Although my nautical pursuits mostly involve pleasure boating, the recent tragedy of the container ship M/V DALI running into and destroying the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore – and then all the theories, opinions and speculations expressed by so many with no real knowledge of commercial shipping – got me to thinking back to my days around those behemoth vessels and what I learned about them.
I used to work as a sales representative for the Marine Division of a company called Radio Holland Group. I called on shipping companies, ship/yacht yards and such to sell them electronics for navigation, communications and vessel control and monitoring (like tank gauges for ballast tanks and such). My biggest competitors were Sperry (the electronics company, not the boat shoes) and Raytheon, a name synonymous with state-of-the-art electronic military hardware.
Most of the systems we sold centered around a gyro compass, a highly sophisticated piece of equipment that many of the other onboard systems depended upon for precise unadulterated directional data. A “gyro” eliminated the factors that mess with a compass’s accuracy like deviation caused by the earth’s magnetic field the further north or south you voyage. It’s what first allowed submarines to navigate their way to north pole. The gyro’s we sold were made by the company that invented the thing, Anschutz of Germany, while the radars we rep’d (the next most important equipment suite) were made by the company Kelvin Hughes out of the U.K. Those radars – properly called “A.R.P.A. radars” (Automatic Radar Plotting Aid) were incredibly complex and powerful “video games” with a 2-foot-wide circular display that not only showed you real-time information on the screen about everything around you out to 120 nautical miles, but could also show you what the situation would be in the future; or a “Bird’s Eye View” of your position as opposed to standard “heads-up” mode; and could automatically acquire and track up to two dozen separate targets.
Now understand here, I was working for the Dutch selling German engineering … and I’m not entirely technically inclined. We all know about German engineering, but if you aren’t otherwise familiar, the Dutch have an incredible maritime history with many oceanic engineering feats to their credit and are considered to be the bad-asses in modern maritime matters. Hell, they’ve reclaimed half their country’s current landmass from the sea and to this day when there’s a big maritime disaster like a ship running aground or a deep sea drilling platform falling over or breaking free of its mooring, it’s usually a Dutch heavy salvage company that wins the bid to make things right again. But they are also some of the most humorless and arrogant people I’ve ever met… and that’s compared to the Germans! Before I was hired, my final interview was with the guy that ran the entire western hemisphere operations for Radio Holland, a fella named Jacob Plenter (pronounced “Yah-kob Plenner”), and he was a former “Unlimited Ocean Master” (meaning he was certified to con ANYTHING afloat) AND an internationally recognized maritime attorney. Talk about a “no sht” kinda guy! But I actually got a smile out of him during our meeting sitting in the atrium of One World Trade Center. Once hired, I was in downtown Manhattan a few days a week calling on customers in their offices but the rest of the time I frequented the commercial docks of Ports Newark/Elizabeth, hardly garden spots and places I would not recommend visiting beyond daylight hours. Those were “the docks” and warehouses you hear about in mob stories, movies and tales of international crime and intrigue where everything was on a massive scale, dirty, rusted and oily, in the looming shadows of the ships. And really big wharf rats! I’d go aboard older 600-foot breakbulk carriers (the old way cargo was transported before containerization) to visit with the captains and can tell you, some of those ship’s bridges weren’t as well equipped with electronics as a medium-sized modern sport yacht of 40-feet or so. And I heard many a tale from our technicians who installed the equipment both in the wheelhouse and then on the outside up in the mast high above the deck, that when they had to climb the welded metal ladder to get up there, they were always very careful because sometimes the rungs of the ladder were so corroded and painted over to cover up the rust that if they put their full weight on a rung, it might just break in half, sending them tumbling. Sure, there were many newer container ships, Ro-Ro’s (Roll-On/Roll-Off, the ungainly looking ships that are basically floating garages used to transport cars, tractors and such), V.L.C.C.’s (Very Large Crude Carriers, what most people call a “super tanker”) and other various sort of “tankers” that carry all manner of chemicals and energy products and had gleaming state-of-the-art bridges teeming with all sorts of the most up-to-date electronics and gadgets. In that hierarchy of hulls, the ones that always intrigued me the most were the ships that transported LNG (liquid natural gas) and you could easily identify them by the huge half-cylindrical tanks built into their decks… and the massive red NO SMOKING letters emblazoned across the vessel’s superstructure. I read a very interesting study once prepared by the Coast Guard (in the Post 9/11 days) about the damage possibilities an LNG ship presented if one ever exploded at the dock. A typically fully loaded LNG ship carries around 72,000 tonnes of LNG, enough to heat 45,000 homes. For a year. The interesting thing was that although an explosion would be akin to a small nuclear blast, the real damage in a place like say, Savannah, Georgia –where the offload port is some distance up the river – the intense heat of it all would immediately evaporate the water in the entire area and the result would be the sea rushing back in to fill the void like a huge tsunami, causing untold secondary destruction and mayhem. Such is the nature of the shipping business: explosions, spills, running around or running into