
Technical Specifications
Overview
Mary A. Whalen, known as the S.T. Kiddoo from 1938 to 1958, is a historic oil tanker located in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, Kings County, New York. She is the home of the non-profit PortSide NewYork, and the group runs programs aboard her. She was built in 1938 by the John J. Mathis Company, of Camden, New Jersey Hull #124, and measures 172 feet long. She is a rare surviving example of a "bell boat," a ship controlled from the engine room with telegraph signals sent from the bridge. The tanker shipped various fuel products along East Coast and was at center of United States v. Reliable Transfer Co., a pivotal 1975 Supreme Court decision in maritime law after she ran aground in Rockaway Inlet in 1968. She was in active service until 1994. She was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.
Composite Risk
Multiple adverse factors, or a hard ship-specific signal, lift this hull above the fleet norm.
A coverage-weighted blend of the single component we could read for this hull; the weights renormalise over only the components present, so a thin read is never inflated and a hull is never credited a “safe 0” for a signal it has no row for. This headline is flagged low-confidence (a thin or structural-only read) and should not be treated as a verdict. Higher means riskier. Derived in-house from government-open port-State-control, flag, sanctions and our own vessel data; weight it by the coverage above.
Commercial
Price it in the Route Planner between any two commercial ports: ballast and laden legs, two fuels at live bunker prices, port and canal costs, the weather on the way, and the TCE set against the market.

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