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