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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?
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
I wonder what sea water flooding implies for the financial district.
1. A brisk day of trading in derivatives based on underwater mortgages.
2. A vindication of the Saltwater school of economics.
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?
It's very dangerous for a ship to be in port for a storm like this. Getting out to sea and out of it's path is the proper course of action. It just couldn't get out from in front of it's path quickly enough. And unlike newer ships that can withstand storms, a tallship like that didn't stand a chance.
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!
And the Huffington Post is still down!
And nothing of any value will be missed while it remains down.
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
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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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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.
"I wonder what sea water flooding implies for the financial district."
Bankers need bailing out again...
According to news reports, the engine broke down and they were not able to repair in time.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
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!
...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.
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.
...wind and water surges knocked off Gawker sites...
And nothing of value was lost.
One bit of Bligh's reputation is secure. He was one helluva a seaman. There are damned few sailors in history who could have accomplished what he managed to do; sailing and navigating a launch with eighteen loyal crewmen 3,600 nautical miles to Timor with only one casualty (from a native attack). It is one of the great feats of maritime history.
I think most historians long ago centered most of the blame on Fletcher Christian. As you say, Bligh was a man of his times, and in those days, where you might spend a year or longer at sea, if you did not maintain absolute discipline, it was likely no one would ever see home again.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The Bounty left port a week before the storm. The captain's stated intention was to skirt around/through the storm and head south. Let me repeat. The captain intentionally sailed into Sandy.
There was a plenty of warning of the scale and scope of this storm before the Bounty left port. This wasn't a case of it being caught unprepared in harbour with a hurricane bearing down on it trying to get to sea. This captain made a decision to put this ship into incredible danger. A ship which is 400 years out of date in technology and used as a school ship to teach sailing.
This was not the right decision.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
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