Runaway Ship Filled With Corn Japan-Bound Freighter, Built In ‘88, Had Just Been Repaired
On its way down the busy Mississippi with a fresh cargo of corn, the Liberian freighter Bright Field had to stop for repairs.
Crews from Dixie Machine Welding & Metal Works Inc. went aboard the Bright Field at an anchorage upriver from New Orleans on Friday night, said Carl Roussel Sr., Dixie’s president.
They removed an engine air cooler and took it to the company’s shops in New Orleans for cleaning before returning it to the ship.
The Liberia-registered freighter resumed its journey down river, and on Saturday it apparently lost power and smashed into the Riverwalk shopping mall in New Orleans.
Initial reports indicated the ship’s engine shut down because of “a lube oil-type situation,” said Ron Brinson, executive director of the Port of New Orleans. He did not elaborate, but Coast Guard officials said it may have been a problem with an oil pump.
There was no immediate indication if Friday’s work on the ship had anything to do with Saturday’s mechanical problems.
Members of the National Transportation Safety Board were to join the Coast Guard to investigate the accident.
The ship had loaded 56,380 long tons of corn Wednesday at the Cargill grain elevator in Reserve and was bound for Kashima, Japan, via the Panama Canal, the Coast Guard said.
Then it sailed across the Mississippi River to the Reserve Anchorage, one of many repair places along the river, said a spokesman for Barwil Agencies Inc. in New Orleans, the steamship agency that handled the ship’s visit.
The Coast Guard said it had inspected the Bright Field in June, although the ship was not boarded.
The freighter, built in 1988, is operated by COSCO Shipping Co. Ltd. of Hong Kong. The company’s name is short for China Ocean Shipping Co., and it is the core of COSCO Group, which was founded in 1961 and has more than 300 subsidiaries.
COSCO is the world’s No. 4 shipping company, measured by tonnage and dead weight, according to a list from the December 1995 “Containerization Weekly” cited on that company’s site on the World Wide Web. That put it behind Sealand, Maersk Line, and Evergreen.