Slashdot Mirror
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?
And the Huffington Post is still down! I wonder what sea water flooding implies for the financial district.
for the good cap'n.
but what they were doing bobbing around in the path of frankenstorm i don't know.
I have no way of getting on the internet.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Yeah, sure, the Captain of the HMS Bounty is "missing" because of a "hurricane".
We've heard that one before.
and the Captain still missing.
You'll find him adrift on the ship's boat somewhere in the Pacific I expect.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The latest news I find says 14 of 16 crew rescued, one drowned, and the Captain still missing.
The captain is missing ... perhaps somebody mutinied?
I am officially gone from
The “Fossil-Fueled Storm” Calls for an Immediate Crash Course on Climate Change...
Wasn't the storm powered by a combination of solar and hydro?
That was caused by those crazy "green energy" nutjobs demanding that hurricanes be generated using entirely renewable energy (don't ignore wind as well as solar and hydro). They should have stuck with good old coal, oil, natural gas, or maybe nuclear power to create hurricanes.
I am officially gone from
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!
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~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Safer for the ship, of course, not the crew.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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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WTF were they even at sea for?
Ships (usually) move a lot faster than houses, so you simply sail out of the way... unless you have an equipment failure during the escape. Then you sink/die of course, because suddenly you're stationary. Its almost impossible to sink a boat that's underway in the modern radio era, even if its an ancient replica. Safest place to be when a hurricane is on the way is on a ship, because in about 12 to 24 hours you'll be somewhere sunny and pleasant instead of in a hurricane, and if you get a couple days warning that is not too difficult to get 12 hours away... I used to get endless shit from landlubbers when I was serious contemplating doing the liveaboard sailboat thing about hurricanes "What'll you do when a hurricane hits your harbor" "Probably drinking a margarita sitting on a sunny beach 300 miles away, what are you going to be doing when a hurricane hits your home city?" "Grr..."
I was a real small time sailboat sailor but even I know their "killer" (literally) mistake was not traveling in a convoy. So the mainmast snaps off or you spring a hopeless leak, who cares, everyone move from boat #4 to boat #27 and we'll continue along the way. Its more fun to sail in a group of friends anyway. Probably they were too scared of low visibility to escape in a group, if the odds of collision are 2% in heavy seas and dense fog, and the odds of sinking are 0.001% then you go it alone. In slashdot IT terms this is a Redundant Array of Inexpensive (LOL) Sailboats, but if its foggy you'll get massive filesystem corruption.
In all honesty quite a few "killed by hurricane" stories are REALLY "killed during hurricane" stories that have nothing to do with the weather, they'd be just as dead without the storm. Very few sailors are killed by hurricanes compared to landlubbers I'd feel much safer on a boat than on land.
Until they come out with a formal report we won't know what happened, but I'm guessing they were doing a hell of a lot better than the landlubbers until something very critical failed in an unanticipated manner.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
It couldn't have been worse in port- the ship's been lost and at least one member of the crew has died. In port the ship could have been destroyed but the crew would have been on land, away from the ship, and safe.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
Dear lifehacker readers - what is the best way you've found to make sure a site remains available during a natural disaster?
-Adam Pash
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Here then, look at this neat map.
Kinda hypnotizing. (Wind map, in case anyone's scared to go there.)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Knocks Off Gawker Websites ... and nothing of value was lost.
Add the Huffington Post to your comment and you said exactly what I came here to say.
...Sandy blows all the historic stats out of the water, including 1938 hurricane Bellport. Calls bullshit on the "75 year cycle storm" theory - where is the data to back that up?
While a couple of hurricane landfalls in Florida have produced pressures in this range, most cities in the Northeast have never reached such values, as is evident in this state-by-state roundup. The region’s lowest pressure on record occurred with the 1938 hurricane at Bellport, Long Island (946 hPa).
Notsureifserious.jpg but there is no "75 year cycle" pattern in the Earth's weather.
Did you not watch the video? Or are you nitpicking some particularly technical definition of "explosion" that you don't think the event quite met? Because it sure looked like an explosion to me.
I'm nitpicking that transformer != powerstation.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Uhh, we predicted the exact path of this storm last Monday, nearly a full week before it hit.
Who is "we"? The NHC's predicted track showed it headed for Bermuda until Wednesday.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I think that the Royal Navy might get slightly miffed about people doing that. Whether or not they could do anything about it is another matter. British Armed forces probably don't get much of a legal budget for pursuing these things.
