Youtube tracking analysis from a knowledgeable mariner.
He says that at about 1:24 AM the ship loses power (from video feed) while traveling 8.5 knots.
at 1:25.30 power is restored.
at 12:25.59 the ship shows smoke. The ship has already drifted in the channel. It is believed that at this time the ship applied full reverse power as evidenced by the black smoke. (My analysis: the ship drifted but hasn't turned in the channel, more of a translation)
By 1:26.45 the ship has obviously turned in the channel pointing at the pier. Full reverse would cause prop walk to change heading angle;
1:28.52 impact at 7.6 Knots. Camera says 1:28.52, AIS reports the ship still moving at 1:29:35
Current personal suspicion after watching your linked video (excellent discussion by the wgowshipping author) is:
Catastrophic engine failure (1:24) causing wide scale power loss.
No rudder control, rudder drift, and ship alignment drift (1:24-1:25:30)
Power restored and ship reengages prop with bad ship/ruddder alignment (1:25). However, ship is now pushing itself into a further bad turn. Pilot likely stomps the brakes realizing misalignment. Obviously 2-3 minutes is not enough to stop 100,000 tons at 8.5 kts, since it only got to 7.5 kts before crashing. Power loss may have caused total rudder loss.
Similar to a car that hits ice, wheels have arbitrary alignment when they reengage road, when power starts being delivered again, car swerves towards concrete barrier even with brakes. Driver with limited crash experience is mostly just panicking and stomping.
How many pilots, trained or not, really have any experience with a 100,000 ton ship in a crash situation with responses where seconds matter?
Edit: Also, economic disaster for Baltimore.
> (Wiki) The Port of Baltimore generates $3 billion in annual wages and salary, as well as supporting 14,630 direct jobs and 108,000 jobs connected to port work. In 2014, the port generated more than $300 million in taxes. 1st in automobiles, light trucks, farm and construction machinery, imported forest products, aluminum, and sugar. 2nd in coal exports.
3,600 commercial trucks / day. Hazardous material transport has a 30 mile detour. Baltimore had $350 million of insurance. However, Brent Spence Bridge is noted for cost comparison at $3.6 billion and 1/5 the length.
On ships like this the propulsion is separate from the steering. There is a separate rudder that is close to, but not attached to the prop and propshaft. The propshaft is fixed. The rudder doesn't just "restart in a random position" it would remain in the previous position unless there was a physical piece that broke in the rudder gear.
The fact that ship was able to reverse hard ( as evidenced by the slowdown), indicates to me that the prop was most likely still attached to the propshaft and hadn't flown off to mangle the rudder.
We still don't know exactly what happened on board, but it is interesting to work through possible scenarios.
Pilots certainly have experience with ship handling of 100,000 ton ships, that's their job. Pilots coordinate the moves of multiple tugs to assist with docking regularly.
At this point in the journey, they were cleared of the docks but not the channel. There wouldn't be a docking pilot on board nor would there be any tugs. It was cleared and under it's own propulsion until it wasn't.
My sailors guess from the footage and the reports is diesel generator failure(s) resulting in loss of power, restoration of power, then loss of power again. Bypassing the diesel generator (which provides power to hydraulics too) and manually throwing the engines in reverse. The billow of black smoke. This could have possibly burned out an engine, blowing the camshaft or propshaft or transmission.
The reverse was too late as the ship was already heading for the bridge pylon. Even at full reverse, you couldn't slow it down fast enough. Tragic.
Well then there were two pilots aboard to see it into the Chesapeake…
Still, a diesel gen malfunction would render them useless unless one of them was a diesel mechanic as well (we sailors often have multiple credentials).
Usually tugboats attend whenever a large container ship enters or exits a busy port, and the tugboats have directional thrusters. Port authorities prefer it that way because it gives them more control (since the tugboats tend to stay in the port).
any idea why tugboats weren't standard issue going out of the port considering the potential damage economic and social of accidentally destroying this critical bridge for Baltimore?
Tugs were involved in helping the ship leave, but they were released before the accidently.
The release was the decision of the pilot, who remaining in charge of the ship till the accident. If pilots are too liberal in their use of tugs, the ship owner becomes unhappy (because the ship owner ends up paying for them), and if they become unhappy enough, will stop using the port. I.e., pilots are under some pressure to keep the use of tugs to a minimum.
Note that it is probably the pilot who advised authorities to stop cars from entering the bridge minutes before the accident, which is why the only deaths were a team of 6 construction workers working on the bridge.
I am surprised that they were able to get the bridge closed in just a minute or two. Unless there is a standing action plan for this (there may be) that seems like a really fast response. Possibly there are gates/stop lights that can be activated remotely?
Apparently not: the MDoT dispatcher: "I need one of you guys on the south side, one of you guys on the north side. Hold all traffic on the Key Bridge."
All pilots are "harbor pilots". Crew members who control the ship outside of port are just called crew members (captain, first mate, 2nd Officer, that kind of thing), never pilot.
In California, at least, that's not strictly true. They get paid quite handsomely ($400–500k as of a decade ago) to avoid hitting stuff in specific waterways around the Bay Area.
There used to be two really tall redwoods in the beast bay that were used as Navigation Trees to avoid a submerged rock in SF bay, that later had to be blown up after the trees were felled.
I put in the quotes because the person asking the question picked the exact phrasing, which as we both pointed out isn't correct. They're just pilots. The normal crew driving the boat are crew, not pilots.
I don't think that's true. The Suez Canal famously requires pilots, but isn't a harbour (I guess you could argue it functions as one). I've heard of pilots for the Great Barrier Reef which is even more not a harbour.
I don’t know Japanese and havent studied this so hopefully someone can correct me as well. But I dont think it would be right to translate this to the modern meaning of a ship pilot. It more loosely translated to “navigator”.
There are some seemingly good details here[0].
> In Early Modern Japanese there was a word 按針 anjin, literally “searching needle,” which referred to the process of using a compass. At the time, this was the main way in which ships were navigated and so, by extension, the word was applied not just to ship navigation, but also to ship navigators
It goes into more detail about things as well but that is the part that stuck out to me the most.
Apparently for you at the moment, any mention of a product on the market is a flag for a marketing AI. I suppose this comment too is just what a marketing AI would say.
The incident has some similarities ti the Cosco-Busan. It hit the base of the bridge piers and bounced off. The bridge wasn’t damaged.
That one was due to pilot error. The point is the pilot was still onboard but he was impaired by medication, the captain and mates kind of engaged in dereliction of duties contributing to the accident.
Obviously it’ll be a while before we know what happened in Baltimore.
It's very typical for pilots to be required for all entrance and egress from harbors, much more than the initial pushaway and turning but for quite a long distance through the channel.
Pilots always, for most harbours - they are extremely well versed on local tides and currents and essential for many river mouths and locations with large tidal swings.
Tugs - quite often, but not always - depends on the currents, ship weight, and time of day.
Depends on the navigational requirements. Indirect towing using tugs as an extended rudder are sometimes used. Although I think it is more common in Europe which has a more modern tug fleet.
on a large vessel, I thought that the captain does not steer the vessel, just gives commands to the helmsman, and same with the pilot. So, in a certain sense, they don't have the direct skills that the helmsman does. And speed/power/direction are indirect through the engine room; it's not a like a little motorboat, all controlled in one place by one guy.
I'm not sure what configuration of props a ship like this has, but in my experience with a 40ft sailboat with a single propeller you have absolutely no rudder authority while reversing. I've read that some large ships also are direct drive--there's no transmission between the engine and the propeller, so "reversing" (if it's even possible) entails shutting down the engine and restarting it in reverse. This can be done with a two stroke engine. And yes, 8.5kt is not slow when you're displacing 100k tons, no correction will happen quickly.
>entails shutting down the engine and restarting it in reverse. This can be done with a two stroke engine.
Funny, I was starting a 2 stroke chainsaw a couple of years ago. I yanked the cord, it kicked back, pulling my arm back down but the saw started up and ran anyway. But it would not cut at all. I killed it and restarted it and noticed the chain going the other (right) way and it was now cutting fine. It has started in reverse the first time!
This is actually common for a 2 stroke type engine and used in things like gas golf carts and snow machines. The direction the engine is started is the direction it runs.
So to accomplish this for propulsion, you'd add a reverse polarity switch for your starter and you're good to go.
