Sea Transport Incident In Trang

[Jai Dee]

2nd Sea Transport Incident in South Thailand, Trang Province

Within hours of our exclusive reports on the loss of cargo near Kantang, another incident took place on the evening of March 21st in the same location alongside Sritrang Logistic Co. Ltd at Jetty 3.

In this latest incident, the MCL Power 8 vessel which was shown in photographs of the first incident with containers in the water along side it, is now shown to be listing with many containers again over board.

Containers from Wanhai Line, NPL, MSC and others were apparently affected.

Continued at IMT News http://www.imtnews.com/item.shtml?x=618899

Source: IMT News - 23 March 2009

[South]

As Peter Phillips stated, there seems to be a total lack of container fastenings to the deck and no intermodal lockings, such as twistlocks, locking bars and bottle screws. There are however other reasons as to why a stack/s of containers has fallen over/collapsed. Were the vessels ballasted correctly, were the boxes loaded correctly (weight?), we can see that they weren't secured correctly or is it just down to sheer negligence on the side of the carrier (inexperienced personel or unseaworthy vessels)?

Having said that, I myself have been on modern up to date ocean going vessels, with professional crews and equipment that have lost boxes, but on those occasions it was because of very severe weather, not the calm seas of the Trang coast.