News / The Loadstar Explains: Abandoned ships – and abandoned crews

Photo: © Erik De Graaf | Dreamstime.com

From time to time, it is tempting to fantasise about a world with fewer laws, no institutions, no ‘red tape’. But for the merchant seafarer, this is a daily reality. IMO treaties give guidance on how people and their employers should behave – but in the in-between world of international waters, beyond borders and flags, it is theoretical at best.

Working and sleeping on a platform blasted by wind and tossed by waves, seafarers must also contend with some of the worst labour abuses on Earth.

142 new ships and more than 1,600 seafarers were abandoned in 2023, according to ITF, a record number. IMO met to discuss the matter this week. 

I’ve heard of ‘abandon ship’ — but what is an ‘abandoned crew’?

If a company went bust on land, it would close its doors and its employees would be sent home. But seafarers still at sea are left at the mercy of an employer that no longer exists, and are sent to a mooring to await further instructions.

But this is only the beginning of the crew’s problems. Because the quayside is a working dock, the vessel is generally sent to a mooring some way out into the bay, where it waits at anchor. A shipowner not making mortgage payments on its vessel is certainly not paying to bunker fuel; this generally runs out within a month or two, shutting down electrical power, potable water supply and sanitation.

With no prospect of getting to dry land, Crews divide up what supplies of food and potable water are left, and wait.

Why can’t crews just get off the ship?

Crews could be awaiting wages of many months by the time the vessel is abandoned.

Meanwhile, quayside real estate is valuable for the port, and so the ship is not moored alongside, but some way out to sea. Between 2017 and 2020, Syrian national Mohammed Aisha was stranded alone on the MV Aman at the port of Tartus, legally obliged to stay on board after a local court declared him the ship’s legal guardian – not the Bahraini owner that had abandoned it. His mother, he later learned, had died just a year into his solitary confinement. He was only able the leave the vessel once a storm caused it to run aground 8km away from its previous anchorage. From there, it was possible for Mr Aisha to swim ashore, procure food and charge his phone for access to help.

In June 2023, 12 seafarers from St Kitts & Nevis-flagged Med Sea Lion, abandoned off Sierra Leone, were turned back from Guyana Airport after it transpired that owner Sea Lion Shipping Co had issued them with fake tickets, the International Transport Worker’s Federation (ITF) said in a report. But often, they cannot even get as far as that, as the shipowner withholds access to crew passports. This means that they do not have permission to disembark the vessel.

What are the conditions on board?

Compelled to fish for food, with no access to power for potable water, sanitation, heating or refrigeration, the health of seafarers quickly deteriorates, and no access to medical care is forthcoming.

Ships are not designed to go for months, or even years, without moving and without power. In the normal course of events, when a ship is placed into lay-up, important procedures are undertaken beforehand to prepare. But this is impossible on an abandoned ship. As the months pass, the vessel becomes a less safe place, with no protection from the elements.

Moldovan-flagged MV Rhosus was abandoned at the quayside at the port of Beirut, with a cargo of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate. The crew stayed on board the deteriorating vessel for a year; eventually the port authority made the fateful decision to move the cargo into a nearby warehouse. The vessel’s sunken carcass remains to this day, less than a kilometre from the explosion caused by its neglected cargo.

What effect does this have on seafarers?

Unsurprisingly, suicides among abandoned seafarers are commonplace, but seafarer suicides generally go unreported much of the time. Should a seafarer die in service through a workplace accident, their family is assured a life insurance payout; but suicides yield nothing. Needless to say, in circumstances like these, such ‘accidents’ are commonplace. Colleagues close ranks, eager to assist the families of the deceased. “Allow for suicide to be an insured risk and the data would clarify itself very quickly,” said a shipping manager in quoted in a UK Department for Transport (DfT) report.

Though the effect is not measurable, stories of their seafaring colleagues being subjected to conditions not tolerated for prisoners of war, or even death-row inmates, likely do little to attract young people to a career in shipping.