MOL Containership Detained in Seattle

The U.S. Coast Guard has detained an MOL containership in Seattle over a number of vital violations found throughout port state management inspections.

The violations have been found Thursday by Port State Control officers from Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound aboard the Panama-flagged MOL Precision. Violations included faulty oil bilge line filtering gear, lacking safety coaching data, and never sending required ballast tank data to the National Ballast Information Clearinghouse (NBIC) previous to coming into a U.S. port.

According to the Coast Guard, the oil bilge line filtering gear, required to be maintained in order that the ship won’t discharge bilge oil overboard, was discovered to have a non-functional alarm and intermittently working meter.

As far because the lacking safety coaching data, the Coast Guard stated that the data of the safety drills couldn’t be offered for an eight month interval in 2014.

Finally, the required data for any vessel outfitted with ballast water tanks and certain for ports or locations within the U.S. was not despatched to the NBIC, the Coast Guard reported. The NBIC collects, analyzes and interprets ballast water administration knowledge to cut back the chance of unique 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,” stated 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 crew was conducting cargo operations in Seattle on the time of the examination. Their final port of name was Busan, South Korea.

The vessel will stay in Sector Puget Sound’s Captain of the Port zone till the violations are corrected.