SubscribeIn December 2000, the Castor, carrying 8.7 million gallons of unleaded gasoline across the Mediterranean, developed cracks in its deck and had to be drained of its cargo in a risky ship-to-ship maneuver.According to an April 2001 press release by the American Bureau of Shipping, corrosion in some areas on the Castor was fifteen times the expected rate:
Preliminary findings in the Castor case rocked the industry. According to the American Bureau of Shipping, the classification society that certified the vessel, the Castor had fallen prey to "hyper-accelerated corrosion" - swiftly dubbed "super-rust" in the trade press. The ABS downgraded its assessment to "excessive corrosion" in its final report, issued this past October. Nonetheless, that document noted that the vessel's steel had disintegrated at rates of up to 0.71 millimeter a year - more than seven times the "nominal" rate expected by the bureau.
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Super-rust was initially explained as an unprecedented phenomenon, a highly evolved form of corrosion neither foreseeable nor preventable. The truth is less mysterious: Hyper-accelerated corrosion is the inevitable result when unforgiving chemistry meets the harsh economics and tangled industry politics of transporting fossil fuels.
The 600 tons of steel, primarily in the deck plating and underdeck longitudinals, that was renewed on the Castor at Special Survey in late 1997 has provided the key to understanding what transpired in the interim.What happened to the Castor is not unique. The sorry state of tanker design, construction, maintenance, and inspection standards are detailed in the 2006 book The Tanker Tromedy — The Impending Disasters in Tankers (PDF, open source license):
"Although further testing is still being undertaken, our gaugings indicate that sections of this steel have already wasted by as much as 30 percent," said Iarossi. "This indicates an annual corrosion rate of as much as 1.5mm compared to normal rates of about 0.1mm or less."
The critical element, according to the preliminary findings, is the presence, and absence of coatings.
The tanker being built today is flimsy, highly unreliable, unmaneuverable, and nearly impossible to maintain. And the situation is becoming progressively worse. As a result, we will have gargantuan spills in the future that need not have happened. This book outlines the sad history of tanker regulation and calls for fundamental changes in both tanker design and the regulatory system.More details about the Castor incident—including international issues about places of refuge for ships in distress—are in Chapter 2-12.
Do we share a global ecology? On a certain level it's obvious that we do, and that therefore, at last, a genuine scientific argument can be made for the imposition of Western knowledge. But making this argument is difficult, full of political risk and the opportunity for self-delusion.And that flexibility depends largely on the size of one's personal economy, yes?
In practice, the world is as much a human construct as a natural one. The people who inhabit it have such radically different experiences in life that it can be almost surprising that they share the same air. This is inherently hard to accept from a distance. Too often we have a view of what is desirable for some other part of the world which is so detached from daily existence there that it becomes counterproductive, or even inhumane.
Alang is a typical case. Resentful Indians kept saying to me, "You had your industrial revolution, and so we should have ours." I kept suggesting in return that history is not so symmetrical. But of course they knew that already, and viewed Alang with more complexity than they could express to me, and were using a simplified argument they felt I might understand.
On the ship-scrapping beach at Chittagong, in Bangladesh, I met an angry man who took the simplest approach. He said, "You are sitting on top of the World Trade Center, sniffing fresh air, and talking about it. You don't know anything."
He was angry about the West's presumptuousness and its strength. He was angry about people like Claire Tielens, at Greenpeace. When I talked to Tielens in Amsterdam, she was unyielding about Greenpeace's demands. She said, "Ships should not be scrapped in Asia unless they are decontaminated and they don't contain toxic materials. New ships should be built in such a way that they can be scrapped safely -- so without hazardous materials if possible. The export of toxin-containing ships from Western countries to developing countries should be stopped. And if possible, ships should be cleaned throughout their lifetime. If they export clean steel, that's fine with us."
I said, "But ships will always contain toxic wastes. Is it economically possible to ..."
"'Economically'? Well, of course that's a very flexible term."
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Steel scavenging on the beach...the industrial age equivalent of gleaners...
posted by darkstar at 3:30 PM on February 18, 2006