Shipping Hazards

The vessel sank very quickly ... after being strongly overturned to the left."

"According to our initial information, only one sailor has been rescued and the vessel has not been found yet."

That is very bad luck, very bad indeed, as Dame Fortune simply looked the other way. Vietnam National Shipping Lines has lost the largest and most modern vessel in its fleet, the Vinalines Queen. Worse, 22 crew members of the ship went down on rough waters in the open ocean. Vietnam had made an appeal to the Philippines, Taiwanese and Japanese coast guards for assistance in finding the vessel.

Emergency equipment on the ship should have sent out automatic SOS signals to satellites and coastal rescue stations as an emergency alert. It did not, and the reason for that failure is not immediately clear, as nothing whatever was transmitted. The ship had been in waters up to 5,000 metres deep in extremely bad weather, en route from Indonesia to Ningde, China.

In its hold was over 54,000 tonnes of nickel ore. Metals like aluminum and nickel ore are often shipped in powder form. At their destination once reaching port, the powdered metal is blown at high force into receiving pipes; this process called 'liquefying'.

A year ago the global shipowners' association Intercargo had forwarded a warning of the hazards of transporting nickel ore. It seems highly likely that in this instance the nickel ore might have 'liquefied', due to the extreme turbulence on the ocean, causing the ship to list.

Loading to international standards is supposed to prevent this type of thing from occurring. On Christmas Day, off the Philippines, the ship disappeared. Before it did, it signalled to the company informing that it was listing at an 18-degree angle in the violent seas.

There was, however, good news that came with the bad. A calamitous bad, and a heart-warming good bit of news; one crew member, after having floated in the open sea for five days with a life jacket his only, but life-saving protection, managed to survive. He was picked up by a British ship, which carried him to Singapore.

As for the ship itself and its crew, rescuers found no trace of the ship, other than an oil streak at its last known location. Intercargo had been extremely concerned at the loss of three cargo ships, all loaded in Indonesia, all of them carrying nickel ore, which had sunk disastrously in 2010, with the loss of 44 seamen.