The Interislander ferry service has been suffering a series of setbacks, documented by the Herald's Dire Strait investigation. Photo / Mark Mitchell
What should have been a standard ferry sailing across one of the country’s most important transport routes came close to disaster this year, raising serious questions about the state of the Interislander fleet and our ability to respond to a major maritime disaster.
On January 28 at 5.05 pm, the Interislander’s Kaitaki ferry issued a mayday call with 864 people on board.
All four engines had failed and the ship was drifting towards Wellington’s rocky coastline during a strong southerly in Cook Strait.
The Wellington Regional Hospital was put on standby for mass casualties, six vessels were sent to the scene, five helicopters were called, and police were put in charge of an onshore operation to rescue people.
But the worst didn’t eventuate and the ship narrowly avoided disaster when power was restored within two hours of the mayday call.
In the five months since the incident, the Herald’s Dire Strait investigation has revealed there’s no emergency towing vessel on standby to help ships in strife, uncovered nine non-conformity issues at the Interislander, and found passengers waited on the phone for five hours during mass cancellations.
There is no emergency towing vessel on standby in New Zealand to help large ships in strife, while our most powerful tug, based in Taranaki, would take one day and 16 hours to get to a maritime incident in Auckland.
Maritime New Zealand released a report from June 2022 outlining this reality to the Herald under the Official Information Act (OIA).
The findings were delivered just months before the Kaitaki’s mayday call.
Two tug boats were among the vessels sent to the Kaitaki’s aid. These tugs are designed to help ships inside the harbour rather than the open water and it’s unknown how successful any effort would have been to secure the ferry.
Just three months later, the beleaguered cargo ship MV Shiling issued a mayday call 22 nautical miles from Farewell Spit.
Luckily, the ocean-going tug Skandi Emerald happened to be in New Zealand for a work assignment in Taranaki at the time and could be diverted to assist.
The report found there are limited vessels available across the country to promptly prevent the escalation of a maritime incident in all but the most benign conditions. This is mainly because harbour tugs are not designed for emergency towage tasks.
“In most potential groundings, successful intervention by harbour tugs outside of port limits is unlikely, due to either the tug’s limited seakeeping capabilities or their operational limitations,” the report said.
The most powerful tugs in New Zealand are those which support oil and gas operations offshore in Taranaki.
At the time of the report, there was just one - the MMA Vision.
It’s estimated the MMA Vision would take one day and 16 hours to get to an incident in Auckland, one day and three hours to reach Lyttelton, and 17 hours to get to Wellington.
The Herald then revealed Associate Transport Minister Kiri Allan expedited urgent advice on New Zealand’s ability to respond to a maritime disaster.
This was spurred by both the Kaitaki incident and then the MV Shiling’s mayday call.
Greater Wellington Regional Council chairman Daran Ponter and Marlborough District Council mayor Nadine Taylor had also penned a sharp letter to ministers on the matter.
The Herald obtained a copy of the letter that said despite the level of traffic in Cook Strait and the “legendary winds” and tidal currents, there is neither the legislative requirement nor any physical resource to provide support for vulnerable or disabled shipping.
“In our view, this is a completely inadequate situation that is undermining public confidence in our Government to manage a well-known risk and prioritise public safety,” the two council leaders wrote.
Allan met with the pair at the end of May and said the Government shared their concerns.
Maritime New Zealand is now preparing a set of options for the Government to consider.
These options could include bolstering capacity on existing vessels through training and specialist equipment such as towing ropes, which could buy time before an emergency towing vessel arrived.
Another idea is to support ports to invest in tugs with emergency towing capability. This would mean vessels have a day job rather than just remaining on standby, which has previously been touted as making more financial sense.
Allan expects to receive preliminary advice this month.
An audit found nine non-conformity issues at the Interislander - two of which were initially potentially major - while KiwiRail’s chief executive admitted to ministers there is an “erosion of trust” among the public.
KiwiRail chief executive Peter Reidy wrote a briefing to ministers regarding the Interislander ferries on March 3, which the Herald obtained under the OIA.
The Maritime New Zealand audit included an inspection of the Kaitaki after its mayday call, as well as a review of office processes across the entire fleet.
Reidy said the resulting nine non-conformity findings were “not ideal”.
Some of these problems had been resolved at the time the Herald revealed them and others were to be addressed as part of a three-month plan agreed with Maritime New Zealand. The Interislander stressed none of the findings put the safety of passengers at risk, and ships remained safe to operate while the issues were remedied.
Of the nine findings, two were identified in a draft report as potentially major but were later downgraded. They related in part to the criteria Interislander uses to determine which, of the thousands of pieces of equipment on its ships, are deemed critical for the safe operation of a vessel.
In response to the audit, KiwiRail made sure inspection and preventive maintenance regimes existed for all critical equipment.
Risk management and escalation processes for addressing overdue inspections were updated.
“If there are any overdue items, a risk assessment is undertaken to ensure it is safe to operate the ship,” Reidy said.
Reidy said the Interislander’s shore-based team was under-resourced for the task of ensuring a reliable and safe operation of the fleet, despite it providing a critical second line of defence for the ship-based teams.
Work to establish a ship management office was under way, including identifying required roles such as maintenance planners and a reliability engineer.
Maritime New Zealand has since also revealed it raised concerns about safety and maintenance with KiwiRail’s Interislander fleet in the months before the Kaitaki ferry lost power in Cook Strait.
But the details of those concerns have been kept secret, to maintain trust between the watchdog and KiwiRail in the interests of improving safety.