...wind and water surges knocked off Gawker sites...
And nothing of value was lost.
And they decided to do so, having left a week ago.
Sailboats are not motor boats.
Really, perhaps you should ask the U.S. Navy why they tend to move all their ships out of port during hurricanes?
You'd have opted to see the HMS Bounty guaranteed to be destroyed. Why?
The crew, whom loved that vessel they worked on, rather thought it'd be nice to keep and preserve it. So they tried to sail around the hurricane and do so before it arrived. And truthfully, they probably were a mere 1/2 day from having succeeded. And you would never have even heard this tale.
But for a mechanical failure...
Don't worry, no engineer would work for someone as stupid as you.
First, you seem to be too stupid to know that mooring a ship in a storm doesn't mean it is going to stay moored.
Second, you seem blissfully unaware that an unmoored ship in a storm poses a very large hazard. You don't know where it will go or what it will hit. You don't know how dangerous it will be to attempt to bring it under control again. You don't know what it will spill. In fact, you don't really know anything at all except you have a very large problem to deal with.
Third, you appear to only look at things through a very small lens, and only in hindsight.
Instead, you focus on the ONE instance where something went wrong while attempting to get away from the storm. What about all the other ships that successfully got away (and there were many). Can you state, with certainty, that not a single life would have been lost directly or indirectly if ALL of those ships stayed in port? Not one person would have been killed by any floating or flying debris or the ship itself? Nobody would have been killed trying to rescue the ship? Nobody would have been killed if fuel had been spilled into flooded residential streets?
The 1938 Hurricane wasn't called Bellport, that's where the measurement you're referring to was made. We didn't name storms back then. That storm was known as 'The Long Island Express' or 'Yankee Clipper,' as it was an incredibly powerful storm that reached a ground track speed of 70mph and struck Long Island and New England practically without warning.
Back to your question, however... The data doesn't exist, because we only recently understood what these storms are and had the capability to make these measurements! Flying aircraft into the center of hurricanes and dropping scientific measuring equipment into them is a relatively recent phenomenon. Otherwise, you had to be (un)lucky enough to be a ship or a city that the eye passed over to get an accurate measurement.
That being said, there is a well-documented history of incredibly powerful storms hitting the New England area, going back to the 1600s.
As previously mentioned, the Long Island Express in 1938, which killed 700 people and did $6 billion in damages (2004 dollars). It had a minimum pressure of 947Mbar, compared to Sandy's 946 at landfall. The Express made landfall as a Category 3, however, showing that central pressure isn't everything. It created a couple new islands by breaking new inlets through the existing barrier islands.
Before that was the 1893 New York Hurricane with a minimum pressure of 952. Came ashore as a strong Category 1. Killed 38, uprooted a bunch of trees, smashed some buildings... Completely removed Hog Island from the map. But pretty calm compared to the Express.
The 1869 Saxby Gale also messed up New England pretty good. Killed over 100. Actually created a new land bridge between Nova Scotia and Partridge Island.
The 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane flooded NYC as well. It managed a 13-foot storm surge at low tide, compared to Sandy's 9-foot, which hit at high tide. Between Category 3 and 4 strength.
There was also the Great September Gale of 1815. Category 3. Actually created the island of Long Beach, as it used to be part of the Rockaways peninsula. This was actually the storm that apparently lead to the theory that Hurricanes were vortices, instead of just large waves of rushing atmosphere.
The most impressive one, though, and the one we sadly have very little direct data for is probably the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635. It was most likely a Category 4, probably with a central pressure = 930Mbar. Simulations show a landfall pressure of 938Mbar in Long Island, which (if correct) would still beat Sandy for the all-time record above North Carolina. Damage was noticable 50 years later.
So there's the data we have. Doesn't look like a seventy-five year cycle to me. It does show, however, that such storms are unusual but not unheard of in recorded history. And, if I remember my studies correctly, there is evidence in the terrain of New England of even worse storms over the past thousand years.
What's changed? New England is much more densely populated than it used to be, our news is much more up-to-date and instantaneous, and our modeling and predictive capabilities are much better. The same was true of the Gulf Hurricanes a few years back (Katrina and Rita). Much of the areas that were devastated were areas that had been sparsely populated when they were previously destroyed (in Hurricane Camille, for instance), and had been spared destruction long enough for the memories to fade in people's minds.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them