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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...
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!
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.
oddly enough there are special rules around this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_salvage
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
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?
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.
Some float, some sink. 10000 are lost during normal shipping every year. The ones that float tend to float a few feet under the top of the ocean. Making them extremely hazardous for other marine traffic.
For years they have been trying to get all shipping and container companies to equip the containers with a kind of water permeable valve, but I think last time i read about it there was some resistance. Can't find any good articles about it though. Comes up every few years.
http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2011/04/19/deep-cargo-an-ocean-of-lost-shipping-containers/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization#Loss_at_sea
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/04/06/0158207/10000-shipping-containers-lost-at-sea-each-year
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
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.
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.
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.