U.S. Coast Guard Detains Container Ship

U.S. Coast Guard personnel detained the container ship MOL Precision in Seattle, late last week.

Port state control officers discovered several significant violations on the Panamanian-flagged ship including defective oil bilge line filtering equipment, missing security training records, and not sending required ballast tank information to the National Ballast Information Clearinghouse (NBIC) prior to entering a U.S. port.
 
The oil bilge line filtering equipment is required to be maintained so that the ship will not discharge bilge oil overboard. However, it had a non-functional alarm and intermittently operating meter.

Records of the security drills could not be provided for an eight month period in 2014. 

The required information for any vessel equipped with ballast water tanks and bound for ports or places in the U.S. was not sent to the NBIC. The NBIC collects, analyzes and interprets ballast water management data to reduce the likelihood of exotic species invasions.

“The port state control program holds foreign flagged vessels to internationally agreed upon standards to ensure the safety of life at sea and to prevent damage to the global and local environment,” said Lt. James Tynan, chief of the Sector Puget Sound Port State Control Branch. “We are continuing to monitor the MOL Precision and are working with the crew and Panamanian representatives to correct these deficiencies."

The MOL Precision is a 962-foot container ship. The crew was conducting cargo operations in Seattle at the time of the examination. Their last port of call was Busan, South Korea.