Thursday, August 31, 2023

Wärtsilä Offers Onboard Carbon Capture and Storage Feasibility Studies

With CCS-Ready scrubbers now being sold at pace, Wärtsilä’s studies across a range of vessel types come as next step in rapidly accelerating trajectory for CCS in shipping

[By: Wärtsilä]

Technology group Wärtsilä is now offering carbon capture and storage (CCS) feasibility studies to shipowners and operators, in another milestone on its journey to research, develop and bring to market maritime CCS technologies. The studies have already been conducted on a range of vessel types including ro-ro and ro-pax vessels, a drill ship, a container vessel and a gas carrier.

The process takes four to six months of study and design work. Wärtsilä Exhaust Treatment’s experts are involved in ship design at an early stage to conduct engineering work to understand how CCS can be smoothly integrated once the technology is launched to market.

Wärtsilä is conducting the feasibility studies across both newbuild and existing vessels. Retrofit CCS installations will be significantly smoothed by the presence of a scrubber onboard. Wärtsilä Exhaust Treatment is already offering CCS-Ready scrubbers to the market, which are integrated onboard in a way that enables a CCS system to be added easily in the future once the technology is commercialised.

Once completed, the CCS feasibility study work enables Wärtsilä to provide customers with a fully rounded commercial offer that can be shared with shipyards to get an exact quote for installation. During the feasibility studies, Wärtsilä’s experts closely examine the existing naval architecture of the ship and work to understand how the power, space and exhaust demands of CCS can be accommodated onboard. Owners will receive a qualified analysis of the costs of CCS integration, and a clear list of considerations on how a potential retrofit would be conducted in the least intrusive way.

Conducting the studies today enables Wärtsilä to bring forward the early stages of CCS integration and, in doing so, lower the barrier to entry once the technology is commercialised in the near future. The studies also serve to educate customers on the upsides and particular considerations associated with installing CCS onboard their vessels. Finally, as the studies will run in parallel with the implementation of new environmental regulations for shipping, owners who conduct them today will be ‘ahead of the curve’ versus their peers.

Sigurd Jenssen, Director, Wärtsilä Exhaust Treatment, said: “Launching these feasibility studies and being able to offer them to market is the exciting latest step in our process of bringing carbon capture and storage to market in shipping. It builds on the market-leading work we are conducting in our test hall in Moss, where our technology is already demonstrating our targeted 70% capture rate, and enables us to directly engage with customers to smooth the CCS adoption process in the near future.”

Jenssen continued: “By conducting these studies today, we are already building a considerable track record and understanding of how this technology will work across multiple vessel types. It builds on the considerable uptake we have already seen for our CCS-Ready scrubbers, which show that the industry is not only exploring CCS as a speculative technology, but is actively investing in its foundations as a decarbonisation solution. We look forward to conducting more of these studies in the coming months as we work to bring our CCS system to market.”

When a customer opts for a Wärtsilä CCS-Ready scrubber, the company takes measures during the scrubber installation process to ensure adequate space for the future installation of CCS system. CCS-Ready scrubbers are also designed to enable smooth integration with a Particulate Matter filter.

Wärtsilä Exhaust Treatment is the market-leading marine exhaust gas cleaning system manufacturer, with a range of lifecycle solutions. Wärtsilä offers integrated compliant solutions for all types of ships, and in open loop, closed loop or hybrid configurations. Wärtsilä’s scrubbers are built with a modular approach to future technology development, creating a platform for the abatement of other emissions from shipping beyond sulphur.

Denmark Allocates $3.9B to Carbon Capture/Storage as it Accelerates Timing

Denmark carbon capture — With Avedore as a backdrop, Denmark outlined a comprehensive approach to carbon capture and storage advancing the deadline to 2029 (Orsted file photo)

Denmark announced a comprehensive plan for carbon capture and storage that includes significant government support as the country also accelerates its timeline while saying that CO2 capture and storage is one of several critical tools to achieve climate goals in Denmark, Europe, and the rest of the world. The announcement of the new plan comes just a week after Denmark postponed its second tender for offshore CO2 storage saying the government needed to finalize a comprehensive plan that resolved government participation in the industry.

