There are two major problems for Scotland in the major cuts and rearrangements to the Coastguard service proposed by the UK Government and the Maritime and Coastguard Association. They are coverage – which includes local knowledge; and communications.
Coverage and local knowledge
One is the basic issue of coverage. They are planning to leave Scotland with one mainland coastguard station (Aberdeen), which will be supported by another at Shetland. (This support role has been a bit of a surprise and seems to be a move to justify the earlier decision to save both the Western Isles’ and the Shetland Isles’ stations).
Aberdeen, supported by Shetland, has taken over the coordination duties of Forth Coastguard’s area of responsibility, with Forth Coastguard the first UK station to be closed – a recent event and with Clyde to follow as the second by the end of this year.
In addition to Aberdeen, Scotland will also retain the island stations of Shetland and Stornoway Coastguard. These two will back each other up.
With Clyde Coastguard to go and that massive sea area from the Mull of Galloway out to Tiree in the Atlantic and over to Ardnamurchan point, the most westerly of the UK mainland to pass to the responsibility of Belfast Coastguard in Northern Ireland, Scotland cannot protect much of her own west coast. An independent Scotland would inherit a lack of personnel, a lost skills base with all of the vital local knowledge and control of the majority of its west coast already in the hands of what would be another country.
Yet the SNP government has effectively slept on watch for want to serious opposition to this proposal. It has done some gestural politicking but has made no real movement to preserve efficient and knowledgeable coastal protection for the benefit of a country it intends to try to take to independence.
Communications
The second problem arising from the proposed cost cutting arrangements is the unreliability of the communications system which will ‘enable’ the radically reduced and overstretched UK coastguard service.
We understand from Dennis O;Connor of the National Coastguard SOS campaign that Shetland has ‘borrowed’ several radio masts from Aberdeen and the communications connection will be through this method.
Likewise it appears that Stornoway may also have ‘borrowed’ some radio masts (probably from Belfast (to be confirmed).
Communications between and from the Scottish islands are very poor and prone to outages at regular intervals.
The Shetland Coastguard PCS representative told the recent and second hearing of the House of Commons Transport Select Committee on the UK Coastguard situation, that communications had failed on no less than six occasions since the beginning of October.
This is of major concern because it makes coordination for the island Coastguards very difficult indeed.
Apparently BT are preparing a significant investment in communications to and from the islands – but it is probable that, even then, communications will still have outages. Here it is important to note that BT has got Ofcom’s agreement to classify rural areas in Scotland as offering conditions ‘beyond BT’s control’ – which means that it does not carry the obligation to sustain a service. The Scottish islands will certainly offer conditions BT would comfortably consider to be ‘beyond its control’ – relieving it of the obligation to sustain these services.
The centralised call centre at Fareham in Hampshire on the English south coast is to take over the incident coordination responsibilities of the ten coastguard stations to be closed – Forth (already closed), Clyde, Brixham, Liverpool, Yarmouth, Swansea, Thames and Portland.
Fareham is not due to be operational before 2014 at the earliest so the remaining stations will take over responsibilities for the abandoned sea areas until such time as Fareham becomes operational – an event which appears problematic.
The plan is that all 999 calls will in the first instance go to the Fareham call centre and they will coordinate rescue services from there – tasking Coastguard rescue teams and RNLI crews. If Fareham is busy they will task coordination to, for example, the closest MRCC (Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre) to the incident; or if that MRCC is busy, the MOC (the call centre – aka the Maritime Operations Centre – it’s all in the name) will task another quieter MRCC.
Potential consequences
Scotland may pay dearly for the Scottish Government’s failure to obstruct this change to the coast guard service and the loss of both Forth and Clyde Coastguard.
Below is a realistic scenario based on the coverage and communications problems this literally ignorant set of cuts and chop-arounds bequeaths to Scotland.
Incident scenario for Argyll waters
A fully laden Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) tanker with twenty crew onboard, which is eleven years old, has transited West of the Hebrides via the Deep Water Route, and is heading for the Tranmere Oil Terminal in Liverpool. She is fully laden with 150,000 tonnes of Crude Oil.
The navigation plan is to exit the Deep Water Route, transit via the North Channel and pass down the Irish Sea west of the Isle of Man, before altering course for Liverpool.
Exiting the Deep Water Route, abeam Barra Head, the vessel sets course for the North Channel. Passing Skerryvore Light a small fire breaks out in the engine room, which quickly escalates and cannot be extinguished via the ships own firefighting system. After five minutes an explosion occurs in the engine room rendering the vessel powerless and she starts to drift uncontrollably.
The weather at the time is Westerly Gale Force 8, forecast to increase to Severe Gale 9. Driving snow and hail is making visibility extremely difficult.
The vessel comes to grief when she grounds on the Dubh Artach reef and, with the sea bouncing her on the reef, one of the port side tanks suffers a rupture to her double bottom and renders the tank open to sea.
Subsequently, 15,000 tonnes of crude oil makes its way into the sea.
The vessel has broadcast a ‘Mayday’ requesting assistance. This is not heard by Stornoway CG due to known technical difficulties in accessing the aerials that were formerly the remit of Clyde CG.
Therefore, Belfast CG answer the ‘Mayday’ message and subsequently take co-ordination of the incident.
