'Fatigue drove sailor to ram coal ship into Great Barrier Reef'

Indian Express: 'Fatigue drove sailor to ram coal ship into Great Barrier Reef'

An overtired first mate who had slept less than 3 hours in almost two days was partly to blame for sending a fully-laden Chinese coal ship slamming into the Great Barrier Reef last year and causing a minor fuel spill, investigators said on Thursday.

The environmental damage from the grounding was largely limited to a gouge in a piece of the World Heritage listed reef, but the accident raised fears about the potential for a much bigger disaster because the reef lines one of the busiest shipping routes from Australia's coal mines and Asia.

Officials in Queensland state where the grounding occurred said today that new satellite monitoring systems introduced in response to the incident would start operating in July to guard against future problems.

The Chinese-registered Shen Neng 1 strayed from a shipping lane off northeast Queensland and ran aground on April 3 last year, spilling nearly 3 tons of fuel oil and etching a scar across a coral shoal that experts say may take 20 years to heal.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau concluded in a final report released today that a number of factors contributed to the accident, but the grounding ultimately happened because the chief mate failed to correctly monitor the ship's position and to alter its course when he should have.

The investigators found that the chief mate had slept just 2 1/2 hours in the 38 hours before the grounding because he was supervising the entry of the ship to port and the loading of its cargo of 20,000 tons of coal.