“We are moving the requirement for full capture from 2030 to 2029 so that we get more CO2 from the air and into the underground faster,” said says Climate, Energy and Supply Minister Lars Aagaard during a briefing about the new plan at Avedøreværket, a power station just south of Copenhagen. “The plan must also ensure a clearer framework for the burgeoning industry and in this way bring the Danish CCS industry up in scale and down in price. It may well be that it's geeky, but it's in the geekery that things happen.”

The plan was presented as a comprehensive approach to with the government stressing that by pooling resources and creating clear framework conditions for CO2 capture and storage it was providing clarity to Danish industry. The energy minister was joined by Business Minister Morten Bødskov and Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen in presenting the new plan.

Instead of smaller tenders, the government plans to launch two large, comprehensive tenders, one in 2024 and a second in 2025. They plan to invest approximately $3.9 billion, with approximately $1.5 billion for the 2024 tender and a further nearly $2.4 billion in 2025 allocated over a 15-year period to support the programs. The goal for 2024 is to set up plans for 0.9 million tons of carbon capture and storage and a further 1.4 million tons in the 2025 tender. Going forward the government will continue to hold 20 percent state ownership, which is the model that was used for the first three licenses and the key point that the ministry said needed to be resolved before the next offshore tender.

While saying as a country Denmark must capture at least 3.2 million tons of CO2 annually by 2030, the new plan moves forward by one year the requirement for the programs to 2029. They said the possibility is also provided to start the large-scale capture and storage efforts by 2028.

The plan also ensures clear framework conditions for the industry regarding ownership and regulation for the transport of CO2 via pipes. Among other things, the government said it will expand the existing rules for the transport of CO2 to include all forms of CO2 transport, which is particularly important for the transport of CO2 for use in PtX facilities and for CO2 that must be shipped via ports for offshore storage.

The goal in addition to providing greater clarity was to increase the size and scope so that more companies can bid and participate in the efforts.

Denmark earlier this year awarded the first exploration licenses for offshore carbon storage after providing a provisional license for the testing and demonstration of the world’s first offshore storage operation. In addition, they awarded the first licenses for industrial plants to establish capture initiatives first centered on one of Ørsted’s plants but designed to also create the infrastructure for other industrial emitters to participate.

ADM Fagan: U.S. Coast Guard Must Learn From its Workplace Culture Problems

After revelations of an unreleased investigation into a pattern of sexual harassment and assault at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan has ordered a service-wide review of command climate and culture. In an open letter on Monday, Fagan addressed the early findings, and she compared the service's ability to learn from operational challenges with its ability to learn from internal, cultural problems.

"It is clear to me that we are not fully applying our core values, principles of operation, or ethos to our own workplaces. In some places in our Coast Guard, there is an unacceptable disconnect between the workplace experience we talk about, and the experience our people are actually having," Fagan said.

The commandant cited reports of "sexual assault, harassment, hazing, bullying, retaliation, discrimination, and other harmful workplace behaviors," at commands across the service. She warned that these incidents not only harm victims, they also tend to erode trust in unit leadership - reducing readiness and the ability to execute on the Coast Guard's core mission set.

In her appeal, Fagan sought to break down the distinction between externally-facing operational challenges and internal workplace problems. Both require an effective response to ensure readiness. "Our operational success depends on our people, and our people are sustained by a positive workplace environment," she said.

Though it went unsaid, the Coast Guard (like all of the armed services) is having a hard time recruiting and retaining enough personnel to meet end strength goals. Any public perception of a negative work environment could hinder efforts to close its workforce fit-and-fill gap.

To resolve workplace culture deficiencies, Fagan called for more transparency and more willingness to call out problems. The service has developed systems and practices that allow it to learn from operational mishaps like collisions or sinkings, but it has no equivalent for sexual harassment, bullying or toxic leadership, she said.

"We do not discuss incidents and do not encourage leaders throughout the Coast Guard to learn from them. Our people do not feel as confident speaking up about workplace behaviors as they do operational risks," Fagan said. "We must give our workplace climate the same transparency and attention as we do our operational missions."

RIP

America's First Licensed Female Tug Captain Passes Away at 82

PUBLISHED AUG 28, 2023 5:12 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

Elsbeth Smith, America’s first licensed female tug captain, has passed away at the age of 82. She passed peacefully, surrounded by her five children, on August 15, 2023. The cause of death was cancer.

