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Container Ship Breaks In Two, Sinks
Cliff Stoll writes "Along with 7000 containers, ship MOL Comfort broke in half in high seas in the Indian Ocean. The aft section floated for a week, then sank on June 27th. The forward section was towed most of the way to port, but burned and sank on July 10th. This post-panamax ship was 316 meters long and only 5 years old. With a typical value of $40,000 per container (PDF), this amounts to a quarter billion dollar loss. The cause is unknown, but may be structural or perhaps due to overfilled containers that are declared as underweight. Of course, the software used to calculate ship stability relies upon these incorrect physical parameters."
so they operate on an honor system?
One would think they'd weigh the container themselves and charge accordingly. But then I'm not in the shipping business so I dunno...
If they are airtight, maybe some could float? If you bump into one of those 7000 while you are out jet skiing, can you take it home as yours? Finders keepers? Or does the shipping company still own the containers?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
reference to:
sank.
sank.
burned down, fell over, sank.
Together with her sister ships, MOL Comfort was the first container ship classified by Nippon Kaiji Kyokai to utilize ultra high-strength steel with an yield strength of 470 MPa in her hull structure.
Stiff brittle ship snaps like golf club in heavy seas?
Capitalism at its finest.
This was not an accident, It was Kaiju. I just saw this happen at the movies. Cover up!
@Valentinial
News for nerds?
After "Breaking in half", the apt part stays up for a week. The forward section stays afloat for over three weeks before it bursts into flames before sinking. Sounds like God wanted that ship sunk.
I encourage everyone to click on the first link, there are bunch of great photos, all on one page (no slideshow).
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcU4t6zRAKg
Well, at least you got paid already probably.
Where was it built?
I have an answer: Not the United States, for we outsourced serious commercial ship building, like most critical industries, to "third world" countries, whose sysyetms aren't as advanced or sophisticated as ours...
Oh wait...wasn't there a fire on the recently overhauled Dreamliner? Wait a second...it's also American built!
News for nerds?
Nautical nerds. Don't you watch SpongeBob?
This is very common in aviation. The pilot gets weights on sealed items that he can't personally weigh, but got sworn certificates of weight... then finds out once in the air, he was lied to. Plane crashed, and almost always it gets listed as pilot error, because it is the word of the pilot against others who will swear up and down their cargo weighs just "x" amount, when it really is "2x".
Aiming at a stationary fishing boat near Sydney, Australia.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
If a container ship broke in two and still floated -- now that would be news.
Come on people... we can't be that desperate for news today... can we?
There is at least one case where because of the use of too few train engines were used many people died. Down a hill into a town the trains brake system was unable to handle the forces of the freight train line. The engineer, not realizing that doing so would disengage the autosystem break when the engineer engaged the emergency break, which just locks wheels (less effective!)
The train raced into town and derailed, killing many many people and destroying section of the physical town.
Of course an independent measurement system must be used when there is a shirt-sighted profit motive to incorrectly state weight.
There goes the package i was waiting on..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why can't ships break in three or break in four even? I mean really. What ever happened to creative engineering?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
They were shipping Krabby Patties?
I guess the Da Vinci virus wasn't playing around. Bummer.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
It sank into the swamp.
So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.
So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
The people in charge of making sure ships don't sneak out of port without paying for their taxes need to measure where the water line is on the ship when it enters port, then measure it again when the ship leaves, then use the blueprint of the ship to calculate how much more water is being displaced and how much that water weighs. All you need in order to do this is measuring tape, a calculator, and a blueprint of the ship.
According to Wikipedia:
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nagasaki, Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOL_Comfort
So when did Japan become a 3rd world country that lacked advanced and sophisticated systems?
END COMMUNICATION
Good use of your time i guess.
This thing was clearly designed well. Ignoring the fact that it sank, yeah that was bad, It fucking split in two, then sat there for a week without issue, and then half sank. Then the other bit taking another two weeks to sink. Holy fuck.
lol fucking idiots, i hope a lot of people died.
mods, every time you down mod, i will repost.
You show 'em AC. You should try out th e Yahoo comment boards - your kind of folk.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There is an incentive to declare your container overweight, because there is a weight limit for each container. Two containers is more expensive than one, obviously. So you are incentivized to pack your stuff as tightly as possible.
However, there's a limit to how overweight your container can be. The container can hold around 28,000 kg. Its interior dimensions, however, are pretty fixed. How dense can you pack your goods? If you've done any shipping, you know that while you can pack stuff in, there's a point where you'll damage your goods. That's even more applicable for heavy goods, like industrial equipment.
Do they actually use software to place containers? My limited exposure to a container yard says no. They load the boxes on there, and well, where it goes is where it goes.
If it really was due to being overweight, how much overweight would each container have to be to cause the ship to snap in half?
