Ireland Gets First Go With EMSA MAR-ICE

BG Dublin — What was in the lost box?

Ire­land became the first to use the MAR ICE sys­tem in a real-life inci­dent last month, says the lat­est newslet­ter of the Euro­pean Mar­itime Safety Agency.

On 12 Jan­u­ary, the con­tainer ship BG Dublin lost seven con­tain­ers in a force 10 storm off Ireland.

Debris was washed up on the south­ern Irish coast, with one con­tainer includ­ing the haz­ardous mate­r­ial sodium bro­mate. On 14 Jan­u­ary the Irish Coast­guard requested info on the sub­stance through EMSA’s MAR-ICE ser­vice. Infor­ma­tion was pro­vided within less than an hour.

The newslet­ter also give a reminder that the New Inspec­tion Regime, NIR, for Port State Con­trol, PSC, enters into force on 1 Jan­u­ary 2011, and prepa­ra­tions at EMSA are
under full steam dur­ing 2010.
The Agency recently sent 33,000 copies of a leaflet on the new PSC report­ing oblig­a­tions to State author­i­ties, which will dis­trib­ute them to stake­hold­ers who will be affected by the new rules: shipown­ers, mas­ters, and the agents or oper­a­tors of ships call­ing at ports of mem­bers of the Paris MoU. The leaflet pro­vides info on THETIS, the new PSC data­base that is due be rolled out dur­ing 2010, which is pop­u­lated by EMSA’s ves­sel track­ing and mon­i­tor­ing ser­vice Safe­SeaNet. The leaflet also out­lines how the ship­ping indus­try must pre­pare for the new report­ing oblig­a­tions for ves­sels com­ing into port in Paris MoU States.