Yeah, in theory, there's not a lot about an engines running direction that matters, its all the stuff that's hooked up to it.
As you start getting into more complex engines, where you have fuel injection, timed spark plugs, oil pumps, transmissions it becomes untenable, but not because a v6 can't run backwards but because you'd have to rebuild and time all the support systems.
A low speed marine diesel like you'll find in a large container ship is not your granddaddy's 6V71. They are complicated, yet simple. They are indeed direct drive (possibly through a reduction gear) and they do indeed operate both in forward and in reverse. See e.g. [1].
Yes, defiantly not saying that's not how these work, and I do know that large boats tend to be direct drive. I'm just pointing out that most engines could do this and the limitation is generally how it interfaces with the external components and not as much a function of internal combustion type engines.
For example, a transmission would expect the engine to always run in the same direction, but given correct fuel and ignition timings, it doesn't really matter which way the crankshaft is turning while things are running.
I accidentally installed an injector pump 180° out of time on a MB OM617 and it "ran" kinda.. with a massive white smoke screen. I was shocked it even started.
> my experience with a 40ft sailboat with a single propeller you have absolutely no rudder authority while reversing.
I have to protest here. Reversing and using the rudder on a 40ft boat works perfectly fine. I've done it on multiple sailing boats. You need to hold tight so that the rudder wont slap you if using a stick.
>I have to protest here. Reversing and using the rudder on a 40ft boat works perfectly fine. I've done it on multiple sailing boats. You need to hold tight so that the rudder wont slap you if using a stick.
this is a stupid argument from all users , comparing a 40ft sailboat to other 40ft sailboats is like making a broad assumption about cars when comparing a dragster to an SUV simply because they have a similar singular aspect.
ANY sailboat, regardless of size, can have poor reversing performance just simply due to its hull shape and rudder plan. Some boats famously cannot reverse with authority due to the turbulence created between the parts. Some boats use feathering propellers which collapse inwards when reverse is applied in order to make a more efficient sailing experience, which effectively makes propulsion reversing useless.
There is NO generalized '40 foot sailboat' in existence. They all act different, and there are some that are perfectly capable of doing what other 40 foot plans might consider IMPOSSIBLE.
If you have enough way on to combat the prop walk, yes. But in a situation like backing down trying to come to a stop (at least in my boat, a 1962 Block Island 40) there's a very long "dead time" while transitioning from slowly moving forward to slowly moving in reverse where the rudder just doesn't do anything. The way I maneuver in these situations is to do all my heading corrections in forward gear, where prop wash over the rudder gives it authority. So it's a game of shots of reverse, corrections, rinse, repeat.
EDIT: also planning ahead is important, because if I do it right the prop walk in reverse can be used advantageously.
Also, with the BI-40's barn door rudder it'll slap you through the wheel if you're not careful. Almost broke my leg that way, not a lesson to forget.
Nice boat! Ye it does not look too nimble in harbours. Somewhere over 40ft with "light" boats is where I feel you get into the "you got one chance" harbour manouvers (unless there is some front sideways motor cheating).
It happens something that I really can't explain, but I guess it is weight related. Or maybe area. Dunno.
Yeah it's right around 20000lb displacement, so momentum is a real thing ;). The fiberglass is over 2" thick at the keel tapering to a mere 1" at the hull to deck joint. Decks are solid glass as well. At the time it was a newfangled material and they were scared of it so they used a lot.
Also, the bow seems to catch the wind really hard so you can get spun around if it's blowing and you head off the wind too much without enough way on. Leave room, plan ahead, have a backup plan, etc.
Isn’t there a pretty big difference in how much rudder authority you get between just making way astern, and having the engine in full reverse while still traveling forwards at seven knots?
The rudder is a wing, it's just vertically oriented and underwater.
The rudder is capable of stalling, just like any wing. The rudder only produces lift related to the flow of water over the rudder. The lift produced by the rudder is what is experienced as turning force. The tiller or wheel changes the angle of attack.
I used to helm a racing sailboat with a high aspect (long & narrow) rudder. It could provide a lot of turning force but stalled easily. It didn't work as well under power as it did under sail; I suspect this was due to the turbulent flow off of the propeller, which was forward of the rudder.
On the Dali, the rudder should have been providing some turning force due to the 7+ knot flow of water over the rudder. Full reverse propeller might have impacted that; I can't comment because I've never helmed a ship that large.
Additionally, a single-propeller vessel like the Dali, will have "prop walk" - asymmetric thrust that pushes the stern of the craft one way or the other while the propeller is rotating.
I'm only a minimally experienced (coastal cruising) sailor so there's plenty of things I don't know, but this is the first time I've heard the rudder as a wing (lifting surface) rather than as a neutral control surface.
It sort of makes high-level sense that a lifting bias could in theory work as a counteraction to propwalk. But the terminology is a bit confusing because aerodynamic lift is a byproduct of air being a compressible medium, whereas water is not. Maybe lift means something different when we're talking about water?
At any rate in scenarios where the prop is not engaged, which in a sailboat is most of them, I don't think I've ever noticed a tendency for heading to track predominantly one way or the other, in circumstances where it seems that would be very pronounced and hard to miss, like extended running downwind. Is the lifting body rudder mainly a performance boat thing? Or perhaps am I just so used to trimming this bias out that I don't recognize where it's coming from?
To your last point - sailboats move in response to the sum of the forces on them. Most sloops are designed to make it easy to balance the forces of the jib and the main, so that the center of effort is near the center of mass. If the sails are trimmed in this fashion you need very little rudder input - in fact it is easy to steer the sailboat with just the sails, if they are well trimmed.t If you let the jib a little out of trim, the force it imparts on the boat will decrease, and since the force on the main is constant, you’ll turn to windward. Likewise you can ease the main to turn to leeward if the sails are balanced and the rudder neutral. Handy trick if your rudder gets damaged.
An interesting note is that well-designed sailboats are designed to round up in the case where the headsail gets overpowered. As the sail gets overpowered, the boat will naturally try to turn away from the wind and also will heel further. The heeling of the boat will cause the headsail to lose lift and spill air before the main sail does, and the keel, which normally generates lift and drag to counter sideslip, combined with the now-more-powered mainsail, Generate a strong leeward yawing force aft of the center of mass which causes the boat to turn sharply into the wind. Rounding up only happens when you are losing control of the boat so turning into the wind ends up putting you in a safe mode where you can recover. There are a few boats out there where the keel is too far forward and/or the main spills air before the headsail; these boats round down in uncontrolled situations and can jibe unexpectedly – very dangerous.
For laypeople and casual sailors, thinking of the rudder as just redirecting water is good enough.
But water and air are both fluids and the same aerodynamic/hydrodynamic rules apply.
A rudder on a boat or airplane is symmetrical in cross section; the chord on both sides is equal. Wings and hydrofoils are asymmetrical; usually the “top” has a deeper chord than the “bottom”. But rudders are a still a kind of wing in that they generate a useful force by redirecting a fluid and thereby inducing a pressure differential. The pressure differential between the two sides is what causes lift - vertically with wings/foils and horizontally with rudders. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense – it would be silly to think that rudders and ailerons and elevators obey different laws than wings. In fact, one of the first things you learn as a racing sailor is that the sails themselves are wings - they’re not “parachutes” as commonly believed.
Anyway, my point was that you can stall a rudder just like an airplane can stall its wings- if the angle of attack is too high.
Stalling, the rudder, most commonly occurs during a round up, if you’re familiar with sailing with spinnakers. The rudder in that case is no longer able to generate enough lift (turning force) To counter the turning force, imparted by the force on the spinnaker forward of the center of mass of the boat, and the boat turns uncontrollably.
I am just speculating, but if the rudder became very misaligned compared to the direction of the ship, then when power was restored, the rudder might not be able to establish laminar flow and therefore would be stalled and unable to provide turning force.
> But the terminology is a bit confusing because aerodynamic lift is a byproduct of air being a compressible medium, whereas water is not. Maybe lift means something different when we're talking about water?
Works just the same underwater. (Inviscid, incompressible). Low Mach number means compressibility is not significant. High Reynolds number means viscosity is not significant. Same for other dimensionless numbers and physical phenomena (Froude number etc).
Though note: compressibility is not the same as "exerting pressure". A hydrofoil or marine propeller works on pressure differences, even though the fluid is effectively incompressible.
