Update: This article has been updated with a reaction from Wakashio’s owner, Nagashiki Shipping Co Ltd, on the possible cause of the blockage.
The front of the Panamanian-flag Japanese giant sent guilty of the worst oil spill in the Indian Ocean, the Wakashio, which has suffered Mauritius islanders since its arrival 28 days ago, has disappeared in the Indian Ocean.
There has been no Mauritius government official on the precise location of the shipment, which is the length of an aircraft carrier and in the largest 1% of shipments ever built, and the governments of France and Japan that have ministers and advisers.on the ground they have kept quiet about their precise location.During his last sighting, he had noticed him heading southeast to Antarctica.The Mauritius government’s latest brief on the debatable front segment of the Wakashio took a position wednesday, August 19 at 6 p.m.(4 days ago), and it did not come with any indication of position or destination.
The French Minister for the Foreign Islands, Sébastien Lecornuhas, at least expressed his discomfort at the sinking of the ship’s forward component, even if press releases from the Mauritian government continue to recommend that French government specialists who were the main advisers overseeing this operation.
There was also a silence about the location of the previous segment of the shipment or confirmation of a leak imaginable through the Panamanian government where the ship was registered, the Japanese owners (Nagashiki Shipping), the global navigation regulator (the United Nations agency, the International Maritime Organization or IMO).
In reaction to questions from Forbes, the IMO issued on Friday (July 21) that it was beyond the success of its box specialist in Mauritius to worry about any component of possible towing or sinking of the front section of the wakashio, unless there would be a threat of oil spill. This was part of the express and explained mandate of the IMO aid project agreed with Mauritius before the IMO specialist arrived on August 11, five days after the start of the oil leaks.
How can such a giant and prestigious shipment disappear in 2020, when the eyes of the world’s media are seeing how their day-to-day life has an effect on other people and the nature of Mauritius?the news had shown its magnitude.
At the same time, a 5-minute video gave the online impression on life situations from the view of the Wakashio Bridge at sea, where the captain deserved to have been at the time of grounding, and shows that the deck is provided with some of the newest generation for a 13-year-old shipment and the merit of the height of being on the increased deckArray that provides even more visibility.
Now it seems that Panama’s role has entered the spotlight, adding its everyday roles and jobs in providing shipping registration services.
Because this is important? Panama is the world’s largest shipping registration service, in the highly secret world of registered ships, and that world leaders have been unable to cope despite boasting that they have led to the completion of world tax havens over the past decade.ships bound for the world’s ocean are registered under so-called “flags of convenience” when shipments or their owners are not physically provided in those countries.
Here are the 3 tactics that Panama is now involved in in the Wakashio controversy, and that any independent investigation will examine.
The Wakashio was a Japanese-owned shipment that operated largely in Asia, but was registered in the South American country of Panama.A search for shipping history (accessible to the public from satellite recordings since 2013) shows that the Wakashio had never been to Panama.Wakashio began operations in 2007.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has boasted of being recognized as a leader of the ”sustainable ocean economy”, being a prominent member of an organization of heads of state called the Norwegian High-Level Group on Sustainable Ocean Economy.Japan continues to allow its largest shipowners to sign their ships in the South American country of Panama, even where they never made a stopover in the country.What happened to a Japanese ship registry for a Japanese shipping company?
Wakashio owners, Nagashiki Shipping, were asked about the number of their 11 giant vessels registered in Panama and the number of visits those vessels made to Panama in their history, Forbes is still waiting for an answer.
In the midst of the Wakashio division and the upcoming cleanup operations over the more than two weeks, two statements issued through Panama’s maritime government have attracted the attention and commentary of several industry publications.
The website of the reputable maritime industry, gCaptain, had revealed that two and a half weeks after the ship stopped, Panama’s maritime government issued an audience on August 12 that read:
“On July 14, 2020, the barn sailed from Singapore (offshore terminal) to Tubarao, Brazil.Everything went well until July 25, when the ship faced adverse weather situations off the coast of Mauritius.Then it was mandatory to perform maneuvers to replace course due to the state of the sea.
All maneuvers were supervised through the captain and co-pilot of the vessel who were aware of the scenario and weather conditions; By 1925 on the same day, while on the bridge, the captain, co-pilot and head engineer spotted that the ship prevented moving and heading, in a position of latitude: 20 -26.6S and longitude: 057 – 44.6E, informing the parties involved (ship flag, ship operators and local authorities).»
A satellite investigation first published in Forbes on August 9, 15 days after the ship ran aground (and 3 days before the Panama declaration), found that the ship was sailing at 11 knots on a direct line for 1,200 miles, and no evidence can be discovered that the ship had attempted to “perform maneuvers to change course due to sea conditions”.
