General average declared for Ever Forward after unsuccesful attempts to refloat

https://gcaptain.com/ever-forward-general-average-declared/

by frenchman_in_ny • 4 years ago

95 106 4 years ago

gcaptain.com

rossdavidh• 4 years ago

Do NOT let one of this company's ships into the Panama Canal...

walrus012• 4 years ago

the largest container ships are too big for even the post-expansion-new-panamax anyways.

hnburnsy4• 4 years ago

A local pilot was in control of the ship at the time...

The Bay pilot aboard had control of the ship at the time it ran aground. Investigators are still looking at whether it was a mechanical issue or operator error that caused it to leave the channel.

https://chesapeakebaymagazine.com/container-ship-aground-out...

kayodelycaon• 4 years ago

By control, they mean giving directions. Pilots have no authority over the ship’s crew and they certainly don’t operate the controls.

teruakohatu• 4 years ago

"The law of general average is a principle of maritime law whereby all stakeholders in a sea venture proportionately share any losses resulting from a voluntary sacrifice of part of the ship or cargo to save the whole in an emergency. For instance, should the crew jettison some cargo overboard to lighten the ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata by both the carrier and the cargo-owners."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_average

confident_inept• 4 years ago

Thank you. That website and article were a train wreck.

I had no idea that ship was still stuck. I guess now they have to dismantle it in place? What's process here?

wbl• 4 years ago

It's a site for people who carry out an ancient profession that has had millennia to accrue jargon and lore.

walrus012• 4 years ago

gcaptain is not a train wreck, it assumes that the reader is in the maritime industry and uses terminology that is widely known to that specific industry segment. much as a network engineering or software development news site and acronyms might be even more confusing to people who hold 100 ton+ masters licenses.

look at all the weird sounding terms that might be used in an infosec/netsec publication...

striking• 4 years ago

General Average is a maritime law principle requiring that the shipowner and cargo interests proportionately share in the costs associated with rescuing a vessel after a major casualty. When GA is declared, cargo owners are required to contribute to a GA fund before their cargo can be released.

... is what the article says. Is there something wrong with this?

CalChris2• 4 years ago

No, the gCaptain article itself gave a good definition of General Average, a fundamental maritime principle that goes back millennia to the Code of Hammurabi in 1755 BC, at least.

  General Average is a maritime law principle requiring that the shipowner and cargo interests proportionately share in the costs associated with rescuing a vessel after a major casualty. When GA is declared, cargo owners are required to contribute to a GA fund before their cargo can be released.

hnburnsy4• 4 years ago

So does maritime law override any contract between the ship owner and cargo shipper or does it just mandate that it is included in any contract?

Also does the local pilot bear any responsibility?

Ever Forward ran aground on March 13 outside the Craighill shipping channel in Chesapeake Bay as it departed the Port of Baltimore with a pilot on board.

From another article...

The Bay pilot aboard had control of the ship at the time it ran aground. Investigators are still looking at whether it was a mechanical issue or operator error that caused it to leave the channel.

vwarner14112• 4 years ago

From what I've been told, the local pilots does not bear any responsibility.

While I don't work on container ships, every time a pilot comes onboard our vessel (87m) we maintain control. The pilot provides guidance and assistance in navigation, but the captain or a bridge officer (depending on watch) is in control of the vessel.

I think liability is removed from the pilots because ultimately the ships captain is responsible for the ship, and the officer on watch is actually in control.

greenhorn123• 4 years ago

You can't contract out of the law. That goes for almost all law I don't see why maritime law would be an exception.

dcx• 4 years ago

I have worked nearby to this area - this is a legal principle, but the way this takes force in contracts is either by including a specific clause, or via a pointer to an international shipping standard which pulls in sensible defaults. Something like what happens with force majeure clauses [1]. International shipping contracts are themselves fairly standardised; they're thick and have all kinds of things in them, accreted over literally centuries of practice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure

glitchc• 4 years ago

One I can believe, two is stretching it, but three in a row? Something stinks.

smitty1e4• 4 years ago

The local news says: "She missed her turn."

Now, anyone who's been in the biz (4.5 years of sea time in the U.S. Navy here) knows that a vessel getting underway has an experienced pilot and a full navigation detail on the bridge while in restricted waters.