Titanic was a “triple screw steamer,” meaning it had three propellers - port, center and starboard. The port and starboard propellers were capable of being reversed, while the center propeller could only propel forward. You can see this in the 1997 movie as they show the props when they throw the ship into reverse.
The center prop (that only goes forward) is the one directly behind the rudder, so the theory is partly that they lost some steering advantage when they lost the center prop.
> in my experience with a 40ft sailboat with a single propeller you have absolutely no rudder authority while reversing.
In general it depends on the rudders and the boat.
Longer keeled boats don't respond well in reverse at all but more modern boats (like mine, 1990) will do better but will still need some way to have steerage. I can certainly manouver around the marina in reverse, it's just harder than forwards and I need to be going a bit faster to get the control.
Going backwards in the marina I often steer on the engine rather than the rudder (though I keep the rudder aligned with the engine of course). Obviously that's in a tiny sailing boat with an external engine, but I thought large ships also often have a steerable front propeller to assist with steering and mooring. Although maybe these very large ships use tugboats for that.
My boat has an inboard diesel so no ability to direct the prop. It does have a bow thruster, but it's only really used at slow speed, usually right at the point of docking and undocking in tight spaces, once you get the boat moving in forward or reverse you don't need it.
I have no idea about container ship sized boats, though I'd imagine a bow thruster of steerable prop might not be practical at that scale.
All I really know about long keels is from what people have said. They tend to track well and don't tend to make as much leeway, but perhaps at the expense of speed due to the wetted area, and they are hard to steer backwards. Not being particularly manouverable forwards isn't really an issue if you're spending several hours going mostly in a straight line.
Modern flat boats (like the 2017 Dufour I learned on) are highly manouverable at slow speed, we practiced spinning the boat on the spot by using prop wash over the rudder forwards then ticking over in reverse. Could turn the boat in not much more space than the boat length, but may not track as well, may slam more, and make more leeway.
Since they were still moving forward while gunning it in reverse the rudder would still operate normally. They generally have bow thrusters too. I have no idea whether they could have been operational with the broader power/engine failures but if they were available I'm sure they were being used as well.
The question is what is the velocity of the water moving over the rudder? If forward velocity and the current due to a reversing prop cancel, then the rudder can't do anything.
I docked in reverse multiple times, same as parking a car in reverse. Just need water flowing along the rudder (from motion, not prop wash), but otherwise it's a great way to turn into tight spaces. Gotta be careful about prop walk, which will dominate the controllability until some reverse speed is established. So until you've decelerated to 0 and re-accelerated in reverse, you don't have much control beyond prop walk.
> How many pilots, trained or not, really have any experience with a 100,000 ton ship in a crash situation with responses where seconds matter?
I would expect anyone piloting such a ship in a harbor/under bridges. We requite airline pilots to train for many unlikely plane failures because the alternative is letting planes crash that we could have saved with better training.
You can train for it, then how many years into your career you actually experience such a scenario are you likely to act instinctually and recover. The best solution would be to improve autopilot assist as it will never forget how to correct (if possible).
I’ve done some sailing but have no real authority when it comes to vessels like these.
Friends of mine are pilots on the Thames (London) and I seem to recall one of them telling me it was over 10 years training before you could bring a big boat in. Pretty fascinating really - they figure out all the tides and weather and plan the route. On the day they board along with a sensor system that sits in the bridge and gives the position to a high level of accuracy.
If it’s anything like airline pilot training, there’s periodic retraining and evaluation to make sure pilots have the right reactions in case of an emergency.
Part of the emergency reponse they are drilled with in simulators are "memory items" that are literally memorized responses to emergencies, i.e. "reverse engines, drop anchor" this is to prevent freezing or indecision. Of course I guess that can still happen but they are trained to the point where it should be automatic.
You'd have to be either a complete headass fresh out of a coding bootcamp or carting around The Agenda That Ate Calcutta to fall for that line of bullshit. Anyone who's spent the wrong parts of their week debugging ought to intuitively grasp that machines are inherently error-prone.
> How many pilots, trained or not, really have any experience with a 100,000 ton ship in a crash situation with responses where seconds matter?
The crew would have know for several minutes that the collision was imminent. These things happen slowly, it wasn't like the bridge suddenly jumped out of the water unexpectedly in front of them. The tragedy is that the crew had no options to avoid the disaster.
This seems like a system architecture error. Boats do weird shit sometimes and so bridges need to be deigned to not fall down when a boat crashes into them. Requiring a huge boat to be steered to meter resolution when clearly that's not always going to happen is top shelf stupidity. Up there with backup generators in the basement below the water table.
My civ engineer friend says that bridges are supposed to have barriers in front of their pylons for this particular reason - in the event of a collision, the barrier would be destroyed but not the pylon.
I can’t find any bridges which have a barrier that can protect against a fully loaded container ship. I have seen plenty of barriers which would protect against personal watercraft and smaller working ships like smaller tugs/coast guard ships/shrimping boats, etc.
But a loaded container ship at 8 knots is not going to be stopped by anything remotely feasible.
Container ships weigh between 50,000 and 220,000 tons. A US aircraft carrier weighs 100,000 tons.
They do. I would think that that bridge certainly did as well, it’s part of a busy port. It’s not exactly hard to imagine it happening.
My guess, and it is a total guess, is that the protection on the bridge was nowhere near sufficient for a ship of that tonnage.
I’m assuming it was built to whatever the correct standard was when constructed in the 70s. I’m also assuming the ship weighed far more, or perhaps traveled noticeably faster, than the cargo ships going into the port back then.
Basically I’m guessing it needed an upgrade in its protective barriers but it wasn’t recognized or hadn’t happed if it was.
Some bridges have fenders, my understanding is that with existing brudges whether they can be retrofitted, even if resources exists, depends on the channel and the kind of traffic it needs to handle, because they take up soace that can be nontrivial in a tight channel.
I’ve see pictures of the barriers before the accident and they were there, but they looked like they were tailored to 70s era ships not the container laden ships of today
> How many pilots, trained or not, really have any experience with a 100,000 ton ship in a crash situation with responses where seconds matter?
I think you are missing the point.
Clearly I am speculating, but I don't think any more experience would have helped in this event.
Why ? I think what happened today was almost entirely down to not being able to fight the basic Laws of Physics.
Its a well known fact that enormous ships take an equally enormous amount of time and distance to reflect the actions of the captain. You make an input and you see the result a bunch of time and distance later.
Time and distance were, sadly, not on the captain's side today. Physics took care of the rest.
To continue the speculation ... as a ship that size is slow to turn or halt, that seems to suggest that even if the ship hadn't suffered a power failure then it would have passed quite close to the bridge pier anyway. Was that expected?
Yes, it was expected. Ports have "channels", essentially traffic lanes. Until the first power failure, the Dali was in the proper lane and would not have collided with anything if she had remained there.
I've driven a number of vessels, ranging from a 17' dinghy to a nuclear aircraft carrier and have a number of friends who have been involved in accidents one way or another. I have personally not had the conn during disaster, but have been an engineering officer and a legal officer responding to them, on my ship. To be honest, steering a ship under most conditions is not hard. The anxiety-provoking issues are 1) poor bridge team management (aka toxic leadership) and 2) engineering disasters, which this appears to be.
This
> Similar to a car that hits ice, wheels have arbitrary alignment when they reengage road, when power starts being delivered again, car swerves towards concrete barrier even with brakes. Driver with limited crash experience is mostly just panicking and stomping.
is almost certainly not the case on a large ship. The rudder is rotated hydraulically. Loss of power simply causes the rudder to stop moving, it's effectively "stuck". Some ships have manual override using a massive wrench, but it takes hours to move the rudder meaningfully in that situation.
As for this:
> How many pilots, trained or not, really have any experience with a 100,000 ton ship in a crash situation with responses where seconds matter?
Probably way more than you think. This is a significant reason why they seem so calm when they show up on the bridge. They just hopped from a relatively tiny pilot boat or tug onto a massive ship, possibly with significant sea state. This can be some Indiana Jones level crazy.
Pilots are very seasoned mariners who have seen multiple losses of power, and pretty much everything.
Now, back to point 1: bridge team. I have seen a captain the crew trusts execute flawless maneuvers even in exigent circumstances. I have seen a captain the same crew doesn't trust fail repeatedly at everyday things.
