More Coastguard Cost Reductions

awol

awol

Well-Known Member
Joined
4 Jan 2005
Messages
6,961
Location
Me - Edinburgh; Boat - in the west
Visit site
While you lot daan sarf are moaning about the stilted diction of your CG VHF messages the doom merchants up north who predicted disaster following our CG shake-up have nearly been proved right. The MV Parita carrying medium level atomic waste to Belgium from Dounreay was adrift yesterday in the Moray Firth, following a fire, leading to the evacuation of an oil rig and crew evacuation readiness. The Shetland CG tug was tasked but the Parita was taken under tow by a commercial tug before she got there. You may think this is an argument supporting the discarding of the CG tugs - we used to have 2 of the things - but while this voyage was one of 21 shipments amounting to 150 tonnes* of waste to Belgium, there are shipments of "several hundred tonnes of waste" to Australia and Germany still to come and the west coast route outside the range of handy North Sea rig moving tugs is likely.

Oil tankers, nuclear waste and errant nuclear subs are all out there without a viable solution to even the naivest "what if?".

*The waste is "concreted" thus the cargo weighs a wee tad more than the actual waste.
 
awol said:
While you lot daan sarf are moaning about the stilted diction of your CG VHF messages the doom merchants up north who predicted disaster following our CG shake-up have nearly been proved right. The MV Parita carrying medium level atomic waste to Belgium from Dounreay was adrift yesterday in the Moray Firth, following a fire, leading to the evacuation of an oil rig and crew evacuation readiness. The Shetland CG tug was tasked but the Parita was taken under tow by a commercial tug before she got there. You may think this is an argument supporting the discarding of the CG tugs - we used to have 2 of the things - but while this voyage was one of 21 shipments amounting to 150 tonnes* of waste to Belgium, there are shipments of "several hundred tonnes of waste" to Australia and Germany still to come and the west coast route outside the range of handy North Sea rig moving tugs is likely.

Oil tankers, nuclear waste and errant nuclear subs are all out there without a viable solution to even the naivest "what if?".

*The waste is "concreted" thus the cargo weighs a wee tad more than the actual waste.
Click to expand...

Fareham CG, was shown on TV news, coordinating trimaran search.
They all had nice braided uniforms to make them look professional.
 
chanelyacht said:
Yep, a good few thousands were spent scrapping all the existing rank markings and creating new ones.

Chinese admirals.
Click to expand...

Last night the Beeb interviewed a Commander Somebody whose shoulder straps bore four stripes but no curl, while the call centre operators wore one stripe with a curl. Commanders usually have three stripes. More Beeb sloppiness, or do HMCG have more types of official now they have cut overall numbers?
 
Grumpybear said:
Last night the Beeb interviewed a Commander Somebody whose shoulder straps bore four stripes but no curl, while the call centre operators wore one stripe with a curl. Commanders usually have three stripes. More Beeb sloppiness, or do HMCG have more types of official now they have cut overall numbers?
Click to expand...


They cut the staff but kept the stripes so there was more to go around... I believe it was a 1st come 1st served basis!
 
Perhaps the MV Parita should have undertaken a risk assessment, identified that there was a risk of engine failure and drifting into a rig causing spillage of oil and nuclear waste and injury. In which case should the mitigating measures should have included being accompanied by a tug...

Or if that wasn't the risk maybe we should be too stressed about not having a CG tug to hand..
 
Yes, AWOL is right - this does prove that keeping two tugs for emergency use only at the tax payers expense, somewhere in the UK which by Sod's Law was likely to be hundreds of miles away from the casualty was an unnecessary expense.

News headline shock horror ship goes adrift, commercial tug takes it in tow!

Channel Yacht - do I detect sour grapes in your posts?

Shorn
 
Shorn100 said:
Yes, AWOL is right - this does prove that keeping two tugs for emergency use only at the tax payers expense, somewhere in the UK which by Sod's Law was likely to be hundreds of miles away from the casualty was an unnecessary expense.

News headline shock horror ship goes adrift, commercial tug takes it in tow!

Channel Yacht - do I detect sour grapes in your posts?

Shorn
Click to expand...

No sour grapes Shorn, just annoyance at a potentially good reform programme badly damaged by ineptitude.