Satellite weather detection did not reveal weather situations by this time of year, and no other navigation gave the impression of being affected in the domain by adverse weather situations at the time of the accident.
Six days after the panama Maritime Authority statement, and while the front segment of the Wakashio was towed under the canopy of darkness on the night of August 18, shipping captain Sunil Kumar Nandeshwar was arrested in Mauritius for the crime of Mauritius police reportedly conducting two investigations : that the captain was out of position while attending a birthday party or that the shipment had tried to protect the wifi from land.not yet commented on.
In a reaction to Forbes on August 18, representatives of Japanese wakashio owner Nagasaki Shipping Co Ltd referred Forbes to comments made through INTERGARO Vice President (International Association of Dry Cargo Ship Owners), Captain Jay K.Pillai, in which he said: “As long as the investigation is still ongoing through the owners and the state of the pavilion (Panama), I do not think it is necessary to comment on the direct or profound reasons imaginable of the incident.However, it is the duty of the owners of the boats.to meet the needs of the ISM (Safe Ship Management) Code, which is a component of SOLAS, which has been applied to tankers and passenger ships from 1996 onwards and all other merchant ships since 1998.»
Captain Pillai then said, “We may have rules, regulations, conventions, codes, systems and procedures for protecting management, but the human factor remains to be loaded, emphasizing that “I hope that the government and the state of the pavilion will conclude the Wakashio research report with knowledge of VDR (Travel Data Recorder) and will be published soon to allow the shipping industry to be informed and prevent such accidents.
Is such a massacre observed in Mauritius simply due to the movements of a single “scoundrel employee” who does not adhere to any of his educational procedures, sends protection and does not triumph over all guarantees?
This would seem to place a heavy burden on the shoulders of a single individual, only for equipment protection and shipping, but also from entire nations through which he has traveled such a giant shipment with poisonous fuel.
When a dishonest co-pilot committed suicide and shot down Germanwings Flight 9525 in the French Alps, killing 150 passengers and the team on board in 2015, there was a global reorganization of maritime transport protection to ensure that there is never a singles point of failure, this can lead to a catastrophic failure.This covered airlines and also covered shipping, given the duration and potential threat of the shipping industry, as evidenced by the devastation in Mauritius.
Other issues addressed by an independent consultation:
In reaction to this article, representatives of Nagashiki Shipping said on August 23, “the precise cause of the grounding is under investigation and Nagashiki Shipping is cooperating fully with the relevant government in this ongoing investigation, but to avoid any hypotheses about the precise cause of the incident is not yet known”.
In the questions to Mauritius’ parliament on 11 August that were televised (bottom video, 11 ’20’), five days after the start of the oil leak, it became clear that there was a complex set of legal day-to-day work requiring the signing of an avalanche of documents related to rescue operations.Fixing the day-to-day work, the duty of the shipowner, the duty of the government, the duty of the flag state.
While some government would possibly argue that it is the mauritius government’s duty to be trained in maritime navigation laws, it is vital to note that the entire reaction of the spill is the rescue of oil and gas mobilized for a vessel that is not designed to enter a port.in Mauritius, and I didn’t even plan to prevent in Mauricio.Se it’s a ship for which the global shipping industry had demanded a “right of free passage” through the waters of Mauritius and near foreign biodiversity hotspots and whale feeding areas.
With the current satellite and the Internet, distance is no longer an excuse.
Why haven’t global shipping or the Panamanian government invested in a maritime control center, an ocean project control?Then, without delay, it would have become transparent to any official that one of the largest single-hull vessels with more than a million gallons of heavy-duty oil, was dragged for almost a kilometer through a formula of sharp coral reefs for 12 days.Even the youngest navigator would have known the dangers this posed now.
Panama is proud to have the world’s largest shipment register, however, it is transparent that it has invested in the systems, processes or technologies needed to create a safer and cleaner global maritime environment for ships under its supervision.
The world wants radically new governance structures in the context of a climate crisis and a coronavirus crisis.
In fact, the global shipping industry provides no indication that its existing structures are compatible with the objective or agile enough to be a safer long-term component where, as we saw with the Wakashio, interventions in the early days when the magnitude of the threat represented transparent to the fullest of foreign experts and may have made all the difference to avoid this ecological and now human catastrophe.
In an August 16 press entitled “The Truth about Mauritius and Ship Registration,” the Panama Maritime Authority responded to a popular video circulating on social media, saying, “The Panama Ship Registry, a world leader in ship quantities and tonnage, is also a leader in environmental security and labor conventions and respects all foreign conventions established through the work of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the International Maritime Organization ( IMO) ».
So it’s the IMO’s own regulations that are to blame.If it is true that Panama’s maritime government had full and fully implemented faith in these IMO regulations, how could the Wakashio crisis have occurred?
