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Dramatic boxship collision in Karachi caught on video

A video taken by a port worker has gone viral on social media, showing the remarkable moment when 8,000 teu Hapag-Lloyd boxship Tolten scraped the side of 6,350 teu Hamburg Bay yesterday at South Asia Pakistan Terminal (SAPT) in Karachi.

Local reports say that 50to 60 containers went into the water from the incident, with Pakistan Today claiming their sources at Karachi Port Trust have laid the blame on the port’s pilots.

There are no reports of pollution or injuries from the incident.

A second video shows the scope of the cleanup operations required to retrieve the containers.

The 2012-built Tolten is owned by Hapag-Lloyd according to Equasis.

Grant Rowles

Grant spent nine years at Informa Group based in London, Sydney, Hong Kong and Singapore. He gained strong management experience in publishing, conferences and awards schemes in the shipping and legal areas, working on a number of titles including Lloyd's List. In 2009 Grant joined Seatrade responsible for the commercial development of Seatrade’s Asia products. In 2012, with Sam Chambers, he co-founded Asia Shipping Media.

Comments

  1. Where is the drama?? Small cut during shaving. But how they did it is another story. Would not like to be in master’s shoes to answer obvious questions.

  2. This was an allision, not a collision. The ship hit a fixed object, the other ship was moored at the time. As Slawomir said, the Master and the pilot have some explaining to do!

  3. Yea, you know how those Pilots are!? Ha!!!

    As a Pilot, my first thought is it would appear they’ve lost their engine and are moving along at a fair speed without any control. My second thought is, “where are the tugs?” Oh, wait! Did we order tugs?????

    Are there any tugs available???

    In my career as a Pilot, I have lost count of the number of Masters, agents, and owners who have questioned: “why you need that tug(s)?”

    This video is the answer.

    Judging by the speed the ship is moving and the obvious collision, it appears to me (based on little other info) if there were a tug(s) on the other side of the ship, they were of inadequate horsepower to effectively do anything to assist the ship in trouble. That is obvious to anyone.

    P&I Clubs would serve themselves well (and the industry as a whole) if they made a greater effort to embrace the “choice” of owners and Masters to opt for using adequate tugs where they are available and the correct number of them. Currently, the mindset of far too many owners is to pressure Masters to NOT use tugs, even when they are available and adequate and recommended by the Pilot.

    All in the effort to save money.

    What do we learn from this video? Pennywise, pound foolish, eh?

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