Looking at the ludicrous funds already spent over the last three weeks (we must be talking hundreds of millions by now, with no end in sight) and the ripple effects of closing the channel (which costs must jump into billions almost immediately), saying "she missed her turn" is almost a middle finger to the audience.

Was it a steering casualty? Were the radars operational? Was the crew qualified? Does someone want to craft an unsavory theory?

The costs involved were quite literally among the main drivers for creating the idea of insurance[1]. Tell me what caused her to "miss her turn". With stakes that high, such mishaps really need a full-on tsunami behind them for such a simplistic explanation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_insurance

rob743• 4 years ago

From what I could see (https://www.npr.org/2022/03/31/1089997406/ever-forward-conta..., Wikipedia), the channel is not closed? Maybe operating at reduced capacity because of the need to keep a safety distance to the stranded ship, but they still can get around her.

BTW "She missed her turn" made me think of something different, it's "she missed a turn", as in going straight forward when she should have turned right or left.

mandevil2• 4 years ago

The channel is not closed: in fact what happened is that she was supposed to turn tightly into the channel and ... didn't. So she continued on ahead, burying herself an entire boat length into the sandbar. This is why she is stuck so tightly- a ~40 ft drought in ~20 feet of water, but she's so far stuck that she's cleared the channel.

As for why, the investigation hasn't completed, there is no official ruling on who's fault it is, and a whole lot of lawyers telling people not to comment because this is big, big money.

ashtonkem• 4 years ago

I thought this was the second, not the third.

mandevil2• 4 years ago

I think a lot of this is that ships have gotten massively larger quite recently. Just to focus on the Evergreen Marine fleet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Marine_Corporation) you can see that until 2013 the largest ships they operated were about 8000 TEU. Then in 2013 the Thalassa class came online at 13k TEU, and more came in that general size (including Ever Forward, the ship in this case), then in 2018 came the G class (including Ever Given) at 20k TEU, then the A class at an even larger 23k TEU is just starting to come online. But you can see that ships of this size are less than a decade old, so you can understand why the edge cases aren't fully worked out- channels and ports can handle them in perfect conditions, but when things degrade they are more likely to have problems because they are so much bigger.

Victerius2• 4 years ago

10k+ TEU ships need to be made illegal.

Kon-Peki• 4 years ago

I am really surprised that it is still stuck. The Ever Given was only stuck for 6 days in what appeared to be a more challenging situation.

This has now been 2 weeks. I guess that since it's not blocking anything they don't have to move as quickly.

a2tech2• 4 years ago

It’s well and truly buried. Something like it plowed into the mud at 14 knots, and pushed over a full ship length into it. It’s draft is typically 40ish feet and it’s in 20ft of water at the bow. So that means it’s buried 20ft in mud up front. The strength of the suction alone is staggering. I’m starting to think it might be there for a very long time. Maybe even salvaged in place.

toomuchtodo• 4 years ago

I think it’s impossible to refloat it without damaging the hull at this point, and you’ll know salvage is the route they’re taking when the containment booms (for fuel loss prevention) are deployed around the vessel.

tedunangst2• 4 years ago

1. You drive down a narrow road with snow banks on both sides, hit a patch of ice, and spin sideways, wedging yourself between the walls.

2. You drive, at speed, into four feet of mud.

Which is easier to get out of?

bradknowles• 4 years ago

Depends on how fast the fleet of Australian three trailer road trains are building up behind you.

throwaway0a5e2• 4 years ago

Which is easier to get out of?

Depends massively on other yet unknown facts about the situation, but generally the snow.

andrewflnr• 4 years ago

It's not stopping up the entire global supply chain like Ever Given was, so I bet there's not nearly the same effort going into freeing it.

blamazon• 4 years ago

If I am understanding this correctly -- if I ship cargo across oceans via container, I am potentially accepting some piece of liability for fixing any accident that occurs? Is this true?

Or are they just saying, oopsie, your costs are your own costs due to this lost cargo, we will not recompensate.

Digory• 4 years ago

You bear the risk that you’ll have to pay your pro-rata share of any cargo sacrificed to save the ship.