We don't have the whole story yet. What happened on the bridge? What happened in the plant? Why did power drop? Did they flood an online generator with diesel oil? I ask because I've seen that happen. Did they blow an exhaust manifold? Seen that. Did they trip the plant by getting preparatory checklist work backward? Seen that. Did they go all back full immediately? Possible that they couldn't ring the order if they dropped power. Was there panic on the bridge (bad sign) or was there grim fortitude to process checklists that would never help (better sign). In any case, no doubt the captain is done. Probably happy to never drive a ship again after that, tbh.
Since you have experience in boats of this magnitude, did it make sense not to have tugs minding the ship until it passes under the bridge since it's pretty obvious through common sense what the alternative is when there is a catastrophic engine failure? Would tugs even help if they'd been around during a catastrophic failure of the boat engine(s) making my question a stupid, ignorant one?
I don't know the rules for the Port of Baltimore, but tugs aren't generally required for channel transit. It's the berthing where tugs are generally used: the ship needs lateral thrust to lay alongside a pier or quay wall. Some ships have bow thrusters or APUs but a ship this size would definitely have tugs for the mooring.
Quite amazing videos. I've no experience in this domain and so it makes me immediately wonder - is there no risk of substantial damage from those ships colliding due to a wave hitting e.g. the smaller ship just right and pushing it hard against the larger one?
I am not an expert, but clearly pilot boats must be built to take a lot of punishment. And they don’t have the mass to damage the big ship beyond the paint layer.
I agree that it seems that must be the case. I'm just curious where my assumptions break down - whether I'm overestimating the mass of the pilot boat, overestimating the force a single perfect wave can impose, or underestimating the thickness of these ships' hulls.
I've just always be impressed by the amount of energy that boats impart when they collide with anything. Like in this case, the entire bridge was brought down by a collision at under 8knots. Obviously that ship had orders of magnitude greater mass than the little pilot boat, but presumably you want to avoid even dinging up the larger ship, and so that's an orders of magnitude smaller goal as well.
Well, here’s a story to give you an idea. In November 2018, a frigate collided with an oil tanker on the Norwegian coast. It was only a glancing collision, involving the starboard side of the frigate and the bow of the tanker. The frigate was severely damaged, basically having much of the starboard side ripped open, and it eventually sank. You could hardly see any damage to the tanker. (Luckily, or perhaps miraculously, no one was killed or seriously injured.)
Back to the pilot boat: Steering one in heavy seas when trying to deliver or recover a pilot is clearly a difficult art. But at least in the videos shown, there doesn’t seem to be much of an impact between the vessels. I am sure that is in part due to the skill of the steersman. Besides, I am sure the pilot boat will have permanently mounted fenders all around.
Admittedly very naive question: would they have an anchor? Would it be long enough to hit the channel bed? Could dropping it have helped prevent, or at least slow down, the ship?
Or even if so was it just too late when it all went down and it wouldn’t have made a meaningful difference?
Given the forces involved, dropping anchor probably would probably massively damage the ship without sufficiently arresting its momentum, and add another uncontrollable variable into its trajectory.
The video linked above shows that the vessel had dropped anchor. However, anchors aren't very effective at that speed. They will just drag on the bottom or the chain will snap. There's just too much momentum.
I hope the next POTUS makes good on Biden's promises because Baltimore and Maryland will need federal assistance since they can't afford such a burden.
And I assume there will lawsuits to recover costs as this caused economic damage and risk to life (8 people unaccounted for at current time).
I'm kind of confused how a President can promise something like that. He doesn't have any power to appropriate money, and given his party's lack of control of Congress, I'd argue he can't promise anything.
Not to mention that one can scarcely find a "bluer" area than Baltimore -- I would assume that the most proudly right-wing politicians would be more than happy to let Baltimore suffer to score points with their polarized supporters. I hope it doesn't come to that, but they tried to block Hurricane Sandy relief, despite every hurricane in the South being an automatic 'non-partisan' emergency.
> It's my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge and I expect the Congress to support my effort
This is what he said. I would expect Congress to play along too -- just how unpopular would it be to abandon Baltimore??
It doesn’t, I agree. Just pointing out that whenever Baltimore figures out Democrats have been fucking them over
for decades maybe something will change.
> just how unpopular would it be to abandon Baltimore??
As someone else posted above, Baltimore is a massively important US seaport, that moves tons and tons of goods.
Even the most pro-business Republican realizes that a lot of industries are going to get hurt, and in places far away from Baltimore, if they can't move freight through there.
"- just how unpopular would it be to abandon Baltimore?? "
I mean I'm from the Baltimore area and.. well.. I mean some of us would consider that town somewhat abandoned already, think Detroit. It has some pretty rough parts. With the main triggering event being 60s/70s loss of steel industry (Bethlehem Steel). Of all the big east coast cities (Boston, DC, NYC, Philly, Baltimore) I would say Baltimore is the most abandoned already.
> just how unpopular would it be to abandon Baltimore??
You underestimate how much vitriol is coming from the Right about Democratic-leaning cities. Baltimore is 60% Black and voted 87% for Biden in 2020. Baltimore isn't on the top of the list of cities they like to claim are failures, but just wait.
My dad is deep in the Right-wing media econsystem and he is convinced that the downtowns of Portland and San Francisco have been burned to the ground and the entire region is a lawless anarchy.
He'll need to get Congress to pass an appropriation, yes, this is his way of putting pressure on them to do it. I think that there are emergency funds already appropriated that he can immediately tap, but they would fall way short of the cost needed to build a new bridge. The damage here doesn't just affect Baltimore, the national economy is affected.
The video is surreal, it looks like it barely bumps the bridge and 2 seconds later the entire thing is gone. I don't know what I was expecting, the bridge just looked extremely fragile, makes me wonder what other bridges are at risk of an event like this.
It's not the impact, it's the fact that it just keeps pushing. Movies commonly use slow motion and time extension via editing for destruction scenes because (as we've just seen) real time doesn't always look impressive to the untrained eye.
Also, there's a lot of mass concentrated in that ship. It's the equivalent of hitting a window with a sledgehammer. Small recreational vessels could probably crash into those pylons all day long.
Indeed, the whole bridge failed because the impact didn't exceed the impact strength of the bridge's material, which means the whole bridge bent until the deflection exceeded the tensile strength of the material. A missile impact with the same total energy would exceed impact strength and would probably have destroyed only part of the bridge.
Did the math, this seems surprisingly spot on, at least from the energy perspective. 100k tons going 7.5 kts is about 160kg tnt equivalent which is a little less than the explosive power of a Mk83/GBU-32, probably not enough to take down an entire bridge, just one span if you're lucky. That said, the issue is the bomb expends most of its energy moving air around, the freighter expended nearly 100% of its energy on the bridge.
There's also the loads are balanced on the pylon. When the collapse took out the bridge on one side of the pylon, the other side failed as well. You can see that in the video as the bridge on the right side of the pylon is no longer counterbalanced by the bridge on the left side, and collapses.
Imagine you're holding up a barbell with heavy weights at each end. If the weights on one end drop off, the bar will tilt strongly in the other direction, dropping the weights off on the other end.
Thank you for breaking it down like this. As someone without an engineering background, your explanation (along with some Googling for terms and definitions) really helped me grasp what happened.
You got me wondering:
> the whole bridge failed because the impact didn't exceed the impact strength of the bridge's material
When I first read this, it initially threw me off. The cargo ship's impact not exceeding the strength of the bridge sounds like a positive thing, but upon closer reading of your comment, it sounds as if it was the catalyst to the entire bridge collapsing.
So, how do engineers balance these properties of impact strength and tensile strength, especially considering large ships channel through these bridges near their pylons frequently? How much engineering goes into the possibility of large structures hitting their pylons?
> The cargo ship's impact not exceeding the strength of the bridge sounds like a positive thing, but upon closer reading of your comment, it sounds as if it was the catalyst to the entire bridge collapsing.
I had intended to add that exceeding the impact strength typically results in a local failure near the impact point. A tensile strength failure could happen far from the load and so could be more catastrophic.
I'm not sure if it would have made a difference in this case though, as destroying a main pillar by exceeding impact strength would have by itself transmitted most of the full bridge load to the remaining pillars and that alone may have been enough to exceed the safety margins on the tensile strength that are built into all structures. Unclear without more data, but there was a chance it could have survived in that case, but no chance with the ship consistently applying more and more shearing load.
