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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!
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?
This was not an accident, It was Kaiju. I just saw this happen at the movies. Cover up!
@Valentinial
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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
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?
Aiming at a stationary fishing boat near Sydney, Australia.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
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.
Apparently there were no Bitcoin or Raspberry Pi stories to post.
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.
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
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?
"Along with 7000 containers, ship MOL Comfort broke in half..." How did all 7000 containers happen to break in half?
We can, wasn't this story first covered back in JUNE 29?
From The Cuckoo's Egg fame? Remember reading the paperback years ago. Will have to pull it out and read it again.
You mean figure out how much fuel was added to a ship that you just refueled in your harbor? You already have that information.
Still trivial.
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.
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.
I wonder if my couch was on that ship :?
Only 'flamers' flame!
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.
Just because this is a 1/4 of a billion dollar loss for the company that own it, that does not means that fishing hundreds of tons of salty, stained, sweaters off the bottom of the ocean is economical in the least.
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
No, you know what you paid for when you refueled. And with near certainty that you took less than that on board.
Working for a major shipping line, installing flow meters on the intake valves showed "systematic measure errors" that all of a sudden were surprisingly easy to fix by the vendor.
Keep in mind that refueling a deep ocean vessel is not the same as getting 10 gallons at your local BP station. This is stuff that has the consistency of peanut butter and needs to be heated to flow in the first place; measuring how much fuel you have or took on board is not as trivial as it seems.
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.
Are taxes paid on weight? Cargo is generally charged by volume.
Bear in mind, that ship was overloaded enough to break it in half. Even assuming the measurement is imprecise and allowing for a generous amount of leeway, the ship was almost certainly loaded way past its weight limit. The measurements don't have to be particularly exact to catch this kind of thing. In fact, realistically, they shouldn't even need an initial measurement. How far the ship sits into the water when it's completely empty is a known quantity. Just measure the difference from that and you get the weight of the cargo and fuel, then subtract the weight of a full tank assuming the fuel is at its most dense. If it's still way over the maximum capacity, then you have a problem.
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!
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
If Clifford Stoll sends you an article, you print it.
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.
True, but like the AC I was wondering about the economics of salvage, which historically has been a viable industry. Is the manifest available for analysis? And how much salvage makes it into the Dollar Store and seconds market worldwide? how much of it is more damaged by salt water than is immediately visible?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?