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How does a ship lose power this way?
This is going to end up being declared a preventable accident. My prediction is that money was saved on maintenance and had a catastrophic failure at the wrong time and people died.
Whomever owns this company should be extradited when it all comes out.
Published in General
Or as my son refers to him, “The Honorable Peter Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation.”
Top…..Men! hahaha
What an entendre THAT is!
Ship-bridge collisions are more frequent that you seem to assume. Of course, not all result in a spectacular collapse like this. In the past 55 years 18 bridges in the US have collapsed from ship collisions. One every three years on average. And I note that a similar bridge collapse happened in Tampa in 1980. Read about the Sunshine Skyway collapse. That bridge was a similar design to the FSK bridge.
Similarly with train derailments. They happen pretty much every day. But again, very few result in something like East Palestine, thanks be to G-d.
I leave warehouse and refinery fires as an exercise for the reader.
Some of you city kids may think I’m joking. You’re probably the same people who laughed at Russian accusations that the CIA was helping the Ukrainians spread malarial mosquitoes with drones.
But any kid who has brought a jar of stagnant pond water into the house to see what hatches out under the warm indoor temperatures knows how it goes. Pretty soon you have underwater mosquitos (mosquito larvae) hatching out and hanging upside down from the water surface. You move your hand closer and watch them dive to escape the danger. They soon come back and you repeat. But the larvae get used to it and quickly learn to ignore the false danger signal. You may think they got bored with the game, but what really happened is that you got bored and went away. Next thing you know your mother is asking who let all the mosquitoes into the house. There are several mosquito bites before you get them all eradicated. Mosquitos are sneaky that way. It’s a short step to causing trouble in the engine room.
Mosquito larvae don’t live in flowing, salty water, but that’s where the CIA bioengineering comes in.
I wouldn’t trust him to tie up a skiff.
I think some people are unfamiliar with the vernacular.
Here we go…
Maritime law is it’s own thing. Shipping has run the world the last 400 years and the laws are setup accordingly.
Dad woke me up this morning asking if I had heard about a bridge collapse and the first one I thought about was this one.
Then this one.
The channel on the first one is only 150′ wide. The bridge gets dinged a lot.
You’d have to be a knucklehead to hit the second.
On today’s Three Martini Lunch, Andy McCarthy says something about the span between piers on the Key bridge is something like 3/4 Mile. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But considering that the ship is approaching 1/4 mile long, if there’s any significant drift or turning it doesn’t seem THAT unlikely for a 1/4-mile-long ship to hit something.
Also, since Baltimore is like 63% black, clearly the ship was racist.
This wikipedia page discusses various ways of testing for randomness. I haven’t studied it closely, but I think they rely on a large number of observations.
But this reminds me of yesterday’s YouTube video on the Ushanka Show channel by Sergei “Sputnikoff.” He was showing how people have analyzed the results of Putin’s re-elections to see whether the results from the various polling stations followed a normal distribution, as is the case with most election results. In the case of Putin’s re-elections, the higher the percentage voting for Putin (as time went on) the more the right side of the curve (where the results favored Putin) went “spiky” suggesting (I think) that most of the hanky-panky went on certain polling stations, and with each subsequent election having more and more of it.
Sergei showed comparisons with elections in places like Turkey, which followed a more normal distribution.
He did not use the United States as an example, but one person in the comments jumped in with a snarky statement saying that the weird distributions are how it worked with Sleepy Joe Biden, too. I was kind of curious about that myself, but I don’t care to make statements of fact when all I have is mere suspicion. Anyhow, I saw that Sergei had already replied to the comment, but YouTube wouldn’t let me see the comment. It refused to add my own comment in reply, either. So I made a separate comment saying I would have liked to have seen Sergei’s reply. Sergei asked me who I was talking about. By then the original comment had disappeared.
I’ve been meaning to go back and make sure I understand the methodology. The axes were labelled in Russian, which wasn’t much of a problem, but that probably means that whatever article the graphs were from is in Russian, too, which probably means it’s going to be work to make sure I understand how this was done.
Smells about right.
I thought he was a cross-country skier.
So many of these ships have minimal crews. I mean maybe fewer than five people aboard a ship of this humongous size. On top of that, these employees are stuck out at sea with little to do for months and months.
Again with only the same few people to interact with. I think that such conditions would make most people stir crazy.
You simply are not going to find decently educated people of any ethnicity who would submit to working under these conditions especially given that the wages are so low.
Interesting stuff. My point to the original commenter is that these events are not rare, not even a bridge collapsing after being hit by a ship. I believe he used “random” as a shorthand for events that are accidents/don’t have a nefarious origin.
I believe this ship had a crew of 29. Not that few (IIRC the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, one of the largest boats on the Lakes, had a crew of 29). Not like an aircraft carrier, but still not that small.
What are the wages for an Able Seaman these days?
There was one boat-bridge collision that may not have been an accident, depending on who you talk to. The Rock Island bridge was the first railroad bridge built across the Mississippi (in the 1850s). Steamboat companies operating on the Mississippi had reason to be afraid of the competition and were not in favor. They called it a hazard to navigation. When a steamboat ran into it, damaging the bridge and causing the boat to burn up, they sued the railroad company that built the bridge. A railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln gathered data on river currents, etc., making the case that it was not a navigation hazard. The court case ended in a hung jury, and the bridge was allowed to stand.
I think NBC said the wind caught it and turned the ship after it lost power. Wind conditions seemed almost placid if you look at the video I shared earlier. The water isn’t showing any gust and just a light breeze. That could be enough to have a small effect, but it would need more than a minute of power loss.
I think the pilot (reportedly, two pilots were consulting on the bridge, but they were not at the helm) or captain was taking the channel at an angle and hadn’t completed the turn to go through. He might be hot-dogging it (not following exact procedure) just a bit because there is no port traffic, then the unthinkable happens.
Controlling a single-prop (screw) vessel is all about mass and inertia. Unlike a ski boat, the prop doesn’t turn so you need propulsion power to do it. If you’ve ever tried to steer a paddle boat without paddling, then you know the problem. The rudder is near useless without that paddle propulsion.
There was a trend for a while in outfitting ships with thrusters (starboard and port propellers for better controlled movement in port). I’m not sure I’ve seen them on ships of this size. At any rate, the Dali doesn’t have them and I’m not sure they would have been enough. It’s an expensive add on.
A tug escort might have been able to help the turn and might have also trimmed enough momentum that the ship could have avoided the pylon once the propulsion came back. We’ll never know. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
It just feels like that is just not good enough.
A lot of American ships sail under foreign flags these days. I don’t know if labor costs are part of the reason for that.
Boeing’s panel fell off totally because of cost cutting measures.
I am not saying companies should not make profits. I am saying that when they cause people to die because they cut costs to make more money, that is a problem.
Or do all the people defending companies think if people die, that’s OK?
I saw a post showing $1500/month for crew and $10K/month for captain.
Totally, and 100% not what I am saying.
zero lives lost? zero risk? The world cannot be Nerf’d to that extent.
Did not ask for that either.
Do you think it is acceptable for a company to mess up and people die?
Totally? Are you sure you haven’t been listening to the sensationalist news media? Here’s a WSJ article by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. It’s kinda vague, which isn’t a good sign, but maybe that’s all we have now.
Understanding the Boeing Mess : An overlooked NTSB report and why the two 737 MAX crashes were different.
Kudos to the local LEOs. There are reports from WJZ in Baltimore that the pilot radioed in about the loss of power and the possibility of hitting the bridge and within two minutes traffic had been blocked at both ends. It seems the last of the traffic on the bridge cleared just before the collapse.