Ship grounding or ship stranding is the impact of a ship on seabed or waterway side. [1] It may be intentional, as in beaching to land crew or cargo, and careening, for maintenance or repair, or unintentional, as in a marine accident. In accidental cases, it is commonly referred to as "running aground".
When unintentional, grounding may result simply in stranding, with or without damage to the submerged part of the ship's hull. Breach of the hull may lead to significant flooding, which in the absence of containment in watertight bulkheads may substantially compromise the ship's structural integrity, stability, and safety. [2] [3]
Severe grounding applies extreme loads upon ship structures. [4] In less severe accidents, it might result only in damage to the hull; however, in most serious accidents, it might lead to hull breaches, cargo spills, total loss of the vessel, and, in the worst cases, human casualties. [5]
Grounding accounts for about one-third of commercial ship accidents, [6] [7] and ranks second in frequency, after ship-on-ship collision. [8] Grounding accidents are being studied in many international ports with serious concerns, e.g. Chittagong Port in Bangladesh. [9]
Among the causes of unintentional grounding are:
When accidental grounding occurs, the ship or its cargo, will need to be removed if possible. This is done for various reasons:[ citation needed ]
A double-hulled tanker refers to an oil tanker which has a double hull. They reduce the likelihood of leaks occurring compared to single-hulled tankers, and their ability to prevent or reduce oil spills led to double hulls being standardized for oil tankers and other types of ships including by the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships or MARPOL Convention. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster in Alaska in 1989, the US government required all new oil tankers built for use between US ports to be equipped with a full double hull.
A ship is a large vessel that travels the world's oceans and other navigable waterways, carrying cargo or passengers, or in support of specialized missions, such as defense, research and fishing. Ships are generally distinguished from boats, based on size, shape, load capacity and purpose. Ships have supported exploration, trade, warfare, migration, colonization, and science. Ship transport is responsible for the largest portion of world commerce.
A merchant ship, merchant vessel, trading vessel, or merchantman is a watercraft that transports cargo or carries passengers for hire. This is in contrast to pleasure craft, which are used for personal recreation, and naval ships, which are used for military purposes.
A double hull is a ship hull design and construction method where the bottom and sides of the ship have two complete layers of watertight hull surface: one outer layer forming the normal hull of the ship, and a second inner hull which is some distance inboard, typically by a few feet, which forms a redundant barrier to seawater in case the outer hull is damaged and leaks.
The MV Sea Empress was a single-hull Suezmax oil tanker that ran aground at the entrance to the Milford Haven harbour on the southwest coast of Wales in February 1996. The ensuing oil spill, Britain's third largest oil spillage and the 12th largest in the world at the time, devastated a considerable area of local coastline and killed many birds, and continued to affect the Pembrokeshire coast for years afterwards.
Marine safety is one of the eleven missions of the United States Coast Guard.
Ship collision is a type of maritime incident, a violent encounter involving moving ships. While the standard definition of collision involves more than one moving ship, and an engagement between a ship and a motionless object is formally known as "allision", in practice the word "collision" is usually used to describe also the situation where a moving ship hits a stationary ship or a fixed object such as a bridge.
An oil tanker, also known as a petroleum tanker, is a ship designed for the bulk transport of oil or its products. There are two basic types of oil tankers: crude tankers and product tankers. Crude tankers move large quantities of unrefined crude oil from its point of extraction to refineries. Product tankers, generally much smaller, are designed to move refined products from refineries to points near consuming markets.
The Erika legislative packages of the European Union are maritime laws intended to improve safety in the shipping industry and thereby reduce environmental damage to the oceans.
The environmental impact of shipping include air pollution, water pollution, acoustic, and oil pollution. Ships are responsible for more than 18% of nitrogen oxides pollution, and 3% of greenhouse gas emissions.
The Ship and Offshore Structural Mechanics Laboratory (SSML) is a laboratory in the Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering of Pusan National University. The SSML develops methods useful for strength analysis and structural design of marine structures. The methods developed should be helpful for achievement of high performance of the structural system. The Laboratory has the facilities for numerical and experimental studies. This includes mechanical testing equipment and high-speed computers with non-linear finite element programmes.
The 2010 Port Arthur oil spill was the result of a collision between two vessels in the Sabine-Neches Waterway at Port Arthur, Texas on January 23, 2010. The two vessels were the oil tanker Eagle Otome and a barge being pushed by the towboat Dixie Vengeance.
The Pierre Guillaumat was a supertanker built in 1977 by Chantiers de l'Atlantique at Saint-Nazaire for Compagnie Nationale de Navigation. It was the third vessel of Batillus class supertankers and distinguished for being the biggest ship ever constructed. It was surpassed in length, deadweight tonnage and displacement only by Seawise Giant, which, though it was originally smaller when it was built in 1976, was subsequently lengthened and enlarged.
The Sea Empress oil spill occurred at the entrance to the Milford Haven Waterway in Pembrokeshire, Wales on 15th February 1996. The Sea Empress was en route to the Texaco oil refinery near Pembroke when she became grounded on mid-channel rocks at St. Ann's Head. Over the course of a week, she spilt 72,000 tons of crude oil into the sea. The spill occurred within the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park – one of Europe's most important and sensitive wildlife and marine conservation areas. It was Britain's third largest oil spillage and the twelfth largest in the world at the time.
e-Navigation is a strategy developed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a UN specialized agency, to bring about increased safety of navigation in commercial shipping through better organization of data on ships and on shore, and better data exchange and communication between ships and the ship and shore. The concept was launched when maritime authorities from seven nations requested the IMO's Maritime Safety Committee to add the development of an e-navigation strategy to the work programs of the IMO's NAV and COMSAR sub-committees. Working groups in three sub-committees and an intersessional correspondence group, led by Norway, has subsequently developed a Strategy Implementation Plan (SIP). Member states of IMO and a number of Intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations have contributed to the work, including the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), Comité International Radio-Maritime (CIRM), the International Association of Lighthouse Authorities (IALA), the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), the Baltic and International Maritime Council (BIMCO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)
Kaj Antero Riska is a naval architect and engineer with expertise in ice and arctic technology. He has written various publications about ice-going ships and icebreaker design, ice loads and ice management for arctic offshore floating platforms. He worked at Total S.A. as Senior Ice Engineer. He received the 2019 POAC Founders Lifetime Achievement Award.
MT or MVHephaestus was a bunkering oil tanker that ran aground off Qawra, Malta on 10 February 2018 and was subsequently scuttled as a dive site off Xatt l-Aħmar, Gozo on 29 August 2022.
Southeast Asia is home to a diverse marine environment. The region is host to extensive coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass beds, and has even been described as the Amazon rainforest of the ocean. The region is estimated to contain approximately 35% of the world’s mangrove species and over 45% of the world’s seagrass species. The shipping industry has multiple damaging impacts on marine habitats and wildlife, such as pollution from port actives, oil spills ballast and bilge discharge, waste dumping from ships and direct physical impact from grounding and anchor damage.