You can (and probably should) have your own insurance that will pay you in case this happens. The insurer can pay cash to the cargo owners ASAP, and then sort out the equitable sale of the actual cargo and distribution of the proceeds. Kind of like a bankruptcy for a ship’s voyage.

If they have to wreck some stuff to save everybody else, and that works, everybody else has to pay something. Fair-ish, but I suspect Insurers start to call foul on Evergreen’s repeated groundings.

hef198982• 4 years ago

It is surprising how even "professionals" (read: companies shipping loads of containers every month) don't get that insurance part. And that insurance is dirt cheap, I used to have one as a basis for my now closed company. It covered all losses, globally, for all modes of transportation for solar modules (and some other electronics falling into the same class of products), covered warehousing. For a projected transported value of appr. 100k € per months I paid roughly 1k per year. And still people for go that, relying on the suppliers "insurance" based on Incoterms... Well, those insurance is usually very limited and leaves some holes, especially if people don't get what incoterms to use and what they mean...

KarlKemp2• 4 years ago

If I understand it correctly, this is mostly about cargo losses resulting from voluntary actions, i. e. throwing containers overboard to lighten the ship to get it unstuck.

The idea is that the crew should not be put into a position where they argue which cargo to jettison, and the customers should not have to care about the position of their cargo on board. Averaging out partial losses makes everyone's interests align. If all cargo is lost, the result of following the process would be identical to everyone losing the value of their cargo.

Costs from environmental damage are excluded. Some of the salvage operations are included. Not sure if it's limited to the value of your cargo somewhere, but it doesn't seem to be a risk of unlimited liability.

PeterisP2• 4 years ago

In any shipping, part of the risk is that your cargo may arrive late, damaged or never - you may get insurance for that, but that risk exists.

GA means that if due to some issue they throw away half of the cargo to save the other half (which is a good thing - you want them to be permitted to do that without going bankrupt, because otherwise there is no motivation to save the half that can be saved) then instead of some people getting their cargo and some losing it, those whose cargo was saved pay a proportional value to those whose cargo got thrown away, so after the settlement all of them get the same average lost cargo value.

tshaddox• 4 years ago

which is a good thing - you want them to be permitted to do that without going bankrupt, because otherwise there is no motivation to save the half that can be saved

You also don’t want them to have any incentive to treat one customer’s cargo more carefully than another’s. You want them to jettison cargo indiscriminately with the only incentive being to save the ship.

eru4• 4 years ago

There's an interesting wrinkle: the system works on self-declared value of cargo, and is set up in such a way that people have an incentive to declare the true value of the cargo.

Basically, if you declare a value that's too low, you don't get enough money when your cargo gets thrown overboard. If you declare too high, you pay more, if somebody else's cargo gets thrown overboard.

killingtime74• 4 years ago

You can always buy insurance…..

cphoover2• 4 years ago

Evergreen Marine? Isn't this the same company that ran aground in the suez canal? What gives? How would they not prevent this from happening so close to that last huge nightmare, and bottleneck in global shipping?

labster• 4 years ago

The very same, and this one is a few thousand miles away from the other nightmare, and is not blocking anyone else.

cphoover2• 4 years ago

Yea it's just sitting in the shallows of the Chesapeake near where I live likely destroying the ecosystem

joe_the_user• 4 years ago

Yeah, same company and same class of ships. The ship that got stuck in the Suez had gotten stuck other places previous and might have gotten stuck afterwards too faik. Huge ships played a part in the bottlenecking of LA/Long Beach also.

In the last time years, all of the largest shipping companies have built ships that are essentially way too big, just to save some marginal amount. A big part of this is that these shipping lines mostly don't have to pay the downside of this absurdity.

Uehreka• 4 years ago

Knowing absolutely nothing about this industry, I wonder if it’s just a matter of there being only a few big players, such that any accident would always be one of a couple companies.

tedunangst2• 4 years ago

How much control do you think they had over these incidents?

lozenge• 4 years ago

Well, they control their hiring, training, and oversight of operations to ensure procedures are followed.

Not to speak to the specifics of the incidents, but "the company is irrelevant because they are distant from the ship" wouldn't wash.

Brian_K_White• 4 years ago

So you suggest that Jeebus struck them twice, and no one else once? Ok.

