MSC Napoli beaching (2007)

On January 18, 2007, in the middle of a storm in the English Channel, the MSC Napoli suffered a hull crack running right across the engine room area. The crew abandoned ship and were winched to safety by helicopter. Taken in tow eastward, the ship threatened to break up offshore, and the British authorities chose to beach it deliberately in Lyme Bay, off Branscombe, Devon, rather than risk a sinking in deep water. Containers fell overboard and washed up on the beach, where hundreds of people came to help themselves to new motorcycles, drums and cosmetics while the police tried to enforce wreck law. What followed was a long operation: lightening, fuel removal, cutting up the wreck on site. The British investigation found a buckling failure of the hull, in an area that the design rules then in force did not check closely enough. The case reopened the debate on the longitudinal strength of large container ships and weighed on the structural rules of classification societies. For insurance, Napoli put everything on the same beach. The hull was a total loss. Cargo interests were numerous, often looted, and each shipper had both to file its claim and to contribute to the general average the owner declared. The P&I club carried the response, the pollution cleanup and the wreck removal, whose total cost is generally quoted at more than 100 million pounds. And wreck law reminded everyone that an object washed ashore does not belong to whoever picks it up: it must be reported to the Receiver of Wreck. Not to be confused with an accidental grounding: here the beaching was the authority's choice to limit a casualty already under way, which makes it a sacrifice in the sense of general average.