Disaster survey and emergency ship handling procedures aboard a MOORED VLCC during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami

The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which began off the Pacific coast at 14:46 JST on 11 March 2011 affected large areas of the eastern and northern parts of Japan. The tsunami disasters affected not only areas along the coasts and harbors, but also many vessels moored along the terminals inside the harbor basins. After the earthquake, many reports and investigations into the tsunami profile, inundation areas, and seismometer readings were completed. However, investigation and analysis of ships׳ behavior has not yet been done. In this paper, we have carried out a disaster survey on a moored VLCC (very large crude oil carrier), which conducted an emergency unberthing with mooring line breakage and main engine activation during the tsunami. We tried to reproduce the ship׳s behavior through a numerical simulation of the tsunami and the ship׳s motion. Furthermore, the effect of the emergency ship handling procedures carried out during the evacuation is also investigated.