The container capacity of vessels has increased by 1 500% over the past 50 years, German insurer and asset manager Allianz has said in the aftermath of a box ship ramming into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.
Although the 9 971 TEU-capacity Dali doesn’t qualify as an ultra-large container vessel (ULCV) capable of carrying more than 14 000 TEUs, it remains lodged underneath the bridge’s collapsed superstructure in the Patapsco River.
According to USA Today, efforts to stabilise the ship and clear the channel have been complicated by the extensive damage to the submerged steel and concrete, with at least 4 000 tonnes of the bridge weighing down the Dali and keeping it stuck in the channel floor.
Recovery operations involve stabilising the ship with anchors and tug boats, cutting up portions of the bridge, and assessing the cargo aboard the vessel, which is carrying about 4 700 containers.
Once that is done, the Dali will be refloated and moved away from the scene of the allission, the term used in maritime law to describe when a moving vessel collides with a stationary object.
The salvage operation is challenging due to the tangled wreckage, the presence of a high-pressure natural gas line, and the need to clear the channel completely for large ships like the Dali to navigate safely.
According to Allianz, “Large vessels continue to drive ever-higher exposures, with fires, container and carrier losses, hazardous cargo, costlier salvage operations and issues with port of refuge leading to oversized losses.
“While the number of serious shipping accidents worldwide has declined over the long-term, incidents involving large vessels – namely container ships and roll-on roll-off (ro-ro) car carriers – are resulting in disproportionately high losses.”
Recent events of this nature, Allianz said, included fires on board the car carriers Fremantle Highway, Felicity Ace and container ship X-Press Pearl.
In respect of the Ace and the Pearl, respective on-board fires at the Azores and off the west coast of Sri Lanka resulted in complete vessel and cargo destruction.
Although salvaging attempts were made in the case of the Ace and the 4 500 electric and luxury vehicles it was shipping from Germany to the US, it sank from a chemical blaze that billowed out of its hull for several days.
Adding to the spate of large-vessel incidents is the Ever Forward, which ran aground in Chesapeake Bay on the US eastern seaboard in 2022, not much further south than the Baltimore bridge collapse.
The ULCV was stuck for over a month, almost a year to the day after its sister vessel, the Ever Given, ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021.
Allianz said: “As vessels have grown larger, values at risk have increased, while the environmental bar has been raised.
"However, regulation, safety management systems and salvage capabilities appear not to have always kept pace.
“A number of incidents involving large losses in recent years have also ended in costly salvage and wreck removal operations, such as that of the car carrier Golden Ray, which capsized just outside the US port of Brunswick in 2019.”
Salvaging operations took almost two years and cost in excess of $800 million.
“The operation, the largest ever of its kind in the US, involved three million man hours and specialist equipment to cut the ship into eight pieces for removal,” said Allianz.
Because vessels keep getting bigger, recovering from allisions, including cargo-capture operations, the rising cost of salvage and wreck removal for large ships has become a worrying trend for the insurance industry.
“The complexity is compounded by environmental concerns, which continue to drive up the average cost of such incidents. Wreck removal for a large vessel can now easily run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and in some cases upwards of $500 million.”
