*Tells MoD ship went undetected because it was reported sunk
The Coast Guard has tried to wash its hands of the security loophole exposed by MT Pavit sailing undetected and running aground at Mumbai’s Juhu beach by telling the Ministry of Defence (MoD) it failed to detect the unmanned tanker as it was thought to be sunk.
To support its claim, the Coast Guard appended a copy of the July 2 news report published on a British news website The News (www.portsmouth.co.uk), which it said was forwarded to it by the Dubai-based owners of the ship as the source of the information that the ship had sunk.
In a letter, the Coast Guard said on July 31 — soon after they confirmed the “vessel is not a suspect ship” to the Mumbai Police — they directed Coast Guard vessel Amrit Kaur for “immediate probe” with a diver being airdropped on the deck.
The diver promptly recorded that the logs and records were “intact”. The second inquiry was done in two sorties by separate teams of Coast Guard officials on Monday between 11 am and 5 pm where the first formal update was — “water ingress in engine room, none of the machinery and equipment functioning, and logs, clothes, documents in cabin all strewn around”. Coast Guard officially declined having any information from local fishermen and local district authorities on Saturday and maintain their first response followed the call from the Mumbai Police Commissioner.
According to sources in the Coast Guard, the first e-mail on Pavit came on June 29 at 5.30 pm from the Marine Rescue Co-ordination Centre (MRCC) of Falmouth Coast Guard, UK. The nodes of the vessel were exchanged as Mumbai’s Coast Guard Western Command was then the closest to the ship. According to the details exchanged, MT Pavit’s last port of call was Berbera, Somalia, and it had left for Dubai on June 22. With its expected arrival on July 1, the fuel in the vessel was “sufficient for pass”, according to the captain’s last log. The captain had pulled the distress signal on June 29, after which the MRCC in Coast Guard, Mumbai, contacted him while he was still on board.
The captain informed MRCC that the distress report had been conveyed to Managers Prime Tankers, Dubai, UK MTO and Oman Coast Guard. The MRCC took a review again and at 6.33 pm on June 29, the updated nautical location of MT Pavit was 675 miles from Mumbai coast with the drift position at ‘northeastern drift’. The MRCC then asked the Rescue Co-ordination Centre, Oman, to take charge and rescue the crew.
At 5 pm on June 30, Directorate General Shipping office was intimated that a merchant motor tank Jag Pushpa, an Indian flag ship of Great Eastern Shipping, was contacted by UKMTO and asked to co-ordinate after a Portsmouth-based Royal Fleet vessel St Albama travelled 100 nautical miles responding to a distress call. The rescue was complete on June 30 and the 13 crew members were taken to Sikka in Gujarat. Before being rescued, the captain had left the automatic identification system (AIS) “on” with the status “not under command”, about which he informed the Mumbai MRCC.
Meanwhile, on June 30, the MRCC requested the chief hydrographer, Government of India, to issue the NAVAREA (naval area) warning for NAVAREA IX — the reported position of the ship as on June 30 after the crew was rescued. The NAVAREA 1X is the Oman region where the ship was being monitored. On July 2, post an article that appeared on the web portal under the byline of a defence journalist stating: “Hero sailor saves crew as tanker sinks in storm”, the owners of the vessel updated the UKMTO that their ship had sunk and faxed it the update and the news article on July 2.
The Coast Guard, after separately verifying with UKMTO, removed the alert on the evening of July 2. The ship, said officials, had meanwhile lost its battery energy with the AIS dying down after it entered NAVAREA VIII — India’s nautical space — where it went undetected for 30 days as the alert for the ship had already been called off. In the absence of AIS and with the alert called back, security officials said it was impossible to track a vessel, manned or not, in the vast sea.
Antony asks Navy to file report
Shocked by the washing up of an abandoned merchant vessel on the Mumbai coast after it drifted in the Arabian Sea for a month, the Navy Chief has ordered an high-level inquiry into the incident and asked the Western Naval Command to submit a detailed report on the matter.
Defence Minister A K Antony has also taken serious note of the incident and is learnt to have expressed his concern and asked the Navy for details on the matter.
“It is a very serious incident and a breach of our coastal security system if an abandoned ship washes up ashore at Mumbai without being detected. A detailed report has been sought on the matter,” sources in the Defence Ministry said.