Elsbeth Smith was born in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1941. She was co-owner of Smith Maritime from 1968 to 2000. For nearly three decades, she sailed on the tugs Elsbeth I and Elsbeth II, towing project cargos and conducting salvage missions. She achieved her captain's license in 1973, making her the first licensed female tugboat captain in American maritime history.

Her journeys included countless voyages through the Caribbean and South America aboard the Elsbeth I. In 1989, she made her initial trans-Atlantic crossing, followed by a year-long circumnavigation of the globe aboard the Elsbeth II in 1991. This feat earned her the distinction of being the first American woman to complete a world circumnavigation on a tugboat.

During her time at sea, Elsbeth established a routine of beginning her day with the sunrise navigation watch, followed by dedicated hours of homeschooling for her children. Underway, Elsbeth effectively co-managed the tug's day-to-day operations. When in port, she was responsible for sourcing parts and managing ship’s stores. On shore, Elsbeth also invested a significant amount of her time overseeing the management and operations of Smith Maritime.

Elsbeth Smith managing the home office at Smith Maritime, 1990 (Tradewinds Towing)

Elsbeth is remembered for her talent playing the piano, and was known to have upright pianos aboard each tug, which amazed customs officials and visitors alike. She was an avid reader and documentarian, maintaining detailed records of each voyage.

Upon retirement, she lived in Amelia Island, Florida, then on the island of Dominica, the birthplace of her fourth child, Dominique Smith. Amidst the jungles she adored, she embraced her appreciation of nature and cultivated the garden she never had. Her last decade led her to New Orleans and, ultimately, to her final home in St. Augustine, Florida.

Elsbeth is survived by her five children: Rachel Smith, Rhea Smith, Rebekah Jordan, Dominique Smith, and Hannah Baisley. She adored her 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, and was affectionately known as "Tugboat Grandma."

Her legacy continues through her co-founding of Tradewinds Towing in 2005. Elsbeth used her lifelong earnings to acquire the Miss Lis, the inaugural tug of the fleet. Tradewinds Towing now oversees a fleet of seven tugs.

Drought in Texas Reveals History of America's WWI Shipbuilding Surge

An Emergency Fleet Corporation wooden-hulled freighter (US National Archives)

Texas' prolonged drought has revealed a long-lost relic of the early 20th century on the Neches River. Local resident Bill Milner spotted the wreckage of a ship in the shoals while on a Jet-Ski outing near the town of Evadale, and he reported the find to a local museum. The vessel was large, and made of wood, suggesting a much earlier era. His first thought was that it was a wooden barge or riverboat - but it turned out to be something much more unusual.

According to the Texas Historical Commission, the wreck is one of many on the Neches that came from a World War I shipbuilding program run by the Emergency Fleet Corporation. When the United States joined the war in 1917, it was badly short of merchant tonnage to carry troops and equipment across the Atlantic. British shipping provided much of the transport capacity for U.S. forces until the end of the war, but loss rates were extreme. Germany's U-boats took a severe toll on shipping in the North Atlantic, and at one point British shipping could expect to lose one out of four vessels on any given round trip voyage.

The Emergency Fleet Corporation attempted to catch up with innovative strategies - including wooden shipbuilding. In that era, a wooden-hulled ship was not unusual, and it offered some advantages. With steel in short supply for the war effort, some of the EFC's leaders believed that wood would be an effective alternative for ships that only had to make a one-way voyage across the Atlantic to justify their cost. "The Germans were sinking vessels so fast that it became apparent we must adopt extraordinary methods," explained former Shipping Board chairman Edward N. Hurley after the war.

The program called for the construction of over 1,000 of these wooden ships with a total capacity of three million deadweight tonnes. The skills and materials to produce wooden ships at scale were available on the Gulf Coast, and many were built along the Neches.

These ships were never intended to be commercially useful in peacetime, and they were designed solely to offset wartime losses. About 320 were completed at the war's end, and though more than 260 had successfully carried cargo overseas, they were immediately obsolete. These hulks were widely criticized as a visible example of government waste. Hundreds were laid up and sold for scrap; in one prominent example, a recycler burned 30 of them at a time on the Potomac to salvage the metal components.

