Cruise Ship Grounding

[Billie Bonce]

You want to talk dangerous stability in a mishap, RO-RO's are the worst. Flood the vehicle deck with a couple inches of water, and you have a giant rolling log.

Oh yeah. MS Estonia, 1994. Should have been a reminder to everybody, but memories tend to be too short. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Estonia

[kham]

ECDIS Video and some narration over at gCaptain. Usual disclaimers awaiting final analysis. My own disclaimer: the narrator sounds technically capable, but couple things. He doesn't seem to know how to operate an ECDIS display fluently, a couple spots he lost the plot. Further, his "he should anchor here" line is flat-out stupid. For one thing, it's too deep to anchor easily. And even if you could, congrats, you have a nice spot to SINK. If that was the case, that's where the carcass would be, several hundred metres down. Odds are you would be looking at a hell of a lot more casualties, since it wouldn't be right off the coast. Plus the panic factor x100 , since now this beast is going to roll over and go to the bottom. You can fill in the rest yourself for that scenario. It does look now that it really was just dumb luck (these survivors I advise to all buy lotto tickets) since it wasn't a beaching try per se; she lost propulsion completely, and only the current and some bowthruster action got them drifting into the final position. Oh, and she hit those rocks steaming in excess of 15 knots; there's the bang they heard -- caving in half the hull would make a hell of a bang...

Yeah Billy, It's hard to believe that was almost 18 years ago. Nasty stuff that one

[Mynock]

I was kind of assuming it wasn't going slow, considering it hit the rocks hard enough to actually embedd one in the hull. I'm still utterly amazed by the picture of that house sized boulder stickng out of the end of that gash.

[kham]

Bridge collapse after ship collision

It's been a bad month for Lloyds....

[Duncan Edwards]

Bridge collapse after ship collision

It's been a bad month for Lloyds....

I've crossed this bridge before and it's getting some coverage locally. The Delta Mariner carries rockets from the Boeing Delta plant near Decatur, Alabama up the Tennessee river to the Ohio, down the Mississippi, into the Gulf and over to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The bridge was overdue for replacement and work had already begun on site prep for the new one. Looks like they will have to speed the work up a bit.

[Sydney]

"Speed up" is an understatement. However, one can be practically guaranteed that the freighter line - or at least their insurance - will have to pay for at least the cost overruns resulting from having to speed up the replacement of the bridge.

[kham]

Bump from the depths, over at gCaptain, raw video someone shot in the wheelhouse mixed with some externals while the incident was well in progress (after the impact mind you). Analysis to follow he says, but my own is basically too many in the wheelhouse talking and a lot of not keeping the head thing going on.
I look forward to reading the final report in a year or two , it should be worth a good laugh

[Mynock]

Just proves the point that stupidity will always be one step ahead of technology. State of the art, 100+ ton cruise ship with all the bells and whistles, practically unsinkable, and the moron driving it tries to put it into a 4 wheel drift it like some ricer Honda civic and bounces it off a cliff...... It'd be funny if people hadn't died.