“MASSIVE fireballs” emanating from burning ships laden with US military-owned jet fuel and (thankfully empty) sodium cyanide containers understandably make politicians, and everyone else, nervous. More so when they happen within striking distance of TV cameras.

We don’t yet know what caused a Madeira-flagged boxship to hit a US-flagged tanker anchored off the UK coast early on Monday.

We don’t yet know how serious the pollution implications of this casualty will be, or what the final clean up, salvage and legal costs will look like.

We do, however, know that it could have been a lot worse.

The first sigh of relief came when it was confirmed that all but one of the crew were safe and accounted for. The second came once politicians were told that it wasn’t linked to Russia.

However bad this casualty looks to a general public watching live footage of two ships on fire, there will ultimately be answers from a thorough accident investigation process.

The emergency response was rapid and textbook. The owners, flag state authorities, insurers and everyone else associated with these two ships are all known and are already co-operating.

The wheels are in motion to deal with what comes next and there are established protocols, systems and agencies in place to make that happen.

Should this have been the big “dark fleet” incident that everybody has been predicting is both imminent and inevitable, this would be a very different story.

While the initial emergency response would unlikely have been affected, the question of how to deal with uninsured, sanctioned, or otherwise politically toxic ships is still not yet clear.

The best guess is that the best scenario would be a more difficult response as all parts of the system slow down to assess what is and is not going to be acceptable or land them in hot water. Beyond the emergency response there would likely be a very politicised and drawn out process.

While the overwhelming fear of an uninsured catastrophe off Europe’s coast has been widely predicted for some time, the inconvenient truth is that most governments are still not ready to deal with it when it happens.

The priority is to deal with the situation in front us and work out how a ship running at 16 knots can hit an anchored tanker.

The next question should be what happens next time.

At the very least this unfortunate casualty should concentrate minds in governments that now is the time to have a clear plan ready to go to deal with a shadow fleet equivalent of this incident.

Richard Meade
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List

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