Over one dozen hulls were in various stages of construction at yards near Beaumont when the war ended, and they were left unfinished. In the 1920s, they were pushed off into the Neches and Sabine Rivers, where they slowly deteriorated over the span of a century.

The program's creators defended the wooden fleet as a legitimate wartime expense. "Although the wood ships never could compete with fast steel cargo carriers in the trans-Atlantic trade, they made more than enough voyages to convince us that our policy in building them was not mistaken," Hurley wrote in his history of the war effort.

Pentagon Wants "Thousands" of Fighting Drones Built in Just Two Years

Drone boat — A Ukrainian suicide drone boat evades Russian defensive fire as it attempts to approach a warship (Russian Navy)

The Pentagon is planning a major shift in order to counter China's massive investments in military hardware. As China goes big, the Pentagon wants to go small: Its newly-launched Replicator initiative envisions "multiple thousands" of smaller autonomous systems on land, in the air, on the surface and below the sea, all built cheaply enough to be lost in combat, all delivered by 2025.

On Monday, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks outlined the challenge at a defense contractors' conference in Washington, D.C. China's advantage, she noted, is "mass - more ships, more missiles, more people." China has the world's largest standing army and the largest navy by vessel count, and it is modernizing its fleet at a rapid clip. It can hit naval targets from thousands of miles away using anti-ship ballistic missiles, which the United States does not possess.

The U.S. may not be able to make similar claims, but it does have access to the world's most advanced portfolio of R&D projects in unmanned and autonomous warfighting. The challenge, Hicks said, is getting these projects to scale up, and scale fast. She wants to see "thousands" of autonomous drone platforms in the hands of warfighters in just 18-24 months.

"Replicator will galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of US military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many,” said Hicks. “So now is the time to take all-domain, attritable autonomy to the next level: to produce and deliver capabilities to warfighters at the volume and velocity required to deter aggression, to win if we’re forced to fight.”

The focus of the initiative will be to grow "a new state of the art" in less-expensive autonomous systems, creating "mass of our own" to counter China's military might, she said.

Hicks' vision reflects lessons learned from the front lines in Ukraine, where low-cost drones often determine the outcome of combat engagements. Drones spot targets for artillery, drop grenades on enemy positions, and directly target armored vehicles in high-speed suicide runs - all without endangering the drone operator. Properly deployed, an $800 drone with an antitank munition can destroy a million-dollar armored vehicle, and both sides have used these devices to inflict real costs on the battlefield.

On the water, Ukraine has developed a series of unmanned suicide boats with long range and high hitting power. These devices have yet to claim a sinking, but they have damaged at least two warships of the Black Sea Fleet, and have forced the Russian Navy to operate with greater caution. They are also radically less expensive than coastal defense missiles or manned naval vessels, and Ukraine claims to be building them in serial production.

Hicks noted that Russia's mass has not translated into an automatic win on the technological battlefield in Ukraine, and suggested that China should take heed of that lesson.

"We must ensure the PRC leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, 'today is not the day' — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, 2035, 2049 and beyond," Hicks said.

The stakes couldn't be higher, according to the top U.S. officer in the Indo-Pacific.

"We ought to look at the Chinese to understand truly where they are and what they're doing: the largest military buildup since World War II, both in conventional forces and in strategic nuclear [forces]," said Adm. John C. Aquilino, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, speaking on the sidelines of the same conference. "They have focused very clearly on delivering a force capable to take on the United States."

The Dreadnought After Next

Royal Navy battleship HMS Dreadnought — HMS Dreadnought revolutionized surface warfare (U.S. Navy image circa 1906-7)

This article appears courtesy of CIMSEC and The Royal Navy. It was the first place, Gold Prize-winning essay of the First Sea Lord’s Essay Competition and may be found in its original form here.

[By Chris O’Connor]

In 1906, the battleship HMS Dreadnought was commissioned. An engineering marvel at the time, it completely changed the playing field of naval warfare and made previous classes of battleships and armoured cruisers obsolete overnight. Its advantage was not new technology but using technologies in a new combination that had never been done before. It created such an epochal shift in warship design that the battleships built preceding it were retroactively described as ‘preDreadnoughts.’1 In the next couple of years, a new HMS Dreadnought will go to sea. It will contain technologies that were the realm of science fiction when the battleship Dreadnought was commissioned – leveraging the atom for electrical power and weapons, operating with thinking machines, and using sound and radio waves to detect targets unseen by the eye.