> How much engineering goes into the possibility of large structures hitting their pylons?
Good questions, I'm not familiar enough with it to provide any further insight, except to say that I believe this bridge was designed long before these huge container ships existed. If they factored ship collisions into the bridge's design constraints at the time, they've no doubt been dramatically exceeded with these huge ships.
I don't think impact strength is factored very much into static structures, tensile strength is more important. It only comes up in very unusual situations like this or 9/11.
Bridges were not designed for being hit. They were designed to span. If those designing and engineering it had considered an impact, the design would not be catastrophic but rather sectional. If sectional, each span would remain standing rather than collapse like dominoes. It takes 3 miles to stop a 100k ton stacked container ship. The things nobody has mentioned are: Current direction and speed. Wind direction and speed. The entry of the vessel in relation to the bridge. The fact that dragging anchor would have on the starboard side pulled the bow right into the pilon, the worst case.
That ship had a 10,000 TEU capacity and was actually hauling a little under 5,000 TEUs. An empty container weighs a little over 5,000lbs, and a full one can be up to 67,000lbs.
If you do the math, you find that it’s just an astronomical amount of momentum, and there’s no effective defense for a bridge that needs support in more than 30 or so feet of water.
Throwback to the scene in The Day After Tomorrow where the cargo ship comes to an almost instant halt after impacting a bus wreck under water. For some reason it managed to stand out as ridiculous even in that movie.
I just saw in a YouTube video yesterday that they actually built a full-size model of the ship (or at least the bow area) and the bit of town it hit. The director didn’t want to use CGI or miniatures.
He spent a full quarter of the movie’s budget on that one scene.
there’s no effective defense for a bridge that needs support in more than 30 or so feet of water
You put in sheet piling 50 meters upstream, and you fill the box with rocks. That's state of the art practice, nowadays, but that bridge was 50 years old.
In 1977 (and in 1972, when construction began), vessels of this size did not exist, and certainly were not allowed in the harbor[1]. But over time, they were given authorization, despite the fact that they could collapse the unprotected bridge like a load of toothpicks.
The real crime here is that there was no retrofit to protect the pylons. It was almost certainly considered and rejected due to cost.
The Oil Tankers of the 70s were the largest vessels ever built. Today the largest container vessels are starting to creep up to their size, but not weight.
The container vessel in question is tiny compared to e.g. the Seawise giant or Batillus Class.
If Baltimore had been anticipating VLCC traffic in the 70s, then presumably the bridge would have been built accordingly and this incident would not have led to a collapse.
According to the marine traffic track shown in the YouTube analysis above, the ship looks to have been heading through the channel, but then nosed in right under the bridge. Would have sailed right past upstream dolphins, and rammed the pylon from the inside anyway.
the modern practice is layers of defense; in addition to building a bridge that doesn't fail at a single point of failure, you also generally design what's around a bridge pier to stop or at least slow down the ship (by, say, running aground onto a bed of rocks around a pier)
"A notable example of dolphins used to protect a bridge is the Sunshine Skyway Bridge across the mouth of Tampa Bay. In 1980, the MV Summit Venture hit a pier on one of the bridge's two, two-lane spans causing a 1,200-foot (370 m) section of the bridge to fall into the water, resulting in 35 deaths. When a replacement span was designed, a top priority was to prevent ships from colliding with the new bridge..."
The MV Summit Venture was a 33,900 deadweight tonnage ship. MV Dali was a gross tonnage of 95,128. Nearly 3× as large. It's questionable whether dolphins would have totally prevented such a tragedy.
Yet similarly, expect dolphins to be brought up as a key component of resiliency for any designed replacement bridge.
Jeasus - seriously - if that was an inbound shipment then it would be worse - this appears to have been leaving - which would infer that the TEUs were more empty than full.
North America has lots of land and oil. Timber (Canada), plastics, and corn fertilised by nitrates that were made using fossil fuel energy. Corn probably doesn’t ship in containers but corn-fed beef and poultry do?
Some import products are crazy cheap because cross-planet shipping is basically free because it's the reverse end of a trip carrying valuable stuff. But they mainly applies to ships returning from low development level regions.
While the majority is bulk, the US does export a lot of industrial machinery. It's just not stuff you normally think about - like the large hvac systems on the roof of large buildings or the caterpillar earth moving equipment/parts to make roads.
Apparently, I was wrong - they are reporting it as a "fully loaded" -- but that does not mean the TEUs were full of goods and services... but thats what they are calling it. So I have no Idea.
Unless ImportYtei.com can get the bills of lading for that ship....
You put it ahead of the pylon so that even when the dolphin or bollard is destroyed, it redirects the ship to—at worst—a glancing blow with the pylon.
You don’t need to dissipate every joule of kinetic energy in the vessel. You just need to redirect it away from the pylon. That horizontal component can be done with bollards and dolphins sufficiently that even a relatively direct original angle should only damage the fenders. From what I see, there were zero such protections around this bridge.
Nothing can protect against a direct hit. But most hits aren’t direct, and those can be redirected without catastrophic pylon failure.
It's somewhat counterintuitive how much energy can be in something moving so slowly. I say somewhat, because when you're up close it's much more obvious, but you're right that on a video it doesn't look like much.
This disconnect happens with boats quite a lot. For example, I can, by myself, pull a 45 foot grand banks trawler in shallow water. I know because I've done so.
But at even very low speeds, I cannot stop it from hitting a pier. I have not tried to do this, but every harbor master has a bunch of stories about people trying to do so and getting a leg or an arm or something squished and pulverized.
People who are not boat people rarely recognize these sorts of dangers, which is why so many get hurt on boats. "I can push us off the dock, so I can definitely keep us from hitting it." Nope, Sir Isaac Newton says you're wrong.
To anyone reading this who isn't an experienced boater:
If you are invited onto someone else's boat, sit down and shut up during docking, don't talk to friends, let the captain concentrate. Don't help, if the captain wants you to do something, they will let you know. If you think you know better than the captain, and this advice is unknown to you, you don't know better. Being a good guest during docking shows experience and helps get an invite back.
Try docking a sailboat on a river. Then slow isn’t an option, since the current will sweep you away in a heartbeat. The key here is planning ahead, including a plan for what to do when you don’t get it right. And you won’t, on the first couple of attempts. I’ve seen it in action, totally hair raising to watch.
This is great advice. For myself, docking in windy situations can be nerve racking. The old adage is to only dock as fast as your willing to hit the pier, and for me this means slow as hell.
I always let guests know exactly what I want them to do, and to your point, it's mainly to sit tight and let me focus.
Similar to stay quiet if the car is about to merge into traffic. But with a boat the stakes are 100,000 times greater due to the huge momentum and that it would be gliding and not slowing down like a wheeled vehicle on land.
Landlubbers are accustomed to momentum (p = mv) behaving in a certain way instinctively from years of experience, where the heavier something is, the more frictional force against it from the ground, and therefore the mass behaves a certain way. This breaks down once the expected friction changes a lot, e.g. trying to stop a moving car or, like you said, a boat in water. I'd imagine it's the same thing in space, where a slowly-moving but massive object would surprise someone at their inability to stop it.
This hit me a a bit ago - you can't really tell how big ships are if you just see pictures of them on sea. I recently hit this in real life. Yeah it's a ship. Oh. It's like 3 - 4 times as tall as I am above water. And it goes 2-3 stories down. And holy hell, a crows nest 30 meters up is... really high up?
And we got the good tour, because we had a severe storm warning as we visited that ship - the kinda storm in which gusts stop you in your tracks and forces you to lean into it to not fall over. Was a great experience. I wouldn't want to be up there with that kinda wind.
And this was a medium sized clipper, somewhat on the small size.
And based off of that, I kind of want to see a retired battleship or an aircraft carrier. Because now I have an idea of how dumbfounded I'll be at those kinda dimensions. It just doesn't appear that big on photos!
The best place I've seen huge ships is Hamburg. People sit and picnic on beaches along the river in the summer, and enormous container and car carrier ships go past.
We had a team we work with a lot over here in HH and went on the treasure hunt on the Rickmer Rickmers as an event. That was very nice - they spread a bunch of little puzzle boxes across the ship so you can search for these, walk through the museum and look at stuff. And the puzzles were neat as well - you'd use the compass the actual helmsman used back in the day to figure out where east is to find some clue, count pests in cargo and such. Very recommendable and a lot of fun.