Based on my admittedly poor knowledgeof maritime law, since the container ship sank on the high seas, it is now fair game for any salvage company willing to undertake the project. I'm sure there are a lot of factors to take into account (location, type of cargo, etc.), but 1/4 billion dollars worth of cargo is not chump change. There are probably a lot of salvagers doing some cost/benefit analysis right now.
"Along with 7000 containers, ship MOL Comfort broke in half..." How did all 7000 containers happen to break in half?
From The Cuckoo's Egg fame? Remember reading the paperback years ago. Will have to pull it out and read it again.
Hunt for the last alien in a giant cargo ship!
Next time, untie the boat from the pier before you give it the gas.
Family friend is a retired truck driver who frequently picked up and delivered containers out of the new jersey ports. One story he told me was he had to pick up a 40 footer and was sent in a single axle tractor. They have scales and you weigh out when you leave the port. He scaled out at almost 90,000 pounds (40,823kg)! For a tractor trailer in the USA, that is 10,000 pounds (4,536kg) overweight. The kicker? The container was supposed to weigh only 40,000 pounds, nearly half of what it weighed. He said they were frequently overweight and it wasn't uncommon for containers to be thousands of pounds over what the paperwork listed.
For what its worth, I am replying to myself. I moderated my parent up, then commented on his post as AC so I would not kill his mod. It killed it.
Bromma, which makes the "spreaders" which grab containers at 97 of the top 100 ports, now offers a solution. Their newer spreaders weigh the container as it's being lifted on to or off of the ship. Accuracy is within 1%. The container crane knows where the container is being placed on the ship, so weight and balance information for the whole ship is collected.
It's being installed in Los Angeles now, London next, and can be retrofitted to existing Bromma spreaders. So there's a technical fix to this almost in place.
While taking a look at these pictures I can't help but think...
It's just a little bit broken! It's still good!
It's just a little bit burned! It's still good!
It's just a little bit soaked! It's still good, it's still good!
<watches in silence as the last bits sink>
I wonder if my couch was on that ship :?
Only 'flamers' flame!
i thought people use bow and stern. hmm
btw, 316 meters = 1,036.7 feet long
It looks to me more likely the problem was excessive weight at the bow and stern rather then midships, the effect is called hogging and is a known way to snap a container ship (or oil tanker) in half, both have occured in the past.
Basically the keel (The BIG beam running all the way from bow to stern down the bottom of the hull) can only take so much sheer stress and if the weight distribution does not match the localised boyancy implied by the current displacement you can very easily bend the ship.
If and how it came to be loaded that way will be one of the things on the investigators list.
There is of course software used to look at this stuff but it cannot realistically be run on the dock during a very tight turnaround, so the declared weights are used as the only data available in advance of starting loading. Not only does that mess of linear algebra have to give a fully loaded ship with the centre of mass and moment of inertia in the right regions (Important for stability and handling), it must also ensure that the total cargo mass per linear meter is roughly the same as the boyancy of that meter of wetted hull at all times during the loading.
Further shippers will sometimes pay a premium for say not having a can of high value goods put in a corner on top of a stack where it is somewhat more likely to be lost, and some of those cans may be 'reefers' (Refridgerated containers) requiring both power and ventilation to remove waste heat, the problem swiftly becomes complex, doubly so as the ports stacking order also feeds into this if you want loading to go smoothly.
A nasty accident, but nobody died, and the hull and cargo will have been insured, so a better outcome then is sometimes the case.
Hope that explains why it is not just about total weight.
I can imagine a few other issues:
- load not being consistent from aft to stern
- a rogue wave (though I didn't see any mention of it)
- buoyancy change due to an area of reduced salt density
- a structural defect
There are all sorts of factors and until a complete investigation has been done, we are only dealing with imagined possibilities. In the case of inconclusive evidence, I would imagine proposals for avoiding this in the future would be based on most likely cause?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
You are talking multi million dollar and dozens of lives risks every time that a ship sails with a unbalanced and unknown weight cargo.
So why not weight the ship and check for an unbalance load?
Since it is already setting in water, as long as you know the ship's specifications it would be ridiculously easy weight the entire ship in 5 minutes.
By, for example, paining lines on the hull and measuring the water temp (I assume that the temp of water affects its bouncy).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
...as would any sentient consideration of risk & reward. And not to be that rare doomsayer on /. , but my personal experience with for-profit business leads me to believe it's not always worked out in this fashion. Ferinstance, I'm the guy at my company in charge of coordinating distribution of our products to the WWmarket. My buddy Joe, who sells space on a transport for Wewontcinq Shipping, always lays out for prime ribeyes thick as a 50's pinup girl at Company BBQ's. He's never been perfect with the paperwork, but he's the life of the party. You See, the very best companies make decisions like they're Borg, but most are staffed by beautifully imperfect people.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
fail boat is fail
Couldn't they tell before setting out if it was overloaded by just seeing how low it sat in the water?