The change of technologies between Sir Jackie Fisher’s Dreadnought of 1906 and its namesake two generations later (with the nuclear-powered attack submarine of the same name in between) did not make warships obsolete, rather, it completely changed the perception of what a warship was. Submarines were not considered ‘warships’ by many in the Royal Navy at the turn of the 20th century – when Sir Jackie experimented with them as the Commander-in-Chief of Portsmouth. Dismissed as ‘Fisher’s Toys,’ they were considered ‘unmanly, unethical, and ‘un-English.’2 If this sounds familiar, it is because this same kind of thinking, a fear of the new technology being so different that it is not ‘right,’ is used today to describe uncrewed platforms and other autonomous systems instead of ships operated by stalwart human sailors. The battleships of today are museums and not the capital ships of nations because they were overcome by new technologies and operational concepts. Warships still exist, but they are markedly different.

This historical perspective of maritime warfare innovation calls for a rephrasing of ‘will warships be obsolete?’ Instead, we should ask ourselves ‘What will make current warships obsolete?’ That way, we can examine the technologies that are just coming to the fore and begin thinking now about how warships will evolve, and yes, their form and function will not look like anything before.

Modern missiles and Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) alone will not bring about this change. New anti-ship missiles with longer ranges, smarter seeker heads, and hypersonic speeds will certainly force operational changes and necessitate new countermeasures for warships on the surface (and eventually below the surface). DEW will be part of every physical domain of warfare, as laser and microwave weapons will be employed from everything from satellites to Marines on the ground. These weapons will lead to an evolution in warship design to add magazines and launchers for the new missiles and increased power generation for the DEW. These ideas are all rolled into the ‘Dreadnought 2050’ concept that was publicised in 2015,3 but in the intervening years between then and now, a new forcing function has emerged that will cause a drastic rethink about the concept of a ‘warship.’

The new paradigm in naval warfare will be triggered by the simple fact that a warship of any size will no longer be able to hide on the surface of the oceans. Persistent multispectral sensing from space with military and commercial satellites already complicate efforts to create uncertainty for potential adversaries. Imagery taken daily of bases and harbours can discern with ever greater clarity the readiness and deployment schedules of navies. This pales in comparison to the ramifications of when these constellations of satellites are aided by deep learning algorithms that will be able to provide daily positions of warships at sea. In just the past year, Russian military equipment aiding the Kremlin in its invasion of Ukraine and a Chinese spy balloon were both tracked by these revolutionary means – satellites from the commercial company Planet feeding their image sets to generative artificial intelligence.4

When surface warships can be tracked this way, they will be constantly targeted and will most likely lose the element of surprise. Submarines are safe from this technology, for now. Even if a ship was able to develop some sort of countermeasure to hide itself and its various signatures (to include its wake), modern ships still rely on fuel for their engines, parts for their systems, and food for their crew. A carrier strike group (CSG) or surface action group (SAG) will give away its location simply through the replenishment ships they require to operate. To win the fight in this sensing environment, the warship will not be over a hundred metres long with scores of people onboard, it will have to be altogether different.

A warship is nothing more than a cluster of capabilities working in concert to fight. Sensors, weapons, propulsion, command and control, communications, and decision-making processes all linked together with a common set of missions and its embedded tasks. Modern warships have all of most of these functions physically located in one hull, but they do not have to be. Instead of a large ship that has offloaded weapons and sensors (like an aircraft carrier), a warship of many small optionally crewed systems would replace that big ship altogether. If hit with a hypersonic missile or fried with a microwave pulse, the ship would be able to reconstitute with varied components.