Lifeboats closest to the incident
- Red Bay (Northern Ireland) – Not considered as she is an Atlantic 85 and classed as an Inshore Lifeboat.
- Port Askaig – All Weather Lifeboat with a transit distance of 30 nautical miles.
- Campbeltown – All Weather Lifeboat with a transit distance of 98 nautical miles- unlikely to be considered as the distance is too great.
- Tobermory – All Weather Lifeboat with a transit distance of 48 nautical miles. She would be hammered on the beam by the westerly gale whilst transiting.
- Castlebay – All Weather Lifeboat with a transit distance of 50 nautical miles. Again this lifeboat would be hammered on the beam by the westerly gale whilst transiting.
How much of this would be known to someone in a call centre in Fareham? In a time critical incident – as this is – how much time would it take to ask for help in identifying the correct lifeboat or lifeboats to task?
Rescue Helicopters in the vicinity
R100 (based at Stornoway) is unavailable due to being employed on rescuing an injured crewman from a fishing vessel 150 miles out into the Atlantic. It is expected the helicopter will be available for retasking in six hours time.
R101 (based at Stornoway) is the spare helicopter but as there is only one crew between two helicopters, this cab is down for maintenance and could be made ready to fly in eight hours time.
R177 (based at Prestwick) is available but the duty crew only have two duty hours of flying time left, therefore the helicopter is deemed unavailable.
The other helicopter options are from Lossiemouth, Boulmer (Northumberland) or Leconfield (Humberside).
How would the new system cope?
The challenges under this new system would be many and varied.
With such a high profile incident, which would invoke media coverage and political manoeuvring, it is suggested that the MOC (Fareham call centre) would not take charge of this incident. There is too much scope for the MOC to get it wrong and as Belfast already has co-ordination, then they should be left alone to get on with it.
The likely problem here is that Belfast would be quickly overwhelmed with media enquiries whilst also trying to conduct normal day to day business. This is where the MOC should come in and field all the media enquiries and take on the routine work of MRCC Belfast, leaving them free to prosecute the incident.
However, there is still the problem of other incidents commencing in Belfast’s area of responsibility requiring co-ordination; and the fact that the radio aerials will be being utilised by Belfast.
This now renders the MOC useless as although they can access aerials being used by Belfast, there is the problem that only one operator can use it at any one time.
This problem, although the MCA are aware of it and have been from the outset, is still ongoing with no resolution in sight. The MCA seem quite happy to adopt a suck it and see attitude but it will be too late when the brown stuff hits the fan and aerials have to be used in anger.
This also begs the question of how the MOC would be able to handle the situation?
As the MCA have already admitted in Open Forums, the MOC (Fareham call centre) will be staffed by 60 ‘Call Handlers’ who have extremely limited or absolutely no CG professional training whatsoever.
This then begs the next question. How will the MOC prosecute a Search and Rescue (SAR) incident with staff who have virtually no professional training?
This is a dangerous road to be on and one that will only result in incorrect tasking of resources, not tasking the appropriate resources or even worse, loss of life.
If MRCC Belfast were busy prior to the incident above, or had suffered an outage, then the incident could well be passed to any station within the UK to prosecute.
This then adds an additional burden on the system as stations outwith the locale would have very little or no knowledge at all of the area of interest and would be shooting in the dark with regard to whom they task to respond.
This would inevitably result in numerous telephone calls to Belfast asking which lifeboats should be tasked etc.
This is a clearly lunatic scenario which the MCA/Department for Transport seem hell bent on pursuing regardless of the cost to the mariner or their own staff.
The cost of a single serious incident with substantial environmental consequences would make the modest cuts achieved in this bargain basement approach to coastal protection seem the false economy they are.
Non operational staff at MCA HQ, politicians and the public have no concept of the challenges that professional coastguard officers and managers face. How could they possibly comprehend such an issue without direct experience?
Any modernisation plans should only have been drawn up with the full interaction of experienced coastguards. It should never have been left in the hands of non operational civil servants, politicians or anyone else for that matter.
The stakes are just too high and the potential for disaster is magnified when looking at perfectly feasible scenarios such as this.
And in this case, with a westerly gale, the crude oil from that holed VLCC is headed our way, here in Argyll.
Note: The National Coastguard SOS Campaign has written several times to each MP to ask them where they stand on the coastguard closures. Argyll and Bute’s MP, the Liberal Democrat Alan Reid, has not replied. Argyll has a coastline bigger than France and the scenario above demonstrates clearly the degree of risk to our marine and coastal environments of a system as unable as the one being introduced. Mr Reid is joined on the fence [and let's hope it's a picket fence rather than post-and-rail] by senior party colleague, Treasury Secretary, Danny Alexander – born on the Isle of Colonsay and representing the east coast constituency of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey.
Note: We wish to record our profound gratitude to Dennis O’Connor of the National Coastguard SOS Campaign for help in research towards this article.
Note: The photograph at the top is © MARK EDWARDS, HARD RAIN PICTURE LIBRARY. It is of the MV Braer, the tanker that ran aground at Garths Ness, on the Shetland coast in January 1993. She had lost engine power and was drifting in winds at Force 10-11. She was carrying 85,000 tonnes of Norwegian Gullfaks crude oil.