We just didn't climb up the ropes in winds that almost pushed you over on foot, haha.
The same go for cars. I was hit by a car which was already slowing down but over ran the line and hit me. The car couldn't have been going more than 10 mph but it was enough force to fracture my knee (the fracture type is also colloquially known as a bumper fracture).
But in this case with slow speed, it's the massive (literally) amount of mass of the cargo ship that gives it an un-intuitively large amount of energy.
To your point, it is mass. Most people don't understand mass on water. At 1 knot the ship would do the exact same damage, topple the support and drop the bridge.
Nitpick: squaring makes numbers greater than 1 bigger, and numbers smaller than 1 smaller. In this case we're squaring something with units, and we can't say the input is greater or smaller than the output, because they have different units. What we can say, is that v^2 curves upward: it grows faster with increasing v, and slower with decreasing v.
When you play about with game engines long enough, you start to realise that momentum is the key metric to track rather than speed. Especially in water magnitude can be very deceiving but to give some quick math, this vessel had a momentum at impact of about 154,000,000kg⋅m/s. For a car to have equivalent momentum it'd have hit the bridge at 156,580 mph. Humans are just less adept at appreciating mass vs velocity.
On the other hand, if I were hit by a loaded shopping cart at 3 mph and I weren’t allowed to move my feet, I’d probably be okay if I saw it coming.
Keep the same momentum but scale the mass down to, say, 200g. Now it’s supersonic, and it will hit with maybe 10x the energy of a musket ball. This would be extremely damaging and likely lethal.
(If you make the mass too small, it might go straight through a person, in which case not all of the energy is delivered.)
But the point was that if you were hit with a full container ship at 0.1 mph and not allowed to move you'd be dead.
The only reason why a high energy but slow moving object (thus high momentum) is harmless is that it will deliver a small acceleration to you and you won't suffer from the consequences of a high acceleration (which is what generally kills people when they hit something like the ground at high speeds). But that assumes that you're free to be accelerated and move away.
I think this is a bit too simple. People can get injured and objects destroyed in multiple ways. For example:
One could be torn apart. If you are glued to the ground and you are pushed away with too much force to resist, you have a problem. You can stretch or move a certain distance and withstand a certain force while doing so, and the product of those numbers is the energy you can remove from the thing hitting you. If the impactor is at a fixed speed, then you can turn that momentum into an energy, but that’s a bit silly. You really can stand still and deliver more stopping impulse to an object moving toward you when it’s moving slower because you can resist for a longer time.
One could collide with an effectively infinitely massive object. But the momentum of that object seems irrelevant — hitting a brick wall on wheels at 25 mph seems much worse than hitting the Earth at 0.1mph despite the Earth having many orders of magnitude more momentum. The impact velocity seems more relevant.
One could get hit by a fast-moving projectile. This is complicated, and neither momentum nor energy seem like sufficient measures. As an extreme example, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays surely hit people on a somewhat regular basis, and I’ve never heard of anyone noticing such an event, despite the energy involved being quite macroscopic.
Hm. I'm no physicist but I think your math is off. Remember it's velocity squared. Your car going that fast is has more than a kiloton of TNT or approaching 5 terajoules of energy... that can't be right.
For a 2 tonne car, my very rough math puts it at more like 2100 mph.
I can't edit my post now, but to be clear I was talking about kinetic energy. I would have thought momentum is not a very useful thing to talk about in a case like this where there was some pretty obvious transformation of energy into damage, etc.
As I said though, I'm far from a physicist so happy to be schooled if I'm way off...
> I don't know what I was expecting, the bridge just looked extremely fragile, makes me wonder what other bridges are at risk of an event like this.
The bridge style in question
> Conversely, continuous truss bridges rely on rigid truss connections throughout the structure for stability. Severing a continuous truss mid-span endangers the structure. However, continuous truss bridges do not experience the tipping forces that a cantilever bridge must resist because the main span of a continuous truss bridge is supported at both ends.
cable stays are also generally more popular these days because of the differences in material. All other things being equal, concrete is generally a lot cheaper than a steel truss bridge these days
If they play the cards very carefully, they can pull out and recycle all the steel of the old bridge, and use that to pay for a new (cheaper) concrete bridge.
I remember when I was a kid, I left a bus, and the bus started moving, and I, not being intimidated by the bus moving very slowly (somewhere between 5 and 10 km/h), didn't move a safe distance away from the bus. I think the bus, due to the nature of its maneuverability, had its tail moving not in parallel to me but slightly towards me - so when it has "touched" (hit?) me, even though I thought it was just sliding in parallel, the force was so strong I made a full 360° turn - and I was a tall and chubby boy.
I ended up with no injury, not even a bruise as far as I can remember (who would count bruises as a kid), but definitely with an intuition to respect mass.
> I don't know what I was expecting, the bridge just looked extremely fragile
The strongest man in the world probably seems pretty solid. Put him at the bottom of a 3 degree grade and release the brakes on a full tractor trailer and he'll seem fragile too.
Probably most of them. A structure like that not designed to bear vertical loads, not lateral ones, other than high winds.
The knee is like this too. It lets you stand, run and jump just fine, but you can knock down an opponent with a relatively mild lateral impact to the knee.
Much more of the bridge collapsed than you might think, though, far from the impact.
Bridges are design to withstand a very predictable type and direction of force. It can withstand the lateral wind, but imagine how much force a fully loaded cargo ship can put into it. Once one segment gone the rest is history, because makes the who construction imbalanced.
I'm once again impressed that subject matter experts are out there on every topic, and they are often capable of quickly and accurately disseminating information about an event far better than the local news.
One might expect that local news are well connected with those who actually did construction, planning and whatnot of such projects, or emergency responders, or disaster mitigation, or people specialized in local geology / hydrology to show up challenges...
The sad truth is that "local" news more often than not barely has any local people any more, a lot of content is directly ripped off from others (especially fire dep't or police reports, with the added problem that no one challenges the copaganda), or not local at all but produced/sourced by central agencies, or theoretically "local" reporters have such large areas to cover that they can't reasonably build relationships with experts.
No. Local news is free over the air. Thus, it is paid for by advertising. Thus, you (the watcher) are the product. Hence, it is low quality. Local news is interested in producing as much clickbait emotional content as possible to drive up viewership. See: CNN, Fox News, MSNBC. All are "free" and terrible for depth of their reporting.
How common are power outages on ships? I get that the captain might not have responded to it correctly but that seems like a thing that shouldn't happen, at least in my completely uneducated opinion.
It is quite common and vessels often have outages that leave them Not Under Command. Usually they are safely at sea when this happens and they can drift for hours without causing problems. But of course there's always a possibility of it happening at exactly the wrong moment.
The reasons for this are the usual: lack of redundancy, lack of maintenance, overworked and understaffed crews, etc. etc. The book lays out how ships are pretty much designed to be floating disasters and the Class societies (essentially privatized regulators) are in the pockets of the builders, and they are so captured that they make rules that make it difficult to make safe vessels.
For instance, he was trying to design multi-screw vessels but the rules now assume single-screwed ships and it can be impossible to design in additional shaft alleys and still conform.
It wouldn't help with this accident, but you would think that the electronics would be on batteries. It wouldn't be too hard to have rack of batteries that would power the lights, instruments, radios, and sensors. Doesn't help if the propulsion or steering go out, but does make easier to know whats going on.
The problem is with steering. The rudder on a ship this big is going to be wall of steel several stories tall with gears as big as car.
Warships have several independent backup steering options reducing finally to a worm gear at the top of the shaft with a winch handle big enough to put a gang of men on it. But ships like this will have none of that. They will have a small wheel or joystick on the bridge and if power goes out the rudder will definitely stay in the last commanded position until power is restored. Even if they had auxiliary steering they would not have the crew to man those positions.
This ship would have alternate diesel power plants called "mules" (think APUs on aircraft). It's possible that when the lights came back on that was because they got a mule started.
But really if we don't want accidents like this to happen the ship should have redundancy. A 10,000 TEU container ship is one of the largest and heaviest moving structures ever created by man. Why is it acceptable that it is driven by exactly one engine powering one screw in front of one rudder?
By the way a ship this big with only one screw is very difficult to maneuver at slow speeds. They pretty much have to be going at least 14-15knots to have any rudder authority.