The crew and command structure would look very different, too:

“A small crew would embark a ship, or series of ships, serving in a variety of modalities as expert controllers, emergency maintainers, and expeditionary operators…moving from independent expeditionary command with a manned crew, to embarking on a mothership or series of motherships supporting unmanned operations.”5

These smaller distributed ships will build up to units that will have humans on the loop but will have to rely on autonomy to do a lot of the fighting. In doing so, a navy will be built of units that are closer to an aviation squadron with one commander, whose span of control is over many smaller assets. These together will be the ‘warship’ that will adapt every time they are employed, as the systems learn from past operations and enemy activity and will swap out with others of different payloads. The evolving capability would be akin to changing the battleship HMS Dreadnought’s turrets every underway – that is how integral these smaller vessels will be to the coherent whole of the unit. There are two benefits to this model; one, the ‘distributed force will pose a vast array of interlocking firepower, making it less clear to the adversary which elements… pose the most pressing threat,’ and two, ‘impos[ing] more kill chains for the adversary to manage.’6 This way of fighting at sea will be the only way to manage when larger warships will be rendered obsolete by their signatures.

When Sir Jackie Fisher recognised the disruptive potential of submarines he did not care if they were cowardly or underhanded, he only cared that they worked.7 He had the clarity of vision to examine warfare from the undersea while working on a super battleship that would be revolutionary in its own right. He was quoted as saying “I don’t think it is even faintly realised that the immense impending revolution with which submarines will effect as offensive weapons of war.” The crewmembers of the two submarines named Dreadnought realised this revolution. How soon will we realise the revolution of autonomous systems that will lead to a warship of the future – the Dreadnought after next?

Cdr. Chris O’Connor is a U.S. Naval Officer at NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe and Vice President of CIMSEC.

These views are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily represent the official views of any government or department.

References

1. Jesse Beckett, ‘The Enormous Early 20th Century Pre-Dreadnought & Dreadnought Battleships’, War History Online,
25/03/2021, https://bit.ly/3pRpS6K.

2. Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (New York: Random House
Publishing Group, 1991).

3. Franz-Stefan Gady, ‘Dreadnought 2050: Is this the Battleship of the Future?’, The Diplomat, 07/09/2015,
https://bit.ly/45iFgJL.

4. Patrick Tucker, ‘A “ChatGPT” For Satellite Photos Already Exists’, Defense One, 17/04/2023, https://bit.ly/3IqtGTa.

5. Kyle Cragge, ‘Every Ship a SAG and the LUSV Imperative,’ CIMSEC, 02/03/2023, https://bit.ly/3Mpb32X.

6. Dmitry Filipoff, ‘Fighting DMO, Pt. 1: Defining Distributed Maritime Operations and the Future of Naval Warfare’, CIMSEC, 20/02/2023, https://bit.ly/42Vj0Ea.

7. Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1991).

Featured Image: ATLANTIC OCEAN (Sept. 23, 2019) Royal navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) transits the Atlantic Ocean, Sept. 23. (Photo courtesy of HNLMS De Ruyter)

40 Years Later: The Loss of the Marine Electric

PUBLISHED AUG 27, 2023 8:13 PM BY CORINNE ZILNICKI

[This article was originally published in 2019, and it is reprinted here in recognition of the 40th year of the Marine Electric's loss.]

At midnight on February 12, 1983, the 605-foot cargo ship Marine Electric was sailing northward 30 miles off Virginia's eastern shore, plowing slowly through the gale-force winds and waves stirred up by a winter storm.

An able-bodied seaman relieved the watch and peered forward, noticing for the first time that the ship's bow seemed to be riding unusually low in the water. Dense curls of green ocean rushed over the bow, some of them arching 10 feet over the deck before crashing back down. The crew had been battling 25-foot waves for hours, but until now, the bow had bucked and dipped as normal.

Now it seemed only to dip.

Over the next two hours, the waves intruded with increasing vigor. The entire foredeck was swallowed in six feet of water. The main deck was completely awash.

At 02:30, the ship's master, Phillip Corl, summoned his chief mate, Robert Cusick, to the bridge and shared his fears: the bow was settling, they were taking on too much water, and the crew was in real trouble.

At 02:51, the captain made the first radio distress call to the Coast Guard.

"I seem to be taking on water forward," Corl said. "We need someone to come out and give us some assistance, if possible."

By the time assistance arrived, the Marine Electric had listed, rolled violently to starboard, and capsized, hurling most of its 34 crew into the 37-degree water.

