A pilot is at fault for the grounding of an Evergreen Marine-owned container ship off Baltimore in March, according to an investigation conducted by the US Coast Guard.
The 12,100-teu Ever Forward (built 2020) had left Seagrit Terminal with 4,964 boxes on the night of 13 March, when it soon failed to make a right turn to follow Craighill Channel and ended up in the shallows.
A unified command consisting of the Coast Guard, salvor Donjon-Smit and incident commander Witt O’Brien’s took five weeks to free the vessel by dredging around the ship and removing containers.
The Coast Guard investigation determined that the grounding occurred due to the pilot’s “failure to maintain situational awareness and attention while navigating” and conduct of “inadequate bridge resource management”.
While navigating the vessel, the pilot placed or received five phone calls from his personal mobile phone over 61 minutes of the 126-minute voyage, according to the Coast Guard’s findings in a 27-page report.
The longest personal call placed was over 55 minutes long and was followed by a work call concerning a line handler issue that was not related to the current task of safely navigating the vessel out of Chesapeake Bay.
The pilot also said that he solely relied on his portable pilot unit (PPU) to navigate ships instead of equipment or charts on vessels because he did not trust the navigational equipment on ships that he piloted.
While approaching a critical turn in the channel, the pilot was taking a screenshot on his PPU of a previous trip to text a fellow member of the Maryland Pilots Association. The screenshot involved an ongoing unrelated issue with line handlers, according to the Coast Guard report.
Five minutes of the PPU’s recording of the ship’s movement had been interrupted, showing that the pilot was not actively engaged in navigating the vessel immediately prior to the grounding.
The pilot tested negative for drugs and alcohol, but the Maryland Pilots Association suspended his pilot’s licence.
The Coast Guard recommended that the vessel owners and marine operators develop and implement effective policies on proper use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices while a ship is underway.
The Coast Guard also recommended its officer in charge of marine inspection initiate enforcement action against the pilot for negligent operation of a commercial vessel.