> But really if we don't want accidents like this to happen the ship should have redundancy. A 10,000 TEU container ship is one of the largest and heaviest moving structures ever created by man. Why is it acceptable that it is driven by exactly one engine powering one screw in front of one rudder?
Perhaps because we have a whole lot of them going and a very low frequency of events like this.
Maybe there's some lighter weight interventions we could do that would further halve the risk of something like this happening that are less costly than fully redundant engine and drive.
They're supposed to have emergency steering gear. Why didn't it work? Maybe ships should have an auxiliary genset running while near land.
Do we need kindergartens to be safe? How many dead kids is too many? /s
Seriously, in England it is a legal requirement to have redundant brakes on a freaking bicycle. A dude that hit a grandma with a bicycle due to 1 non-functional brake went to prison. But a giant container ship needs nothing?
What is the cost of fixing this bridge and + lost lifetime earning of all the people who dies + compensation to their families? Is that really cheaper than installing batteries plus electric motor?
Now imagine this ship would hit a bridge in daytime, when it’s clogged with traffic?
Cost/benefit analyses are just a fact of life. I see your point, but without really considering the question we don't know what the proper response is. It is not obvious to me that we need to mandate backup power systems, there are an awful lot of ships entering ports around the world each day and very few bridge collapses.
The problem is that the bridge collapses that do happen are just catastrophic. The economic impact alone will be massive for Baltimore. But will the responsible parties pay out that damage in full? Unlikely.
Cost-benefit analyses aren't designed to evaluate the total risk a business venture presents to everyone who could possibly be involved; they're designed to evaluate the risk posed by a problem that will launch lawsuits that will play out in courts for years, if not decades. Meanwhile, some injured parties settle for pennies on the dollar, laws change, and in the absolute worst-case scenario, major shareholders draw down their positions in the corporate venture that caused the problem. The world keeps on spinning, and just maybe some regulatory agency will pay attention to the report issued by the likes of the NTSB and USCG.
The process does not adequately protect the public.
Regulations are written in blood, because trying to make everything safe pre-emptively is impossible economically for a number of reasons. Primarily being, you can’t (usually) realistically force people to spend the money on something that isn’t clearly an actual problem.
And that fundamentally means until someone ‘bleeds’/a big enough disaster happens, some things won’t get fixed.
See the triangle shirt waist factory for an example of what it took to be able to force people to pay for certain kinds of fixes.
Since folks aren’t currently burning down the NTSB’s offices or the like, it also seems like your opinion that the public is not currently adequately protected isn’t a majority one?
The only way we’ll ever hit zero accidents is if we are all dead, it’s impossible to do anything without some risk.
I have lived in two different cities where no kindergarten age children have died getting hit by cars outside of their school.
Last year I saw a child fall off a raised garden bed at his school, hit his head, and leave in an ambulance. I never found out what happened as I was just visiting that small town.
Children die at or going to/from kindergarten a few times a year I bet in the US.
And this bridge being down will shutdown the port and reroute all automobile traffic that used to travel across it for months and the bridge itself will require design rebuilding, all of which will be extremely costly economically.
Biden has said that the Federal government will pay to rebuild the bridge, in order to get it done quickly.
But presumably they will ultimately seek reimbursement from the Dali’s insurers. As will the Port of Baltimore and anyone else who has suffered damages.
> What is the cost of fixing this bridge and + lost lifetime earning of all the people who dies + compensation to their families? Is that really cheaper than installing batteries plus electric motor?
I don't mean to contribute to this already-too-charged discussion any more than to say that the answer to this question is not as obvious as you think it is. If anything, I would bet that the former is less expensive than the latter, and I say that with immense sadness. Does that make sense?
It’s a legal requirement to have brakes on both wheels of your bicycle. That’s not the same thing as redundancy. Braking performance is significantly reduced if you can only brake on one wheel, so both brakes need to be functional to stop quickly and safely.
And the dude went to prison because he hit and killed a grandma while riding with reckless disregard for the safety of pedestrians. The brake thing didn’t help, but it was a side story.
On pavement, when the front brake performs well and is operated near optimal power, the back tire will not have traction. The back brake is entirely redundant in that case.
> ”Redundancy doesn't necessitate the redundant option being identical to the first.“
Yes. In fact, in a redundant system, using different designs or technology is often an advantage, so that a failure mode that affects one system is unlikely to affect the other.
But if something is redundant, it is “able to be omitted without loss of function”. Front and back brakes on a bike are not there for redundancy. They are components of the same braking system: without both in service, they don't work as well.
Or to put it another way, the front brake isn’t there as a spare in case the back brake fails. It’s there because without brakes on both wheels, you can’t stop quickly in an emergency.
> Front and back brakes on a bike are not there for redundancy. They are components of the same braking system: without both in service, they don't work as well.
Bikes are very different from cars due to the short wheelbase vs high center of gravity.
At moderate or fast speeds maxim deceleration occurs when the front tire applies enough force to lift the rear tires off the pavement thus removing the impact of the rear tires. Below maximum acceleration you could use the rear break but it doesn't do anything applying the front break slightly harder would do.
At sufficiently low speeds the rear tire can help, but it's really there for redundancy as even acting alone it doesn't work very well.
This only applies in ideal conditions (eg: dry tarmac). Where there is less surface friction (wet or icy surface, dirt or gravel trails, etc) you're going to quickly hit the limits of the tire's traction, so will need both brakes if you want to stop in the shortest possible distance.
Wet roads, cold ice, and dirt still provide enough friction to send you over your handlebars at speed. They just increase the maximum speed rear tires provide any benefit. Near its melding point ice isn’t going to provide enough friction for rear breaks to matter.
So sure there’s a minimal benefit in some very specific conditions, but no they are there for redundancy.
In reality, the rear brake contributes nothing (apart from redundancy in case of front brake failure) to being able to stop quickly in an emergency. The quickest stop is achieved by using the front brake as strongly as possible while bracing oneself to avoid going over the bars, which if done correctly, will mean the rear wheel will have next to no contact with the ground. That means locking the rear wheel with the rear brake will contribute nothing to stopping.
Conspiracy... some adversary is waiting for opportunities during unfavorable/aberrant conditions and triggering simple failures at impossibly inopportune times. Without any redundancy, conditions it looks like a freak accident. It would be interesting if you could come up with a likelihood for each conditions to have overlapped temporally. If someone comes to the conclusion that its possible to create the triggered failures it would be prudent to forbid sailing in conditions that might lead to these supposed "fly under the radar attacks".
> Maybe there's some lighter weight interventions we could do that would further halve the risk of something like this happening that are less costly than fully redundant engine and drive.
Redundancy doesn't inherently have to cost a lot more. For example, if you have three engines driving three props, they can each be 1/3 as large, and not necessarily weigh much more if at all. But then if you lose one, you lose 1/3 power rather than experiencing total loss of control.
> Redundancy doesn't inherently have to cost a lot more. For example, if you have three engines driving three props, they can each be 1/3 as large, and not necessarily weigh much more if at all.
Yah, from aviation everyone moved to twins because tri-jets and four engine jets were too expensive in comparison. Things don't scale up or down perfectly; in practice you end up with more maintenance.
But it seems like here they lost steering, so maybe there's something better we can do to keep steering more of the time (the cutover to emergency steering gear isn't instantaneous or perfect).
Planes use two engines because they can land with one and smaller jet engines are about as complicated as larger ones. Ships have different constraints. For example, a lower output diesel engine could have fewer cylinders and correspondingly lower maintenance costs.
but two engine jets can fly on one engine for a while, however a one engine boat this big is an uncontrolled juggernaut when it has some speed and no engine because it doesn't have any redundancy.
> but two engine jets can fly on one engine for a while
Not just for a while. They must be able to do so indefinitely, until you run out of fuel. Of course, you are going to want to get it back on the ground long before that happens.
Emergency steering gear is required on every commercial vessel and is regularly tested. We will have to wait for the investigation to see what actually happened.
At least in small craft, bow thrusters are usually electric, with local batteries charged from the main engine room. I don't know what large craft are like, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that a bow thruster may remain operable even if the main engine fails. Clearly that's not required or they would've had it and used it, but it could be required if the regulations didn't suck.
Furthermore, steering could absolutely have an electric backup for the hydraulic pumps that power the main steering gear. As long as there's some forward speed through the water, the rudder should work. But again, backups clearly aren't required or they would've worked here.