MCA contracted tugs were an insurance policy - Braer, Sea Empress, etc showed what happened when commercial tugs of an appropriate bollard pull weren't available. The tugs didn't actually cost the taxpayer anything - salvage operations are back charged to the insurer which more than covered annual contract costs. Don't forget following the withdrawal of the south west tug, the only thing that stopped the Ice Prince becoming a major disaster was the French coastguard tug.
 
Grumpybear said:
Last night the Beeb interviewed a Commander Somebody whose shoulder straps bore four stripes but no curl, while the call centre operators wore one stripe with a curl. Commanders usually have three stripes. More Beeb sloppiness, or do HMCG have more types of official now they have cut overall numbers?
Click to expand...

Coastguard ranks don't follow maritime ones - being civil service, the stripes are linked to pay grade.

One stripe - AO
Two - EO
Three - HEO
Four - SEO
 
chanelyacht said:
The tugs didn't actually cost the taxpayer anything - salvage operations are back charged to the insurer which more than covered annual contract costs.
Click to expand...

So why have they got rid of them?

In a Civil Service organisation, I'd assume that the tugboat department would be somebody's little empire that he'd want to protect, and if it paid its own way then it would be immune to the usual call to disband for efficiency or cost savings.

Pete
 
prv said:
So why have they got rid of them?

In a Civil Service organisation, I'd assume that the tugboat department would be somebody's little empire that he'd want to protect, and if it paid its own way then it would be immune to the usual call to disband for efficiency or cost savings.

Pete
Click to expand...

You forget the internal war within the MCA - the empire building is within enforcement, policy, seafarer monitoring, all that stuff. So budget has gone from SAR to the other side of MCA (hence the coastguard reductions). Also SAR is not seen as a DfT priority - despite the weasel words by politicians. In fact, we've only ever had one sec of state who got what it was all about, and she lasted about 10 months.

The tug contract was actually very light touch - one person looked after it as part of a lot of other things - but because it was a good headline figure, and open to the sort of ill informed "they never did anything" type comment, it was an easy target.

Don't forget the tugs were brought in after the Donaldson review "Safer Ships, Cleaner Seas". There still isn't towage capacity around most of the country - the cost of these things to companies mean they are either out on contract, or mothballed. I've had any number of engine stops mid channel where the French CG tug response was around 2 hours- commercial UK towage was around 10 / 12. That's a lot of time on a lee shore in a F10!

Of course, we are due another big maritime crash, so no doubt after that, there will be "lessons learned" and we'll be back to tugs...
 
chanelyacht said:
No sour grapes Shorn, just annoyance at a potentially good reform programme badly damaged by ineptitude.

MCA contracted tugs were an insurance policy - Braer, Sea Empress, etc showed what happened when commercial tugs of an appropriate bollard pull weren't available. The tugs didn't actually cost the taxpayer anything - salvage operations are back charged to the insurer which more than covered annual contract costs.
Click to expand...

I thought the Stornoway tug never actually salvaged anything.
 
JumbleDuck said:
Indeed, but were any of them actually in serious trouble?
Click to expand...

Define "serious".

The point of preventive towage is to make sure they don't get into serious trouble - that's why it's cost effective.

You could say that a tug standing by a vessel in the shipping lanes changing an oil filter isn't a dire situation - but when that filter change takes longer, or the weather changes, or the engines won't restart, it becomes a very dynamic situation. You can never get time back!

The fact is that a single major pollution incident costs millions - toursim in Pembrokeshire for example took around 8 years to recover from the Sea Empress.

I haven't broken down at the roadside for 10 years or so (touch wood), but I don't cancel RAC membership.

Even if there was no cost recovery element to the towage contract, in terms of cost versus UK revenue from shipping, if UK revenue is spread over a year, the towage contract was paid for by 02:00 on Jan 1st. I'd think that's pretty good value.
 
I'm confused.

If it was profitable why would the commercial towing guys not get together, buy the UK ETVs and man them. Then when the CG calls up and says... 'ERM we have a wee tad of a problem... It seems there is a big ship carrying nuclear waste which is broke could you help?"
They would simply say "sure, tell the ships agent to call us and we will agree terms..."
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top