Chief mate Cusick surfaced with a gasp, managed to get his bearings, and spotted a partially-submerged lifeboat nearby. After swimming through towering waves for 30 minutes, he pulled himself into the swamped boat and started thrashing his legs to stay warm. "All the time I kept looking out and yelling out, 'lifeboat here,' just continually yelling out to keep myself going," the chief mate said. "Then I waited and prayed for daylight to come."

The Coast Guard had long since dispatched an HH-3F Pelican helicopter crew from Air Station Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and directed the crews of several cutters to the Marine Electric's position, but the tumultuous weather conditions slowed the rescuers' progress.

Naval Air Station Oceana had to recall available personnel before launching a helicopter crew, including rescue swimmer Petty Officer 2nd Class James McCann.

At 05:20, the Coast Guard helicopter crew was the first to arrive on scene. They had expected to find the Marine Electric's sailors tucked into lifeboats and rafts, but instead, they found a blinking sea of strobe lights, empty lifeboats and bodies.

The Navy aircrew arrived and deployed McCann, who swam through the oil-slicked waves, searching for survivors. He managed to recover five unresponsive sailors before hypothermia incapacitated him.

The Coast Guard crew scoured the southern end of the search area and discovered one man, Paul Dewey, alone in a life raft. They dropped the rescue basket so he could clamber inside then hoisted him into the helicopter. About 30 yards away, they spotted Eugene Kelly, the ship's third mate, clinging to a life ring, and lowered the basket to retrieve him.

Cusick remained huddled in his lifeboat until the sailors on board the Berganger, a Norwegian merchant vessel whose crew was helping search the area, sighted him and notified the Coast Guard. The helicopter crew retrieved him in the rescue basket, then took off for Salisbury, Maryland, to bring the three survivors to Peninsula Regional Medical Center.

Meanwhile, more Coast Guard and Navy rescue crews converged on the scene to search for survivors.

Coast Guard Captain Mont Smith, the operations officer at Air Station Elizabeth City, had piloted a second Pelican helicopter through turbulent headwinds for over an hour in order to reach the site. He and his crew scanned the debris field below for signs of life. The people they saw were motionless, and it was difficult to determine whether they were simply too hypothermic to move or deceased. Smith spotted one man and hovered over him, squinting through the whipping snow, trying to decide what to do.

"We all felt helpless," Smith said. "There was no way to know if the man was dead or alive. We had to try something."

Petty Officer 2nd Class Greg Pesch, the avionics electrical technician aboard the helicopter, volunteered to go down on the hoist cable. After some deliberation, Smith agreed.

Pesch's descent in the rescue basket was a harrowing one. "The whole world seemed to be churning," Smith said. "I struggled to maintain a smooth hoist, but I know it was erratic."

Once in the water, Pesch grappled with the basket, trying to hold it steady as he guided the unresponsive man inside. It took several attempts, and then he scrambled into the basket himself and ascended back to the helicopter alongside the victim.

The aircrew spotted another potential survivor, and although Pesch attempted to descend again, the hoist cable spooled back on itself on the drum. The crew was forced to abort their mission and departed for nearby Salisbury Airport, where the man they had pulled from the water was pronounced dead on arrival by paramedics.

Dewey, Kelly and Cusick were the only men pulled from the ocean alive that morning. Their 31 shipmates had either succumbed to hypothermia or drowned.

All told, Coast Guard, Navy, and merchant vessel crews recovered 24 bodies from the scene of the capsizing. Seven were never found. It is likely the ship's engineers were trapped belowdecks when the vessel capsized.

"Throughout Coast Guard history, the missions of the service have been written in blood," said Dr. William Thiesen, historian, Coast Guard Atlantic Area. "Such was the case with the loss of the Marine Electric."

While the incident itself served as the catalyst for the major changes to the Coast Guard and maritime community at large, the rigorous efforts of Coast Guard Captain Domenic Calicchio brought the necessity for such changes into sharper focus.

Calicchio was one of the three marine safety officers charged with investigating the capsizing and sinking of the Marine Electric. The board of inquiry launched their investigation on July 25, 1984, and examined every aspect of the WWII-era cargo ship, its upkeep, the events leading up to its demise, and the Coast Guard's rescue efforts on that morning.

The investigation revealed that although the Marine Electric had been recently inspected several times by both the American Bureau of Shipping and the Coast Guard, marine inspectors had failed to note several discrepancies or recommend needed repairs. Investigators concluded that the casualty had most likely been caused by inadequate cargo hatches and deck plating, which allowed the crashing waves to flood the vessel's forward spaces.

