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.