WEEKENDS and holidays are notorious bad luck charms for maritime incidents to occur (especially four day weekends). The consequence of a 24/7 industry is it doesn't neatly happen at Monday at 2pm when you've got time to jump on the phone.
The whys and hows of the Cape Falcon grounding will be appropriately investigated by the relevant authorities, and in due time, reports will be issued and actions and learnings taken.
While the "she'll be right" mentality and the "school of hard knocks" has its place, a vessel incident that could lead to 5+ years of litigation is not exactly what those phrases have in mind.
When an incident happens on a Saturday night, the people first on the phone aren't choosing between good options and bad ones, they're choosing between the options they can think of in the moment, under pressure, without their usual advisors on hand. That's not a criticism of anyone involved. It's just what happens when a 24/7 industry meets a business that runs on business hours.
The requirement to respond and mitigate promptly isn't a courtesy, it is a legal duty, and it doesn't pause for the weekend either. The clock on notification obligations, on preserving evidence, on reserving your rights under the charterparty, and on your duty to mitigate loss all start running the moment the incident happens, not when your office reopens. Waiting until Monday to work out what your options are is itself a decision, and it's one that can cost you later, whether that's a notice period lapsing, a mitigation opportunity missed, or a position weakened simply because you didn't act while acting still mattered.
That's precisely why the desktop version of this exercise matters so much. You can't compress the legal clock, but you can make sure that when it starts, you're not starting from zero.
The opportunity the grounding of the Cape Falcon gives various stakeholders is to run a desktop risk assessment with their own documents and supply chain (upstream and downstream contracts).
What the charterers and owners are sorting out on the fly, you can do in the comfort of your boardroom, with the clarity that time and space provides to logically think through your options through a number of lenses:
The options you think you have isn't necessarily what's in the contract. Frequently I've been the bearer of bad news that the contract says something different than the handshake over a beer.
Risk assessments are also not just for policy tick and flicks. They can financially benefit you.
The duty to mitigate loss is a very real and necessary duty that many forget, overlook, and ultimately pay the price on. I know of a cargo owner that lost 60% of their "rock solid" claim because they failed their duty to mitigate. A slam dunk case doesn't mean all losses fall onto someone else's balance sheet.
The other issue is that just because something is operationally possible, doesn't mean it's legally permissible.
Simon Gravenall's LinkedIn post referenced the issues with balancing the vessel, or trim, and the risk that people will just comingle cargo. If there is different cargo for different charterers, or shippers, or even the same cargo owner but different grades of commodities, is comingling permitted? What is the financial damage from such a decision? Who is liable for the financial damage? Whose insurance (if any) responds?
Additionally, you may go old school with a digger-esque solution (a la Ever Given) and then learn about applicable marine orders after the fact. Strict liability isn't a fun concept to learn from a regulator.
Finally, the earlier you can make decisions, the more options are generally on the table. With 40 days until cyclone season kicks off, operational windows tend to shrink and disappear.
"But Alison, how do I know what risk tolerance our company has?" Glad you asked. See the table below of the 5 levels of risk appetite and see where you land and if you want to improve, you know who to call.
None of these levels are about being a good or bad operator, they're about whether you find out where your gaps are on your own terms, or on the terms of whoever's grounded off Queensland this weekend. Every business sits somewhere on this scale right now, whether they've thought about it or not. The only real choice is whether you find out today, in your boardroom, or later, in someone else's timeline.