Strait freight disrupted further by ship fire

Press, 26 April 1984, Page 8

Strait freight disrupted further by ship fire

Disruption of another Cook Strait link, the firedamaged Coastal Trader, is unlikely to cause serious freight problems, according to a Shipping Corporation spokesman. The 2500-ton ship was forced to return to Auckland Harbour with her South Island cargo on Monday morning, after an engineroom blaze disabled the starboard engine in the Bay of Plenty.

The assistant general manager of the Shipping Corporation, Mr Mick Payze, said that the mishap could not have been more poorly timed in view of the backlog of Cook Strait rail freight affected by a union ban. Repair work on the Coastal Trader was expected to take up to three weeks.

“But it is difficult to imagine that it is going to cause a real problem,” Mr Payze said from Wellington yesterday.

Without the fire, there would have been more demand for north bound space in the vessel’s holds al-

though it tended to carry different types of cargo from the Railways. “But the Coastal Trader simply is not going to be there for the next two or three weeks,” Mr Payze said. “That is a fact of life.”

Some freight forwarders would have to juggle storage and transport arrangements to keep their supply points going, but he doubted that there would be any big problem in moving goods. “We are going to miss out a voyage anyway because of this particular dead week,” he said. The Coastal Trader, due to have arrived at Lyttelton last Tuesday, was to have stretched its weekly schedule into two weeks because of the holiday period. This would have meant spending extra days in Dunedin before taking on north-bound cargo at Lyttelton next Wednesday.

The time taken for repairs would likely result in the cancellation of one, possibly two, round-trip voyages, Mr Payze said.

Repair work on the vessel should be well under way by the end of this week. Cleaning up after the fire, started by a fractured oil fuel line, was nearly finished.

“It is a fair amount of damage but compared with what ship fires can be, it is by no means a disaster,” Mr Payze said.

Repairs were helped by the availability of replacement parts in New Zealand, such as some control system cabling damaged in the blaze.

A decision has not yet been made on whether to discharge the ship’s present cargo.

Mr Payze said staff of the corporation had managed to reach only two of the shippers involved by yesterday. One of those had three refrigerated containers on board, one holding yoghurt which had a limited shelf life.

Other south-bound cargo on the laid-up Coastal Trader included sugar, vehicles, and containers of mixed goods. If clients wanted the ship

unloaded some of the more urgent cargo could be sent on the Union Nelson; The larger container vessel was due to leave Auckland early next week.

The temporary withdrawal of the Coastal Trader has left the 1171-ton Spirit of Free Enterprise as the main shipping alternative across Cook Strait. Mr Brooke McKenzie, the chairman of its owner, Pacifica Shipping, Ltd, said the vessel was over-committed for freight cargoes because of the rail and Trader stoppages.

“We are 110 per cent full,” he said yesterday-. . . .

The extra trade : was bringing in little additional revenue, however, as the Spirit of Free Enterprise already had been running at a high capacity. The ship could not handle more than its present three round voyages a week between Lyttelton and Wellington but Mr McKenzie said the company would consider buying another ship if rail freight problems continued.