The Herald has requested the details of these concerns under the OIA and awaits a decision.
The Herald has also revealed KiwiRail wanted five jobs relating to its beleaguered Interislander ferries to be included on the immigration Green List, but none had been added.
The job titles KiwiRail wanted were able-bodied seafarer, motorman, second officer electrical, masters, and electro-technical officer.
This information was provided in response to a written parliamentary question from National’s Transport spokesman Simeon Brown.
The Green List is a list of occupations which are eligible for fast-tracked residency, or qualify for a work-to-residence pathway.
A week after the Herald published an article about the list of job titles, the Government announced four out of the five occupations now had a work-to-residence pathway.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins announced deckhands and skippers were being added to a transport sector agreement designed to give bus and truck drivers access to a time-limited, two-year residence pathway.
“In our seaside cities, ferries form an essential part of the public transport system, so it is critical that ferry service operators have access to the workers to enhance the reliability of these services,” Hipkins said.
Interislander executive general manager Walter Rushbrook said he was grateful.
“The maritime sector is an international affair, so with the borders being closed and tighter immigration restrictions, this now opens it up to make sure we get all the skills and expertise required to help run our operation.”
Rushbrook said staff shortages have been a bit of a problem because specific skills were needed for ships.
“They don’t just readily come off the street - you actually need people who’ve got years of experience and particular maritime training.”
The Kaitaki was given the all-clear to take passengers again five weeks after the mayday call.
She was back sailing for less than 24 hours before a problem with her gearbox was discovered on March 4.
Passenger sailings eventually resumed on April 12 after severe disruption caused by cancellations.
A ministerial briefing from Reidy, released under the OIA, revealed some customers waited up to five hours on the phone after their sailings were cancelled.
This was in the initial stages of the disruption and the average call wait time was down to 40 minutes when Reidy provided the briefing on March 20.
“The pressure point for the disruption is managing passengers. This is due to wholesale and freight customers being more flexible with fewer contact points to rearrange sailings,” he said.
KiwiRail’s approach to cancelling passenger sailings was to do so in tranches, every two days, and about four days in advance of scheduled sailings.
This was so the Interislander’s call centre had the capacity to book alternative sailings or give refunds to passengers.
“Cancelling bookings in larger batches would negatively affect customers who are closest to sailing, as their rebooking call wait times would be significantly longer,” Reidy said.
Interislander operations general manager Duncan Roy said their external call centre provider was contracted to boost its capacity and eventually doubled the number of operators available.
Depending on the demand, the Interislander had anywhere between three and 15 people taking calls each day, he said.
Wait times were reduced to less than an hour and by the last week of cancellations to a matter of seconds, Roy said.
Last month Wellington City councillor Iona Pannett asked Maritime New Zealand officials whether the public could be confident of the safety of the ferries as they are currently.
Maritime New Zealand’s position was that as a regulator it can never guarantee safety, but it was not aware of major non-conformities on board the Interislander ferries.
Since the Kaitaki incident, navigation changes have been ordered by regional harbourmaster Grant Nalder.
Bluebridge and Interislander ferries must now keep a greater distance from Wellington’s south coast when southerly winds reach a certain strength.
“The purpose of this direction is to provide more time for a vessel in difficulty on this coast to be able to resolve the issue prior to the need for anchoring, and for support services to prepare if necessary,” Nalder said.
The maintenance schedule for the Interislander ferries has also changed.
The ships will be taken out of service for maintenance more frequently and this will be signalled well in advance, rather than unplanned disruptions.
KiwiRail also intends to sell the Interislander’s freight-only ferry, Valentine, to free up crew and money to improve the reliability of its remaining vessels.
Former Transport Minister Michael Wood has said it was the unreliability of the ferries which caused a “degree of chaos”.
KiwiRail needed to do a better job of managing reliability going forward, Wood said in March.
“That is the expectation that the Government has put down to KiwiRail and that’s what they’re working on now.”
But that is as far as Wood’s public criticism of KiwiRail went on this matter, and executives at the state-owned enterprise have kept their jobs.
Reidy has apologised in the wake of the Kaitaki’s mayday call and said KiwiRail is committed to ensuring nothing like it happens again. Various KiwiRail managers have also apologised profusely during the resulting service cancellations.
Wood has focused criticism on the former National Government for deferring investment in new ferries to replace the ageing and increasingly unreliable Interislander fleet - although National spokesman Brown has said he doesn’t believe such a proposal was ever put forward to the former Government.
“Had we won the 2017 election, we would have looked at any proposals put forward to strengthen the resilience of the Cook Strait connection and invested in this critical connection,” Brown said.
The Government has committed $435 million towards two new mega-ferries and the associated landside infrastructure.
The first ferry is due to arrive in 2025 and these vessels are very much expected to resolve the Interislander’s woes. The total cost of the project was last estimated at about $1.45 billion.
However, it should be noted the only purpose-built ship in Interislander’s current fleet, the Aratere, is ironically well-known for mechanical breakdowns, as in 2013 when it lost a propeller in Cook Strait.
Asked whether passengers could have confidence the two new purpose-built ships would in fact be an improvement, Wood has said there were full assurance processes in place to make sure the new ferries are highly reliable.
“It is absolutely the expectation of the Crown, who is putting significant investment into these projects, that every box is ticked to ensure these vessels will be as reliable as possible. I have no concerns in that regard,” he said.
Georgina Campbell is a Wellington-based reporter who has a particular interest in local government, transport and seismic issues. She joined the Herald in 2019 after working as a broadcast journalist.
The 19-year-old disappeared without her wallet or mobile phone.