Posted on 12/10/2003 5:58:30 AM PST by NYer
Three crew members remained missing this morning after a Dutch cargo ship listed and partially sank at the Port of Albany at about 3 p.m. Tuesday. The accident involving the Stellamare tossed several men into the icy waters of the Hudson River and prompted the Coast Guard to close the river, left the ship tilted at a 50-degree angle, and may have killed three seamen.
It marks the city's worst maritime accident in decades.
The ship's 18-man crew was loading the second of two General Electric generators, each weighing roughly 250 tons, when the boat listed to port, rolled and became partially submerged in about 30 feet of water. Several crewmen had to be pulled from the frigid river.
No sounds of life have been heard inside the vessel since then, and three crewmen are unaccounted for. The 289-foot Stellamare is a heavy lift ship out of Willemstad, Curacao, in the Netherlands Antilles.
"When they picked up the piece and started to move it over the hatch, the ship started to lean and it got away from them," said Paul Fisher, a retired foreman with the port's longshoremen's crew who said he spoke with a dozen of his former colleagues after the accident. "Somebody screwed up."
"Our guys were screaming, 'Stop!' There wasn't enough ballast on the inshore side and they kept screaming, 'Stop!' But there was some kind of language barrier and they didn't stop."
A preliminary look found no oil spill, the state Department of Environmental Conservation reported.
Albany Fire Battalion Chief Bill Hummel said the call for help from the port was so unusual that dispatcher Ken Marks made a special phone call to him as well.
"He told me I wouldn't believe it, but it was a big cargo ship that turned over," the chief said. "Even when we got to the scene and I saw it, but I couldn't believe it. Twenty-eight years on the job next month, and this is the weirdest."
Firefighters worked with the stevedores on shore. "They (stevedores) already had one man out when we got there, but we got the other three with the tugs. That was a great save by the guys."
Fisher said longshoremen often operate the cranes aboard ship, but never on the Stellamare, which typically has a highly regarded crew skilled with the cranes.
On Tuesday, two Stellamare crane operators were working the shipboard cranes in tandem, coordinated by a chief officer or captain via radio, he said. Longshoremen were aboard the ship to observe the lift, but did not direct it or operate the cranes, he said.
"When you work by sight, hand signals are universal and everyone understands them," Fisher said. "The radio must have caused the communication breakdown."
As the afternoon unfolded, attempts to search the ship for the missing seamen, believed to be inside the hull, proved fruitless as darkness, receding tides and the absence of an interior ship diagram hampered divers from the city, county and state. The divers wore "dry suits" to protect them from the frigid waters. Still, their work was curtailed by the cold.
Generators loaded onto the ship are usually placed on a metal holding platform, then welded into place to prevent shifting, said Deacon Dick Walker of the Albany Maritime Ministry.
Meanwhile, four Stellamare crewmen from St. Petersburg, Russia, ranging in age from 28 to 53, were taken by ambulance to St. Peters' Hospital with cuts and exposure. Dr. Samuel Bosco, chief of emergency medicine, said they clearly were removed from the water quickly, because hypothermia could have occurred within minutes. All were expected to be discharged.
Two patients were taken to Albany Medical Center Hospital. One was from New Jersey, the other from Russia. They were expected to be admitted. Albany Memorial Hospital also treated patients, including a Russian man who spent several minutes in the water and feared his friend may have succumbed. None of the sailors had life-threatening injuries.
A nearby tugboat, the Rhea I. Bouchard, plucked one man from the icy waters and another from the hull of the ship. Water temperature in the Hudson was estimated at close to 32. Even if uninjured, a human cannot survive more than several minutes in water that cold, medical experts said.
The boat, bound for Italy and Romania, was already holding 600 tons of cargo when it started taking on water, said Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings. The Stellamare is owned by Jumbo Shipping Co., a worldwide shipping company. A company spokesman said its Russian representative contacted the seamen's families Tuesday.
By early evening, the U.S. Coast Guard had taken official command of the scene. The Coast Guard sent a 49-foot rescue boat from Saugerties to the port and an investigative team by land from New York City, Petty Officer Mike Lutz said.
The river current, which had been increased by the outgoing tide, slowed to pond-quiet about 1 a.m. just after low tide. It was then that the "Empire," a small work boat, began to move around the ship, breaking up accumulating snow and ice.
The "Empire" was under contract to Clean Harbors Environmental Services, which was in charge of any pollution control. Throughout the night and into the early morning hours of Wednesday, Clean Harbors crews scurried into the dock area, bringing in equipment and setting up for what appeared to be an extended period of salvage.
Federal Marine Terminals Inc., which oversees cargo loading and unloading at the Port of Albany, will aid the investigation, said Paul Gourdeau, executive vice president. He said he believes the ship's crew was hoisting cargo aboard with the vessel's onboard crane when the ship began listing.
"The reason for this happening, I don't know at this point," he said, in a phone interview from his office in Montreal. "It will probably take a long time to investigate fully."
Gourdeau said Federal Marine employees were dockside at the time of the accident. None were injured. Federal Marine is the Montreal-based company that has managed loading and unloading at the port since 1996, when it acquired Meehan Overseas Terminal's operations in Albany and elsewhere. It manages cargo at seven other U.S. and Canadian ports.
The company employs three people full-time at the Albany port, and hires on dozens of workers from Local 1294 of the International Longshoremen's Association to handle the cargo.
Gourdeau said there have been no other similar accidents at ports under its watch, and that he was not aware of any safety problems at the Albany facility.
During the night, a large Dumpster-type container, bigger than a trailer truck, was hauled in by a tow truck and later a mobile-home-sized office was also brought on site by another tow truck. Clean Harbors vehicles also brought in at least two small workboats on trailers, apparently to have them ready for launch at daybreak.
Several booms used to contain pollutants in water were being readied overnight, but there was no sign that any fuel oil had leaked from the ship.
Coast Guardsmen made regular patrols along the docks, often pausing to apparently take laser measurements of the ship to see if the rising and falling tides had caused the Stellamare to shift.
The port remained closed to all traffic early this morning a mile north and south. Sound-monitoring equipment at three spots on the hull was turned off shortly before 11 p.m., Jennings said.
Fisher, who said he has been involved in a hundred or more heavy lifts over the years, including many aboard the Stellamare, speculated the generator that set off the chain reaction never made it aboard, but sank to the bottom of the Hudson after the cranes failed.
"It will be a massive recovery effort to remove those heavy pieces and right the ship," Fisher said.
In the stillness of the night, ice floes on the water could be heard cracking and crunching into each other. Most of the ice was created by truckloads of snow being dumped by the city and state at the Snow Dock, upstream of the capsize site.
When you see accidents like this, it isn't an accident but carlessness. Somebody needs to be in charge, it isn't a democracy in the workplace.
Boating on the Hudson Tide Tables December 2003
Boating on the Hudson Tide Tables December 2003
I guess I was looking for *why* there are tides so far inland. I looked it up. Apparently the riverbed of the Hudson is below sea level all the way to Troy, NY, about 10 miles north of Albany. Thus the ocean tides can affect the river up to 157 miles inland.
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