Sandy Sinks HMS Bounty, Knocks Off Gawker Websites

Black Parrot writes "Several news sites are reporting that the 1962 replica of the HMS bounty was lost at sea due to hurricane Sandy, about 90 miles off North Carolina. The latest news I find says 14 of 16 crew rescued, one drowned, and the Captain still missing." And on land, the combination of wind and water surges knocked off Gawker sites and the Huffington Post for a time, and forced the evacuation of NYU's Langone Medical Center. Did it affect you?

Comments

last post

[Anonymous Coward]

for the good cap'n.

but what they were doing bobbing around in the path of frankenstorm i don't know.

Re:last post

[BenJury]

Safer for the ship to be at sea instead of docked, safer for the crew to be docked rather than at sea...

WTF were they even doing at sea?

[crazyjj]

The original HMS Bounty didn't have the benefit of knowing a week in advance when a hurricane was coming. This one did. WTF were they even at sea for? Unless this was a suicide run, that was pretty fucking stupid.

Re:WTF were they even doing at sea?

[Nidi62]

Ships are designed to be at sea, not alongside a dock. In severe storms, boats are often able to more easily weather a storm in the open water than at a dock or in shallow water, where they are likely to bump into things, which rarely ends well for the ship. From what I understand, the Bounty was out and trying to skirt along the edge of the storm, but the waves were so high that they took on too much water. The whole crew had on life jackets and survival suits, but the Captain and th sailor that drowned were swept overbaord while getting on a life raft. So they were prepared to ditch.

And for an example of why being at sea is better, Good Morning America showed footage this morning of a tanker that had been tied of at a dock in New York. The storm broke it free, carried it several miles, and beached it to where about half of it is on land. This was a modern ship with a metal hull, but it's safe to assume the hull took at least some damage when it beached. Now imagine what would have happened to a larg wooden hulled vessel that got smashed up against it's pier, or beached on some rocks.

Re:WTF were they even doing at sea?

[DarkOx]

The original bounty would have pumps that would have been operated manually by gangs of sailors. Wood hauled ships of that type are pretty much in a constant state of sinking, you must pump the bilge.

The replica bounty was equipped only with electric pumps They had some kind of generator failure and could not run them.

What were they doing at sea. Its pretty much SOP of an ocean going vessel of any significant size to put to see ahead of storm. I hope its obvious to you why being anchor in heavy sees would be a problem. Since you can't be tied up you don't want to be anywhere near shallow water or anything like pier, rock, other ship, etc you might be pushed against.

So what you generally do is you try to sail out into deep open water, and avoid the storm as much as possible. This is the safest thing to do for the ship. Obviously you don't head strait into the storm, but this thing was so big they could not easily avoid even the worst of it; given their best possible speed.

So yes the original HMS Bounty and her crew probably would have survived this storm, although its likely some top men would have been killed trying to reef sails in heavy wind and sea. The replica with her mechanical dependencies and crew we value more than the vessel was not up to it.

Re:WTF were they even doing at sea?

[crazyjj]

Ships are designed to be at sea, not alongside a dock. In severe storms, boats are often able to more easily weather a storm in the open water

Why do you people *keep repeating* that dumb shit? Yes, that's true FOR THE BOAT, NOT FOR THE CREW. The best option for the crew (which is *way* more important than your shitty replica) is to GET THEM OFF THE SHIP UNTIL THE STORM PASSES. You see, ports allow the crew to exit the ship and go onto dry land and shelter. And that's why a port is MUCH BETTER in a storm than being out to sea.

Huffington Post

[Edzor]

I think the Huffington Post managers would be more worried if a real media website went down like the NYT. Where would they steal - sorry aggregate - their content from then!

So where are all you idiots

[geekoid]

that said this storm wasn't going to be anything and were criticizing people getting prepared in the 'Sandy' story the other day? hmm? I expect you are apologizing and have learned your lesson~

Re:Huffington Post

[cruff]

And the Huffington Post is still down!

And nothing of any value will be missed while it remains down.

Re:End climate silence

[SternisheFan]

So , man-made climate change was the cause of Hurricane Sandy? Are you kidding me?!!! Sandy is the 75 year cycle storm that was overdue, last one was in 1938. It's a natural weather phenomena, and has nothing to do with humanity's doings.

Re:End climate silence

[TheMathemagician]

Notsureifserious.jpg but there is no "75 year cycle" pattern in the Earth's weather.

Re:Best site backup plan? #Openthread

[SecurityGuy]

This is the age of putting things in the "cloud" and forgetting that cloud is just someone else's data center(s). If you pay for services sufficient to stay online if the entire northeastern US goes offline, you at the very least get to sue your provider and probably win when it doesn't work. If you periodically go into your datacenter, er, "cloud" and flip the breaker and listen to all the fans die and your backup site X thousand miles away seamlessly takes over, you stand a really good chance of actually weathering a storm like this.

The people who are down didn't necessarily do it wrong. They may have made a quite rational decision that the cost of fully redundant geographically dispersed backup infrastructure and live failover testing is greater than the expected cost of downtime when you factor in the probability of it happening. If they didn't think about it, or just assumed their provider wouldn't screw it up and are now running around wetting their pants, then yeah, they did it wrong.