something, there aren’t many “small” accidents with the scale of things involved in oceanic shipping. During the time I spent living in Charleston, South Carolina – the second largest container port along the east and Gulf coasts – I came to know several of the harbor pilots. Those are the guys who go out in the pilot boats, in all weather, to literally jump aboard the incoming ships to guide them safely into port. (There are also Docking Pilots who board the ships inside the harbor from a tugboat as the ship gets close to the wharf. They don’t so much con the ship as much as they coordinate the tugboats in the final pushes that bring the ship alongside.) Pilots undergo years of training until they know every tide, every current, every single nuance and navigational factor that may affect the 1,000-foot+ ships – each of which may carry hundreds of millions of dollars in cargo and can wreak a lot of damage as we saw in Baltimore – they bring safely in. They knew Charleston harbor to the extent that, even in the event of a landside catastrophic power outage in the aftermath of say, a large hurricane or even an EMP attack (electromagnetic pulse, like they did in the movie Oceans Eleven) that would eliminate all their electronic aids to navigation, they could still orient and navigate themselves only by the church steeples visible all about the Charleston peninsula. But I also was fortunate enough to have developed a close friendship with Captain Buddy Ward, tugboat captain extraordinaire. Buddy, a true Gentleman of the Lowcountry who was born and raised on James Island just south of Charleston, started his professional career in a suit and tie but gravitated towards the docks and tugs and wrote extensively about his tugboat life. This was back in the days when, like so many other industries, the maritime industry was still somewhat informal and the companies were run by people from within the industry. The new age of management, computers and company consolidations was just starting to take hold (the captains lamented that it was when “the bean counters who didn’t know a porthole from their a*hole started calling the shots”) and Buddy was strongly of that opinion. In fact, the first time I ever heard him talk about quitting the business was when they started refitting all the tugs steering systems with little fly-by-wire joysticks instead of the traditional huge 3-foot diameter wooden or stainless steel steering wheels preferred by the captains because it gave them a better “feel” for the barn door-sized rudders under their tug when maneuvering in close quarters. Buddy claimed it was because all those no-nothing executives just wanted those classic wheels hung up on their office walls to make them feel legitimately nautical.
Anyhow, Buddy would often invite me out to do some “tuggin’”, and I jumped at every chance, especially when he said we’d be doing “an outbound.” See, when a ship came in, the tugs just sort of tended to it, giving it a little shove here and there as it made its way into the harbor and up one of the rivers to the docks where the tug again just gave it little nudges until it was safely alongside the cay. But when leaving the dock, the tugs played a much more impactful role as the huge ship had to be dragged “dead-weight sideways” away from the pier and sometimes, be spun 180-degrees in the process so it was heading out in the right direction. In those cases, there’d be a 6-inch diameter hawser (line) run from the tug’s aft winch up to one of the ships forward bollards. And then came the horsepower. 6,000 horsepower. A cloud of black smoke belching from the stack’s worth of 6,000 horsepower. Deck plates and your teeth rattling 6,000 horsepower. The whole tug shaking and shimmying under the load as the 12-foot diameter heavily-pitched propeller beneath the tug bit into the water, churning the bottom and stretching that hawser taut as a piano string and halving it’s diameter as, inch by inch, the ship started to move.
On one occasion, we had an outbound up the Wando River Terminal just north of the city and the docking pilot (as mentioned previously, they orchestrated the dockings and were the symphony conductors for the tugs) had timed departure for when the tide was at near full ebb. The river was about 1500-feet wide and the ship we were working on was just under 1,000-feet in length and that outbound tidal current was flowing at over 5 knots which makes for a LOT of water force. Plus, the ship was pointed upriver so had to do the 180-degree turn first. So what we did was run a line up to the ship’s bow and began our pull, but only for a short time before the crew released it back to our custody and we got out of the way as fast as we could. See, with all that water flowing down river, as the ship started rotating to be perpendicular to the river, it effectively became a dam (the water level would pile up several feet higher on the upriver side) and the resultant force of all that water pressing up against the side of the ship forced it to spin away with no engines involved, just water pressure. It was literally a well-choreographed ballet, an intricately designed and executed maneuver… with ballerinas that displaced hundreds of thousands of tons. Yea, it was way cool to witness.
I’m sharing these tales with you in an effort to say that I’m actually surprised that more maritime accidents don’t occur. But thanks to the many highly trained and dedicated individuals in the maritime industry – here and the world over – they don’t happen very often. But yea, when they do, it’s usually death and destruction on an extremely large scale. That’s just the way it is with stuff that big. But we continually learn and improve and perhaps someday, accidents like what happened in Baltimore Harbor will be a permanent thing of the past. Just not yet.
Comments are welcome. Email: editorljwallace@gmail.com.
(For an ever better perspective of life and work on a tug boat, check out the delightful book Tales Of The Anna Karrue, by Captain Buddy Ward, 1988 by Tradd Street Press, Charleston, S.C. It’s available via Amazon and elsewhere.)