After months of trying Splash was finally to obtain this week Panama’s final accident report into the grounding of the
Wakashio
The accident, which led to a total loss, happened on July 25, 2020, and although an accident report was lodged with the International Maritime Organization (IMO) a couple of years ago by the ship’s register, Panama, it has only just been made public.
The report finds that the crew were celebrating the birthday of a crewmember on the day of an accident and the decision was taken to get nearer to shore to find a wifi signal so he could phone his family. The officer on watch was likely distracted by his mobile phone as the ship bore down a reef off Mauritius, with the officer failing to keep five miles from the shore as had been stipulated by the master. The report also found it took some 30 minutes after the grounding for the crew to contact local authorities in Mauritius.
Lack of vigilance, failure to support in the bridge, overconfidence and lack of personal capability, and inadequate ISM procedures were all listed as the human factors that led to the environmental catastrophe that played out in the following months.
It took 18 months to remove the remnants of the giant Wakashio, which split in two on reefs near a protected UNESCO World Heritage site. The Nagashiki Shipping newcastlemax leaked more than 1,000 tonnes of bunker fuel. It was operated by Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL) with crew management provided by Anglo-Eastern.
In announcing measures to prevent another reoccurrence of a Wakashio style disaster, MOL gave the reason the ship had changed its passage plan from leaving a 22 nautical mile gap between it and the island of Mauritius to just two nautical miles. The reason cited, according to a release issued in December 2020, was “to enter an area within the communication range of mobile phones”. Moreover, MOL revealed the crew were using a nautical chart without sufficient scale to confirm the accurate distance from the coast and water depth. In addition, MOL said a crewmember neglected appropriate watch-keeping, both visually and by radar.
The Wakashio is the second-highest profile commercial ship accident of the 2020s to date, after the 2021 Suez grounding of the Ever Given, a ship that is also flagged with Panama. Like the Ever Given incident, Panamanian authorities gave inconsistent reports with what happened to the Wakashio, pinning the bulker grounding to adverse weather conditions in the the early days of the investigation, which was quickly proven to be incorrect.