Calicchio felt the Coast Guard needed to revamp its marine safety procedures and demand more of maritime companies, but more importantly, that the Coast Guard needed to demand more of itself.

His push for reform resulted in several additions to the Coast Guard's marine safety protocol, including guidance on hatch cover inspections, and new requirements for enclosed lifeboats and their launching systems, for ships' owners to provide crews with cold water survival suits and for flooding alarms to be installed in unmanned spaces on vessels.

The Coast Guard also tightened its inspections of 20-year or older ships, which led to the near-immediate scrapping of 70 similar WWII-era vessels.

"Calicchio embodied the service's core values of honor, respect, and devotion to duty," said Thiesen. "He championed marine safety and pursued the truth even at the risk of his career of a Coast Guard officer."

The Marine Electric shipwreck served as the genesis of another crucial development: the Coast Guard rescue swimmer program, which was established in 1984. The program's physical fitness standards, training and organizational structure were developed over a five-year implementation period, and in March of 1985, Air Station Elizabeth City became the first unit to receive rescue swimmers.

The first life was saved two months later.

Story and artwork by U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer 2nd Class Corinne Zilnicki.

Salvage Team Departs FSO Safer After Completing Oil Transfer Project

The salvage team in the UN-led effort to remove the oil from the dilapidated FSO Safer departed the site on Monday, August 29, marking the completion of the project. UN officials thanked the team from Boskalis’ SMIT Salvage for completing the complex task which adverted a potential environmental disaster.

After completing the transfer of approximately 1.1 million barrels of oil that had been stored aboard the Safer since 2015, the team undertook a final series of tasks. The transfer was declared over on August 11, two and a half weeks after it began on July 25. The salvage team had prepared the machinery aboard the Safer for the transfer and stabilized the storage tanks which had not been properly vented in years. Equipment was standing by in case of a spill but they were able to complete the transfer without a serious incident.

During the last two weeks, the tanks aboard the Safer were scrapped and cleaned to remove as much residue as possible. The material was also transferred to the replacement tanker Nautica which had been acquired from Euronav and was renamed Yemen by the local government after the UN transferred the ship to Yemen.

Replacement tanker was repositioned in one of the final tasks in the salvage operation (Boskalis/SMIT)

The tanker was repositioned on Sunday evening, August 27, to remain a safe distance from the FSO Safer. The older tanker, which was built in 1976 and had been functioning as a storage and transfer point approximately four miles off the coast of Yemen since 1988, has been prepared for recycling. The UN is responsible for arranging for the recycling of the vessel while the replacement tanker will take its place holding the oil which is claimed by the Houthi faction which controls that area of Yemen.

The Boskalis vessel Ndeavor, which had been alongside the FSO Safer since the end of May accommodating the SMIT team, departed Yemen on August 28. It is sailing to Djibouti where the salvage team will disembark and the vessel will then continue on its trip back to Rotterdam.

“The completion of the work marks the end of a pivotal chapter in the UN-led operation to address the threat of a major oil spill that have been caused by a leak in or destruction of the Safer tanker,” said UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric during his daily briefing on Monday. “The United Nations and the broad group of partners that support the Safer project have so far succeeded in preventing the worst-case scenario of a massive oil spill in the Red Sea which with obvious potential catastrophic environmental, humanitarian and economic repercussions.”

UN officials highlighted that they still need to raise an additional $22 million beyond the $120 million already committed to the project. They are awaiting the delivery of a new mooring buoy that will be installed for the Yemen. They also need to arrange for the towing and scrapping of the FSO Safer. Experts working with the UN previously determined that the Safer was beyond repair and in imminent danger of a structural failure. The vessel had only received minimal maintenance since operations were suspended eight years ago during the civil war.

The execution of the project lasted nearly 13 weeks. Officials highlighted that the project required years of planning with many world leaders acknowledging the UN was the only organization that could have undertaken the task, dealing with the political sensitivities of the Yemen civil war.

FSO Safer on May 31 fully loaded when the salvage team arrived (Boskalis)

FSO Safer offloaded and prepared for recycling on August 28 (Boskalis)

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