While the Panama Maritime Authority issued a strong press release on August 16 to refute any criticism, this is not yet its press release of August 12 (three days after Forbes’ article that obviously it appears that such a narrative may simply not be true, and 15 days after which such knowledge was made public).
So, there are 4 unanswered questions the world is waiting for in any investigation:
While the component of the crisis can be attributed to some form of human being (which a representative of foreign shipments advised in a written reaction to Forbes on 18 August), there are also broader systemic errors that may have led to this tragedy.you will have to look after these problems and be carried out in a radically more transparent way than Operation Wakashio so far.
A country and the world demand greater transparency, but what is being revealed is a global shipping industry that is desperately about to sink further and deeply into the shadows.
Comments have been requested from the maritime government of Panama, but messages have not received a response.
At one of the Panama Maritime Authority on August 17, a high-strength Panamanian delegation was preparing to fly to Mauritius.
The Minister of Maritime Affairs, naval architect Noriel Araz, accompanied by the Director General of the Merchant Navy of the Maritime Authority of Panama (AMP), engineer Rafael Cigarruista, heads the Panamanian delegation that will make a stopover in Mauritius in the coming days for cooperation with the government of this island country affected by an oil spill of the Wakashio shipment, registered in Panama through a Japanese company.
The organization will join through a delegation led by Japanese experts from the Japanese Shipowners Association (JSA) to paint in a coordinated manner in the applicable investigations to explain the reasons that may have led to the run-off and the upcoming oil spill.»
This means that there will be officials conducting an investigation, embarrassed by the publication of contradictory statements that have added to local confusion, now invited to conduct an investigation that would possibly also require an investigation into themselves.
The global shipping industry generated more than $3 trillion in profits in 2019 and is a critical component of infrastructure in many countries around the world.Where is the independent foreign research team that can ensure that there can be no threats of cover-up, given everything?conflicts of interest that are at stake lately?
Confidence over how the Wakashio oil spill and rescue was managed has been damaged, and world maritime industry leaders seem in a hurry to rebuild it.
At the same time as the controversy surrounds Panama, the UN maritime regulator, the International Maritime Organization, is beginning to strain its role in resolving to sink the Wakashio.
The mauritius government’s initial request was very specific: the IMO only for the reaction to the oil spill (confirmed through an IMO spokesperson on 21 August).This scope meant that IMO specialists sent (who arrived in Mauritius on 11 August, five days after oil leaks from the ship began), did not have a mandate to advise on operations other than in particular the response and containment of oil spills.
When government requests are made to regulators such as the IMO, experts are sent based on the scale and nature of the challenge. In the case of Mauritius, the Wakashio is a very giant and complex vessel, and it is not transparent what specialists sent through the IMO.had the specialized wisdom to provide assistance beyond prompt reaction and containment in the event of an oil spill.
This was demonstrated through an IMO spokesperson on 21 August, in response to Forbes’ questions, where the role of the IMO specialist was shown to be limited only to providing recommendations in particular on “oil pollutant issues”.
The spokesman showed that the role of the IMO specialist did not advise or help compare characteristics for the elimination of Wakashio (since the government had shown in the past that there was no more oil in the damaged front segment of the ship), nor did the IMO expert plead or approve the resolution to taste the Wakashio to the position that was decided. Array or raises considerations about possible toxins or the implications of marine pollutant regulations (Marpol).
That’s why it all counts.
If the IMO specialist (appointed through the United Nations Global Shipping Regulator) made a recommendation beyond the mandate agreed between IMO and the Government of Mauritius, at what point was a scope replacement agreed (not has there been public since grounding on July 25 of any replacements in the IMO specialist’s mission scope) If there was a replacement in the Array scope, did the IMO case specialist have the proper background to do such recommendations? For example, was the IMO specialist aware of the location of feeding and feeding spaces for marine mammals around the coast of Mauritius during the winter months, or was the specialist fully aware of the general contents of the ship, adding materials from Internal construction. Sunken ships eventually degrade and, as has been noted in many parts of the world, can potentially release even more poisonous ingredients. in the marine environment for many decades, and are now much more complex to extract (particularly at an intensity of f 2 kilometers, as had been reported).
If, on the other hand, in fact, the IMO specialist legitimately submitted the Recommendation of the Government of Mauritius on the elimination of the ‘advanced segment’ of Wakashio, then this would mean that, in fact, there is a threat of hydrocarbon pollutants ‘ from the front segment of wakashio.Then, there is new data revealing that there may have been a threat of more oil pollutants sinking the front segment of the Wakashio.
Which one?
Given potential conflicts of interest, and also given that the IMO itself is guilty of implementing marine pollutant standards, known as MARPOL, an internal investigation would be a cover-up in the eyes of the world.
