Rena-style navigation interference at play in Ports dispute

Les­sons from the Rena dis­aster clearly haven’t been learnt, as new evid­ence emerges of delib­er­ate attempts by ship­ping com­pany Maersk to inter­fere with the nav­ig­a­tion sys­tems of two ships arriv­ing into Auck­land dur­ing the cur­rent Ports dis­pute.

Mari­time work­ers track­ing coastal ship­ping move­ments noticed that the Irenes Rem­edy and Maersk Aber­deen have in recent days both turned off their Auto­mat­ic Iden­ti­fic­a­tion Sys­tem (AIS) as they approached New Zea­l­and.

The two ships com­ing into Auck­land came in without their nav­ig­a­tion­al equip­ment turned on, des­pite it being in good work­ing order, the Mari­time Uni­on said today.

If delib­er­ate, this was deeply con­cern­ing and showed a com­plete dis­reg­ard for the safe pas­sage of the ships and their work­force, MUNZ Gen­er­al Sec­ret­ary Joe Fleet­wood said.

Joe Fleet­wood said the exper­i­enced mari­time work­ers who noticed the anom­aly believe the ves­sels were try­ing to be “silent” to pre­vent their move­ment being tracked dur­ing the cur­rent indus­tri­al dis­pute.

Mr Fleet­wood said he had asked the Maersk Aber­deen cap­tain in Wel­ling­ton if he had been turn­ing AIS off on New Zealand’s coast, and wasn’t sat­is­fied with the response. The AIS track­ing device was of high con­cern, and he had wanted to go aboard the ves­sel imme­di­ately on arrival, not two hours later as had occurred, Fleet­wood said.

“We will be ask­ing ship­ping author­it­ies at Mari­time New Zea­l­and what on earth is going on,” he said.

“There is no obvi­ous explan­a­tion for this occur­ring only on ves­sels involved in the indus­tri­al dis­pute in this way. We are look­ing for­ward to hear­ing an answer from Mari­time New Zea­l­and on this.”

Mr Fleet­wood says if there was any sug­ges­tion that nav­ig­a­tion­al or safety pro­ced­ures were being delib­er­ately cir­cum­ven­ted it would be unfor­giv­able.

“Obvi­ously the Ports of Auck­land and Port of Taur­anga should be quer­ied as to their aware­ness of this situ­ation, and wheth­er they have any con­cerns about it.

“But we also want an assur­ance from Mari­time New Zea­l­and that they will not tol­er­ate this delib­er­ate inter­fer­ence with a ship’s nav­ig­a­tion sys­tems.”

“Giv­en the ves­sels are oper­at­ing in the same area as the site of the Rena dis­aster, this is even more dis­turb­ing,” he said.

The Irenes Rem­edy and Maersk Aber­deen con­tain­er ships have worked at the Ports of Auck­land in recent days des­pite strike action.