The North Sea ship collision is likely to be cock-up rather than conspiracy

This week’s ship collision off the Humber could have been much worse. Just one person is unaccounted for and one other needed hospital treatment. The fire is mostly extinguished, the two ships are disentangled from each other and the damage to the tanker is less than feared. It is early days, but there are reasons to be optimistic that the event will not prove to be the catastrophe that some feared. 

First, it’s likely to be cock-up rather than conspiracy. True, it may seem suspicious that a US government jet-fuel cargo is involved: Iran and others would enjoy that. Plus there has been a spate of suspicious anchor-dragging, cable-breaking incidents involving Russian and Chinese ships, and it’s pretty difficult to crash ships by accident these days what with all the sat-nav, radar and radio they possess. So it’s right not to rule out foul play yet. But tracking shows that the container ship Solong sailed in a straight line for around a hundred miles, along a course it has regularly travelled before. If it was aiming to hit the Stena Immaculate tanker it would have adjusted course, probably at the last minute, to aim at it.