Express News Service
Coast Guard withdrew Pavit alert after dodgy web report
The Indian Coast Guard seems to have based its decision to remove a maritime alert warning about an unmanned oil tanker floating in the Arabian Sea off Oman on inconclusive, and possibly dodgy, reports which said the ship, M T Pavit, had sunk in a storm. One month after its crew abandoned Pavit and gave it up as sunk, the ghost ship quietly sailed into Mumbai’s waters and got stuck on the Juhu beach on the night of July 30, exposing a gaping hole in coastal security and sparking outrage.
The Coast Guard’s Mumbai-based Western Command had issued the alert after Pavit’s captain had sent a distress call on June 29 and security agencies were alerted about the 78-m Panama-flagged tanker floating adrift after the crew was rescued. The alert was removed in mid-July after the owners of Pavit faxed the Coast Guard a copy of a British news website report and information from the UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) which said the ship had sunk.
Investigation by The Indian Express has, however, found that the information on which these reports were based had not conclusively established that Pavit had sunk.
One of the two reports faxed by the Dubai-based owners of Pavit was a news report on British news website The News (www.portsmouth.co.uk) titled “Hero sailor saves crew as tanker sinks in storm”, written by Michael Powell. This report was about how sailors from a British navy ship in the region had responded to the distress call of Pavit and rescued its sailors.
Last week, in a letter to the Ministry of Defence justifying its removing the alert for Pavit, the Coast Guard had highlighted the headline of the report as well as a sentence in it which talked about the rescue “just before the vessel sank to the bottom of the sea bed”. This information, the Coast Guard claimed, had been subsequently verified with the UKMTO which confirmed that Pavit had sunk.
Powell, who is the defence correspondent of the website, told The Indian Express that he had concluded that the ship had sunk based on photographs of the incident circulated by the British navy to the media as well as interviews with sailors on board the HMS St Albans which went to rescue Pavit. He said the photograph “shows the tanker to be sinking” and also supports why sailors he spoke to on July 1 “thought it was sinking”.
The version of the sinking vessel was based on “eye-witness account as given to the crew members of the warship. It came to me straight from the horse’s mouth. I can best say it was the situation then,” Powell said.
The Royal Navy’s media office, however, contradicted Powell. A statement issued by the office after the incident only said “the vessel was stricken, defined as ‘affected by something overwhelming’,” according to a spokesman. He said the Commanding Officer and two members of the aircrew from HMS St Albans gave media interviews on July 1 and “none of them quoted that the ship had sunk”.
“The Portsmouth News reported that the MT Pavit had sunk. The (St Albans) ship’s air crew, the personnel who operate the ship’s Merlin helicopter, gave eye-witness accounts that the ship ‘appeared to be sinking’ in so far as it was low in the water and taking on water,” the spokesman said in an e-mail to The Indian Express.
The media office had also spoken to Powell since and he had confirmed to them that he had not quoted anyone from St Albans “directly or indirectly as saying that the ship had sunk”, the e-mail added. “He (Powell) understood that to be the situation, based upon the description of water being taken on, on the images of the ship low in the water, and the fact that the crew had abandoned ship,” the spokesman added.
Subsequently, the Royal Navy on the same day updated the Falmouth Coastguard Marine Rescue Co-ordination Centre, which had co-ordinated the rescue, that the crew was rescued and that the vessel stands abandoned. Ian Guy, Watch Manager, Falmouth Coastguard, said that his office was in touch with the owners of Pavit “but they were not very helpful”.
“We informed the company that the vessel was still abandoned and drifting and that the sailors were rescued. On July 2, a phone call from UKMTO reached us and informed us that the vessel was still drifting,” Guy said. “Finally on July 5, we again got an e-mail from towage agents that the vessel was ‘still adrift” and that they can make arrangement for a salvage operation only once they get the decision from the owners. We did not track the matter further as it was not our responsibility.”
The UKMTO, which is the primary point of contact for merchant vessels and liaison with military forces in the region, confirmed the information on the news website on July 2, according to the Coast Guard. However, when reached by The Indian Express, a UKMTO duty officer in Dubai said he was aware of the news reports surrounding Pavit sinking but added that it had not confirmed any such thing to the Coast Guard. “Your information is negative,” the duty officer said.
Lastly, it is now learnt, that the owners of Pavit had also informed Coast Guard that their tanker had sunk and that they had started the insurance process for the same. But despite repeated attempts and messages left at the Dubai office of Pavit’s owners, there was no comment.
-IE
No comments:
Post a Comment