There will have to be a complete and independent investigation, given how catastrophic the Wakashio occasions were for the people, marine life and wildlife of Mauritius, and the surprise expressed on the occasions around wakashio.
Assuming the IMO specialist has the expertise to deal with the oil spill, it raises even bigger questions.
The IMO is the global regulator that legalizes the use of low sulphur fuels in shipping, such as VLSFO engine fuel in the Wakashio incident.However, an IMO spokesperson revealed to Forbes on 18 August that the IMO did not have a full understanding of the long-term implications.VLSFO fuel in the sunniest climates of the Indian Ocean, where the oil spill occurred.
The IMO went on to say: “Because this fuel is so new, studies have just been introduced on its fate and behaviour in the environment, especially during a longer era.We know that some of the oil corporations are conducting investment studies on this.”subject., and oil studies centers, such as CEDRE and SINTEF, have begun work, but we do not yet have concrete data on this, given the relative novelty of these bunkers, while mentioning that the movements of a containment phase would be similar in any oil spill, the spokesman went on to say, “In reality, it is fate and long-term effects that are not yet known.”
Since no oil spill cleanup traps one hundred percent of oil spilled into the environment, this is a cause for concern.
Advances in new technologies, such as complex genomics, have revealed much more widespread dangers of these fuels in injuries elsewhere.In San Francisco Bay in 2007, the giant container ship, Cosco Busan, hit the bay bridge in the middle of a thick cloud.spill 54,000 gallons, a quarter of Wakashio’s leak amount (the final amount of the spill has not yet been released 11 days after the last evaluation). Tests conducted through marine scientists revealed that this bunker fuel used through the global shipping industry to force its vessels were more poisonous than crude oil when exposed to sunlight, a phenomenon known as enhanced photo-poisons under ultraviolet light, and that in the past it released unidentified destructive chemicals called Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHHs cause excessive damage to wildlife.
Therefore, at the heart of this research on the role of the IMO, two problems must be addressed:
It has been almost a month (28 days) since nearly one million gallons of VLSFO rested on Mauritius’ pristine reefs.Mauritius islanders have called for help in perceiving the dangers they face.28 days later, while more than 30 kilometres of unspoiled Mauritius beaches remain “severely damaged” (according to the UN) and the degrees of arsenic have increased by 500% in local fish, the silence and global navigation on this factor has been staggering.
There are thousands of islanders who now have to suffer every day from the smell of heavy oil in the air and in their lungs and whose main source of protein, the fish in the lagoon, has 500% higher than normal arsenic grades.for maximum fundamental investment to local clinical efforts to perceive risks independently.
Instead, a significant budget was spent on the fees of global crisis communications corporations, building expensive platforms for oil spill reaction corporations, and other reactive means and legal activities, leaving islanders uns sealing their attempts to document science.
Mauritius is not a forgotten wasteland. It is a middle-income country with a professional and has been situated as the Singapore of Africa.Scientists and the public just want the device to do anything they didn’t expect in their own backyard.
What has been presented so far has vital situations: specialized advisors with links to the polluting country for toxicology testing (which seem far from where prior art deserves to be, by the way) or generation platforms funded through oil purification and maritime insurance industry that came with a deep marketing portfolio that undermines the efforts of Mauritius volunteers who self-organized and developed local technology solutions.These platforms do not even have transparent policies related to moral artificial intelligence or the use of knowledge.again, a lack of transparency about all players and their motivations after a primary oil spill.
It turns out that all facets of global maritime transport governance seem damaged and do not satisfy the wishes of citizens, such as the undeniable families of fishermen who had lived off the coast of Mauritius for several centuries and had never taken action, may simply destroy such a giant.and a vital component of their habitat on which they depend.Celebrities and business leaders like Sir Richard Branson are already calling on global shipping to do more for the island and the desire for bolder adjustments to global shipping.
With anger observed after the explosion in Beirut harbor on August 4 (10 days after the Wakashio swept through Mauritius’ reef barrier), and the uninterrupted time bomb that is the abandoned oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, global shipping is clearly similar to a relic of a bygone era.
The Wakashioa began as an irreproachable maritime accident and is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with today’s global shipping.
I am a progressive economist oriented to innovation, sustainability and moral economic growth.Lately I’m working with leading generation corporations in Silicon Valley in
I am an economist of progression focused on innovation, sustainability and moral economic expansion.Lately I’ve been working with leading generation corporations in Silicon Valley on opportunities for sustainable expansion, i.e. targeting low-income countries.WEF Global Network of Experts and member of the CCICED China Council.My e-book on sustainability in the fourth industrial revolution, Soul of the Sea in the Age of the Algorithm, focuses on a revival of the oceans and climate and is based on me as an advisor on the economics and innovation of governments and global CEOs of Fortune 500.