Arrived BHAVNAGAR / Alang

On her way to Alang

On her way to Alang

Fire erupted on board of passenger cargo vessel Harsha Vardhana on 1250 LT May 15 2012 in a cabin on passenger deck. Vessel is undergoing repairs at Kidderpore, India, there were some 60 workers, nobody was injured. Some 4 firefighting teams and a fire boat were engaged in fire fighting, fire was brought under control by 1330. Harsha Vardhana is one of the three vessels operating between Calcutta, Chennai and Visakhapatnam, and Port Blair of Andaman Islands. Maritime Bulletin www.odin.tc

General cargo vessel Parnassos II ran aground early in the morning May 15 2012 shortly after leaving port of Saint Nicolas, Greece, due to engine failure. Vessel was refloated and towed to Bay of Itea same day, where she was anchored for inspection. Maritime Bulletin www.odin.tc

An incident in the St. Clair River caused a stir along the shoreline as the "Bristol Bay" caught fire in the afternoon of May 15, 2012. A smoke stack fire broke out on the ice-breaking tugboat during a training exercise around 1 p.m. The ship was anchored in the middle of the river near Ferry Dock Hill for over an hour. The crew was spraying water into the stack. Nobody was injured in the fire and the ship sustained minimal damage, U.S. Coast Guard officials confirmed. report with photo: www.theobserver.c...

A crewmember of the "Gaurav Prem" testified on May 15, 212, that his superior officer ordered him and other workers to dump plastic pipes overboard when the ship was between Korea and the Panama Canal last summer. The testimony along with pictures that members of the crew took, bolstered federal prosecutors’ allegations that Capt. Prastana Taohim covered up the dumping when he presented fraudulent logs to the Coast Guard when the vessel reached Mobile in September. Taohim faces obstruction of justice charges related to the so-called Garbage Record Book that that Coast Guard maintains made no mention of the dumping. The Defense attorney told jurors that his client had nothing to do with the dumping. The allegations all sprung from a setup engineered by the ship’s chief officer who was angry that Taohim got the captain position over him, the lawyer said. He added that ethnic rivalries played a role. Taohim is from Thailand, while most of the crewmembers were Filipino. He said the allegations do not hold up to common sense and that the dumping occurred before the crew got orders to change their destination from Venezuela to Mobile. He also noted that the vessel just had left a port in China where the ship disposed of 3 cubic meters of plastic waste — a service that the port provided for free. Taohim had no idea that the plastic pipes ever were onboard. They had been in a cargo hold since before Taohim even took command of the ship, he said.

Beached at Aliaga at 15.05.12

An operation to stem a gas leak at Total’s Elgin platform, located 150 miles off the coast of Aberdeen, has begun on May 15, 2012, at 9.20 am a.m. The operation involves pumping heavy mud into a well from the support vessel "West Phoenix" via a temporary pipeline connected to the G4 wellhead. Depending on the precise conditions inside the well, the operation itself and the subsequent observation period will last a few days before it is possible to confirm whether the operation has been fully effective. All 238 staff were evacuated from the Elgin platform when gas started spewing from the installation on March 25.

On May 13, 2012, the "Lifjord" serving the Lavik-Oppedal had to be taken out of service due to engine trouble. The connection was held upright with a reduced capacity by ferry operator Fjord 1.