High Seas Fixes Come from Landlubber Office

There is a superb view of Mount Diablo and the dry Los Medanos hills from the balcony off the London Offshore Consultants office. It's on the seventh floor of a modern office building close to the Walnut Creek BART station.

If you turn to the left and squint, you can see the sea-green waters of the Sacramento River. But, still, it's landlocked Walnut Creek — far from the world of rudders and bow thrusters, hatch covers and hulls, stevedores and enormous cranes poking into holds.

Nevertheless, in this landlubber office, J. Arthur Waddington is checking emails and the Internet on two computer screens while fielding cell phone calls about maritime disasters and would-be disasters and could-have-been-much-worse mishaps.

Waddington, a native of Yorkshire, England, sat for an interview with Walnut Creek Patch recently and told a few sea stories of folly and ambition and insurance claims.

Waddington — a marine engineer with degrees from schools in Liverpool, Glasgow and London — and LOC are called in often to consult for ship owners and their insurance companies on ocean-going disasters, sometimes to prevent further damage and sometimes to do some maritime detective work to pin down what went wrong.

On the morning of our interview, Waddington had already been out to Stockton at dawn to take a look at a problem where a ship tied onto a pier. During the interview, he took a call from a ship far out in the Pacific with a rudder problem. The ship, and its insurance company, was making arrangements for Waddington to meet it in a few days at the port of Long Beach to poke a little deeper into the rudder issue.

Consulting on Cosco Busan

On a higher profile, Waddington was called in when the Cosco Busan cracked into a pier of the Bay Bridge on Nov. 7, 2007, spilling heavy fuel oil into the bay. More than 50 public beaches were closed.

When the container ship struck the Bay Bridge, Waddington was stuck at the Oakland Airport, waiting for fog to clear and release his flight to San Diego. He eventually went to San Diego, fulfilled a commitment of investigating a routine case there and returned to the Bay Area.

Waddington boarded the Cosco Busan about 7 in the evening when it was dark. Over the next few days he made recommendations on temporary and permanent repair work.

The tasks included the transfer of fuel oil internally and cleaning of ruptured fuel tanks, together with the installation of steel plates to seal the gash in the vessel’s side shell plates.

All was necessary before the Cosco Busan could be cleared to sail across the Pacific to effect the permanent repairs in China.

One of the trends of Waddington's long career has been the progressive pricing of U.S. Pacific ports out of large ship repair work that now often goes to more competitive yards in China.

Another trend that concerns Waddington is marine engineers who are too tied to the information their computers yield. It's no substitute for direct observation of conditions on the ship in question, and observation of the answers to questions posed to the responsible parties on board, Waddington said.

Dirty hands

"Nobody wants to get their hands dirty anymore," Waddington said, shaking his head.

When he gets to the ship, he sometimes postpones the Q&A with the master until he can clamber below decks and observe the scene of the malfunction.

“When things are getting a bit too contentious and serious, I explain that I can do the job I do because I served an apprenticeship (years as an engineer working on ocean-going ships). I probably got the job I have because I went to university; however, I keep the job because I have a driving license (and the ability to fly into a port, rent a car to go to the docks and/or shipping company offices). That generally lightens things up.

"I had four years training to be a marine engineer and then began my career proper working on both steam turbine ships and motor ships. Over several years I served aboard refrigerated fruit carriers, cargo liners, general cargo tramp vessels, gas tankers and bulk carriers. After my son was born there was also a three-year stint as an engineer at a gin distillery in London before my wife, perhaps fed up with my grumblings, told me one evening that I needed to be back working with ships."

Arthur and Mary Waddington live in Walnut Creek. They have a married adult son, George, living in Washington, D.C. and a married daughter, Sadie (and grandson, Thomas, 10 months) living in Walnut Creek.

"I get to a ship and there are certain facts," said Waddington. "I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a spy or a detective. But if something is broken, we want to know why. In the case of machinery breakdown, it takes a bit of investigation. I have a background in materials science."

On an investigation in Hawaii, it made him skeptical that "every person on the ship had exactly the same story — even the ones who were in bed at the time" when the No. 3 hatch stove in and flooded. The pattern of damage told Waddington that it was human error — the crew forgot to open ventilation flaps while pumping the ballast out and the resulting pressure imploded the hatch cover.

Waddington probed a mystery in Italy for the Eden Five, beached on the Adriatic coast in a 1988 storm. He discovered faked log entries, documents and faked cargo for a ship that had changed owners three times in a year. The evidence pointed to a secretive trade in toxic waste between Italy and Lebanon and dumping of toxic waste barrels in the Adriatic and Mediterranean, according to a documentary by an Italian journalist. 

Even with his investigations that often lay bare human frailties that can take down ships and spill nasty stuff into the sea, Waddington finds the shipping business "grossly overregulated."

"Fining somebody for making a mistake isn't always helpful," he said.

Sometimes when shipping companies are docked for a large unforeseen expense like a fine, they tend to revise procedures to cut corners.

"It makes them more inclined to hide things," Waddington said.