Even if there are no other else's that have ships that big, they controlled that they built ships that big at the very least.

throwaway0a5e2• 4 years ago

They're getting the Boeing treatment. Their name now has mind share among the people with high class, high dollar eyeballs that everyone wants their ads in front of. So every time they do anything even marginally newsworthy it will be written about because the subject has a great clicks to effort ratio for the people who produce content in order to sell ad time.

vwarner14112• 4 years ago

So for anyone curious, the article mentions very briefly that there was a pilot onboard. A pilot is someone who comes onboard to help the ship navigate, and is usually required in areas like this (areas with shallow waters, etc). Transiting the Suez also requires a pilot come onboard. They come on to prevent these issues.

eru4• 4 years ago

Historical anecdote: Mark Twain used to be a pilot, too. His literary pseudonym pays homage to that profession.

55873445216111• 4 years ago

Battleship USS Missouri also ran aground in Chesapeake Bay in 1950.

the battleship remained stuck for over two weeks before being freed from the sand. The ship was so damaged that she had to return to port and enter dry dock for repairs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_USS_Missouri_grounding

RandomBK• 4 years ago

Does anyone have a reputable resource for how General Average actually works under today's international law?

Some questions I'm curious about are:

(1) What constitutes an "emergency"? If the ship is stuck but not otherwise in imminent danger, would GA apply? It would appear to me that Evergreen could safely transport the cargo off the ship, but would rather just throw it overboard to save time and effort. Doesn't that just unnecessarily pass the costs on to cargo-owners?

(2) Many places refer to the idea that GA only applies if jettisoning cargo actually saves the ship. It sounds like the ship is really stuck - if they jettison cargo but the ship still doesn't budge, would that nullify GA?

(3) Is the GA liability limited by the declared value of your own cargo on that ship? What happens if the total declared value of the "saved" cargo is less than the value of the "discarded" cargo?

(4) Do cargo-owners have an option to say "you know what, I don't really want my cargo anymore" and avoid paying GA?

(5) What country would have jurisdiction over any litigation in this instance? Would it be the country whose territorial waters this happened in, the flag country of the ship, the country of ownership of the ship, contract-defined, etc?

dmurray2• 4 years ago

I'm not an expert but 3 and 4 seem to have been answered: the point of GA is everyone gets X% of their cargo value back, and we decide what X is. Either you get X in cash, or you pay 100-X into the fund. So yes, your liability is limited to 100% of your cargo, and you wouldn't generally want to exercise any option to walk away from it. (Maybe you would in some edge cases around fraud, or financing difficulties, or where the market value of your cargo has suddenly declined).

paxys2• 4 years ago

Remember folks these ships approach the size of the tallest skyscrapers in the country. Inertia is a bitch.

throw0101a• 4 years ago

The Odd Lots podcast did an episode on this ship—partly motivated by the fact that one of the co-host's (Tracy Alloway) recently moved from Hong Kong to New York and all her stuff is on it:

It's happened again. Another container ship owned by the Evergreen Maritime Corp. has gotten stuck a year after the Ever Given became lodged in the Suez Canal and briefly halted the flow of global trade. This time the grounding happened in the Chesapeake Bay and involves the Ever Forward -- a 1000-foot container ship which happens to be carrying the contents of Tracy's entire Hong Kong apartment. On this episode of Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with maritime historian Sal Mercogliano about why another ship has gotten stuck, what it says about shipping and infrastructure, and how long Tracy might have to wait to get her stuff.

* https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/5abecebe-aa98-11ec-9133-1f4...

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-tracys-furniture-i...

Odd Lots has done a number of episode on logistics over the last little while (ports (multiple times), rail, trucking, the Suez Canal and Ever Given, shipping pallets, shipping containers, etc), so this is just continuing the 'series' in a way.

londons_explore• 4 years ago

I would like to see General Average be used for more than just shipping.

For example, I would happily insure my house with a 'General Average' based insurance. I would pay no premium upfront for said insurance, but I would be committing to pay a proportional share of anyone's house that is part of the scheme that gets damaged.

Sadly nothing like this seems to exist. Instead we're stuck with regular insurance which on average spends more on admin and overheads than it actually pays out!

General average declared for Ever Forward after unsuccesful attempts to refloat

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