SILENCE KINGSLAYER! We do not want to hear your stories of why you do the things you do! We in this kingdom do not condone your actions. To the Wall with you!
That's all the Christmas Sony PS4 to Europe and Mid-East - down into the bottom of the sea.
I posted this to a dead thread but not less relevant:
Remember the Liberty Ships during WW2 -- they failed due to undocumented & mis-understood properties of metals.
I am tired of industry re-learning past mistakes. Liberty Ship Failures are a classic "oh-shit" moment in the learning curve of not using high strength matrials aka brittle aka not damage-tolerant metals thus will fail without warning.
I see the same thing with the Boeing Deathliners er Dreamliners -- lost technological knowledge lost because terminate the experienced staff and offshore the work to 3rd world countries who lack the experience base and lack the standards and proper education.
linkedin.com has many technical lists where people encounter the same "predictable" problems over & over.
In reference to not knowing the weight of the container -- that can be handled very simply by the cranes by adding load cells to the lifting mechanism.
Wake up -- problem is MBA's make decisions that used to be made by engineers. That is the only real cause of the new round of failures.
Technical decisions are now overridden by MBA's who have a cost cutting agenda who recieve bonuses for cutting costs -- they are gone by the time the decision comes home to roost.
Time to smell the coffee.
Two ships collide, one dies.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Although there are requirements in SOLAS (SOLAS Regulation VI/2) for a declaration of the gross weight of the container, there is no requirement for the actual weighing of the container. The sole exception to this actual weighing requirement is for export from the United States. Recently, a broad spectrum of industry organizations and countries, Denmark, The Netherlands, the United States, BIMCO, the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH), the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), and the World Shipping Council (WSC) submitted a formal proposal to the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to require all containers to be weighed in order to determine their actual weight.
What’s the Weight? Why Weighing of Cargo Containers is Critical/
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Building things in cheap factories and using massive vessels to ship the stuff around is the Luddite way. 3D printing is the future, soon we will be able to 3D print anything at home from clothes to computers.
http://www.ovguide.com/tv_episode/gilligans-island-season-1-episode-9-the-big-gold-strike-238257
Bing!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Not a stretch of the imagination at all.
Just look at Steve Baller.
You mean we're not going to blame...Sharknado?
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I really hope there were no stowaways on that ship :( that would be sad.
Ever heard of that?
If all you can lose is what you invested, then if you invest for one year and can make your investment back in profit, then you no longer have a loss invested in that company.
Therefore you don't care any more if the company goes bankrupt: YOU have made your stake.
Meanwhile the smaller people who can't just move their money but have to move their homes to find a new job have to pay for your mistake.
so they operate on an honor system?
One would think they'd weigh the container themselves and charge accordingly. But then I'm not in the shipping business so I dunno...
If that's the case just another prime example of how self regulated business leads to disaster in pursuit of profit..
Yes... because the shipping company doesn't worry at all about overloaded containers or ships at all.
We'll just ignore the massive costs should go something go wrong that they are oblivious to in your world.
When I read the above comments, I cringe.
I cringe because people who wrote the above messages have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA on the shipping business.
All commercial vessels, whether they be big or small, must have at least one master (that's the captain) and one chief officer.
The job of the master is to determine when and where and how the ship should do in any given time.
And among the many jobs of the chief officer, determining how the weight of the cargo on board the vessel is to be optimally distributed (whether on the Starboard side, the Port side, the Aft, the Fore ... )
A ship which has uneven weight of cargo/fuel/ballast water on board can easily sink.
As for that ship which broke into two parts, I do not know what is the actual cause --- but the "undeclared weight of the cargo" is definitely not the chief culprit --- or the ship would have sank sideway, instead of broken in two.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Typical Asian companies. Lie, cheat, steal, build underperforming crap and then cover it up, fake weights, break safety guidelines, all in the name of honor and status and prosperity and profit for themselves and their family. They don't import much from the US and morals certainly isn't on that list. Not one single US company should be surprised that some of their Asian manufactured shipments just sank into the ocean. That is the epitome of Asian company quality standards. If they pulled their head out of their ass for a second, they'd notice that a 30 day wait in their supply chain for their inventory to sail over on a sketchy boat from a country with zero industrial quality standards might not be "cheaper" than a US-sourced product after all.
Spokesman explains what happened when the front fell off
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-QNAwUdHUQ
based on your "triple performance" metric, i suspect your "substantial income", isn't.
Unless your the same guy who borked the original MS SQL installation.
If the headline hadn't specified that the ship sunk, I would have been cast into a tailspin of panic and despair by the notion that a ship could break in half, and then continue to float.
Ships are cool and some of the most advanced machines on the planet (definitely the biggest). News for nerds can be more then Oracle doing a point release, or Patent Lawsuits.