear of the berth but they were obstructed by the weather.

He was aware of some CCTV footage purporting to show a crew member cutting a mooring line, but he said this was because it was caught around a drum and he had been told it had no relevance to the investigation.

"Personally, I believe they (the crew) did everything properly," he said.

The claim a crew member cut the mooring line may do a lot to blunt simmering ill feeling towards the mine over the shipwreck. The mine is by far the biggest employer of locals, but residents' affection for it is not what it was in 1991 when the workers themselves owned it.

The environmental impact of the sinking was obvious immediately to the crowd that had gathered at the cove to watch the daring rescue of the crew carried out by navy officers in rigid inflatable boats.

The navy rescued 15 crew after the captain gave the order to abandon ship and seamen jumped from the vessel into the mountainous swell. The water was soon brown with fuel and phosphate.

The cove, where the oil slick spread to, is home to a range of hybrid reef fish found nowhere else in the world.

One resident told The Weekend Australian locals were unhappy about phosphate mining and exports on the island because of its effects on the environment, but they had grown to feel equally unhappy about the federal government's Immigration Detention Centre.

The centre itself was built on what was thought to be a feeding ground for the then-endangered pipistrelle bat. The bat, found nowhere else on earth, has not been recorded for more than a year and is believed extinct.

One resident told The Weekend Australian: "Look, none of us like to see cleared rainforest for phosphate mining, but putting the detention centre here has had a big impact that you can't immediately see."

The influx of hundreds of fly-in, fly-out immigration workers, and the presence of more than 3000 detainees at its peak, put enormous strain on infrastructure including the sewerage plant, which began spewing brown liquid on to a popular snorkelling and fishing area.

Complaints from residents that guards from the mainland were squashing the island's giant robber crabs in their cars led National Parks to put up signs urging the newcomers to drive around the crabs and to slow down.

Yesterday, marine expert Jean-Paul Hobbs, who has collected 10 years of data on Flying Fish Cove, said he was very concerned about the wreck's impact on coral, fish and other marine life, including the baby red crabs that began coming ashore this week as part of their annual migration.

"This is, however, just one of the pressures on the environment on Christmas Island," he said.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

i'll go with Nick Haslam of LOC.