Steer-by-wire cars are required to have all sorts of redundancy so they're almost as safe as steering-shaft cars in case of an engine failure. This is a 9,900TEU ship with a 41480 kw powerplant. That a ship with so much more destructive potential is allowed to operate without the same level of redundancy as a $90k Audi, is unconscionable.
The difference for a car and drive by wire system is that the failure mode of control systems on cars is normally catastrophic and dangerous. If a car loses steering or brakes, it will hit something within seconds 95% of the time.
That ship spent 1 (4:30 to 5:30) hour of a presumably 10-20 day voyage in a critical control section. The tugs left the ship right around 5:08 (43 seconds into the video). A much better policy for this case would be to have required the tugs stay with the boat until it passed the main span safely.
There were no doubt maintenance issues that led to this accident, but it is exceedingly rare for these types of failures to cause this type of catastrophic result.
Aircraft carriers are billion dollar ships, these are not. The most expensive container ship tops out at ~$250 million and the one that crashed today is more like $80-150 million. The propulsion systems on these vessels cost tens of millions. $100k wouldn't even pay for the material costs of a rudder.
I don't know enough about the cost and safety tradeoffs made in the design of these ships to comment but your numbers are orders of magnitude off from both directions.
Right. It's not like the ship owners (or, more saliently, their insurers) want things like this to happen.
Second-guessing the marine engineers in this case is like the people post-9/11 who argued that future buildings should be designed to withstand the impact of a wide-body jetliner fully loaded with fuel.
Really recommend you read Tankership Tromedy which was written by a marine engineer. You don't even have to find a copy, the author put a PDF on the internet:
Great resource which allows one to get an idea of the issues involved in Tanker safety. Thank You for posting the link.
Just browsed the book and immediately found "the smoking gun" in the preface itself!
Mandate twin screw in the form of two fully independent engine rooms. Under the current system, 99.5% of all tankers, however large, are single screw. These ships are always a single failure away from being helplessly adrift. The book presents evidence, never before public, that there are at least ten total loss of power incidents on tankers every day. Twin screw, properly implemented, would reduce this failure rate by more than a factor of one thousand. Twin screw would also drastically improve tanker low speed maneuverability which is implicated in a number of big spills including the Aegean Sea shown on the cover.
This was written in 2006, so it clearly does not take any data from this incident into account. Even if it were written today, it would not be based on any real data -- it's far too soon for that.
The bridge has been there for nearly 50 years, in a port that handles around 50 million tons of cargo every year.
It seems pretty clear that whatever the cause, it was an extremely rare incident.
> It seems pretty clear that whatever the cause, it was an extremely rare incident.
It may be rare in the lifetime of the bridge, but if there is a variable which has change (or is moving) then that isn't so important a consideration. For example, if container ships have recently become much larger in relation to the design requirements in place at the time of the bridge's construction.
I don't need to browse the book to understand that a book from 2006 can't possibly have any data from an incident that happened yesterday, and that no conclusions can possibly be rendered at this time about the causes of this specific accident.
People are telling you to read the book because, yes, it has a ton of perspective on the long-standing market and regulatory forces that shape the environment that almost certainly led to this specific incident. Understanding how loss-of-power incidents happen, why ships are built the way they are, how flags-of-convenience affect the standards to which ships are maintained and inspected, how ship builders, owners, lessees, operators, crews, and regulators interact, YES, all of those things are extremely relevant to understanding the present situation.
If someone made a landscape painting today using the wet-on-wet technique, would you argue that a Bob Ross episode from years ago couldn't possibly tell us anything about it? That's silly. It's precisely applicable. Mr. Ross himself might not describe the specific location of today's trees or clouds, but he can darn sure tell you how the brush strokes add up to make a tree. Actually he's probably one of the world experts on precisely that.
Proclaiming your ignorance of extremely-well-researched expert sources is not a good look.
While it is true that the investigation into the causes of the disaster is just starting and we don't yet have a definite conclusion, user "jordanb" has done a great service in pointing us to a book written by a domain expert which had pointed out fundamental design flaws in the design of Tankers long ago. Design Flaws have no expiry date until they are acknowledged and fixed properly. In an era of disinformation/misinformation and focusing solely on profits it is important that people be shown some factual data by actual engineers/experts who were very much concerned with safety and how all concerns were flouted by concerned companies/authorities.
Just like the Boeing disasters have shone the spotlight on Civilian Aeroplane Safety, this disaster shines a spotlight on Tanker Safety, arguably a far far more important topic since almost all the world trade of goods and oil is dependent on them exclusively.
While the ship is $200Mish, how much is the cargo also worth? If the ship had went to the bottom in this event the cleanup would take 10x as long and release god knows what pollutants.
Based on what I've read the container ship was only half loaded (5k out of 10k TEU) and most of the containers were empty or lightly loaded. I don't think ships of that size can even navigate those waters fully loaded.
AFAIK the water around the bridge is only like 50 feet deep and the ship itself is about 150 ft high. It wouldn't even really sink, just get stuck on the bottom. A crane ship would come unload it and then tugboats would pull it out.
The worst case scenario though does take a long time if it gets fully grounded and stuck beyond the ability of tug boats to pull it out. A company specializing in marine salvage has to come in to cut it up in place and haul the ship away piece by piece. They use large cutting chains that they pull back and forth to cut through the metal. It's a fascinating process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndr2a7AQ8b4
The ship can carry 10,000 TEU, which would fit at least 10,000 imported cars, which would cost around $500mm.
In this case it seems the ship wasn't full, but it's not hyperbole to estimate it as being worth a billion dollars fully loaded. Cars aren't the cheapest things you can ship in containers, but they're far from the most expensive either, and they're what the Port of Baltimore specialises in.
I know this may seem pedantic, but to image that the cost of an additional screw or screw+engine at 100k for vessels like this is patently absurd. Just trying to offer some explanation if you're confused at the responses you're getting. Requiring such a thing would probably have a measurable impact on the global economy, even if all current vessels were grandfathered in and exempt.
> That a ship with so much more destructive potential is allowed to operate without the same level of redundancy as a $90k Audi, is unconscionable.
Would you still believe this if it was demonstrated that the system lacking redundancy was - due to factors beyond the scope of this conversation - more safe by an order of magnitude than the steering system that includes redundancy but in a different medium?
Put differently: do you think the Space Shuttle should have had ejection seats? If yes, what about an Airbus A320 flying a normal commercial route?
Ejection seats are a use case noche unique to military flying where the pilot is A) the most irreplaceable piece in terms of warfighting, and B) injury of the pilot in the escape attempt is considered an acceptable tradeoff.
If you really want chills, think about this: a conscious decision was made with covil aviation that it was more economically feasible to sacrifice the human lives on board, and resolve the rest through lawsuits.
In short: if you know/are critical to the process of murdering extra-natiomals, you warrant a life saving device.
If you're a civillian, you're a line item in a potential series legal judgements.
Military aircraft are subject to failure from being shot at. Aircraft in combat will fail much, much more often than properly maintained civilian aircraft.
Civilian aircraft don't have election seats because situations where they would be useful are exceedingly rare.
That's wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to start. Where in a commercial airliner do you want to keep several hundred explosive devices that would violently launch a passenger out onto an open air, through a hole punctured through a pressurized fuselage at the perfect moment, when the plane could be either at a cruising altitude, over an ocean, or speeding down a runway?
Thanks for the link to that book. I don't know if it's the because of this catastrophe, but it looks to be unobtanium at the moment. Will have to find it in the library.
> lack of redundancy
This is what I am surprised at from many angles. It seems to me that the ship, the port (in the form of lack of tugboats), and the bridge (in the form of lack of secondary protection of the pillars) all had a lack of redundancy and secondary options.
It shouldn't happen. There will be investigations. I think that having a properly operating ship is the captain's responsibility.
But the ship's pilot [1] (not captain) should know exactly how the boat will handle and the exact course of action. Pilots are extremely well paid ($200-$400k) and the tests are very stringent. Friends have told me that the Narraganset Bay pilot test involves drawing every shipping navigation bouy on a map by hand to within ~200 yards from memory alone, compass, ruler and scaled map provided.
Where do you get those salary numbers from? The info about this "Dali" ship is not private: [0], and it lists the master's salary as $10,200 per month.
The pilot is employed by the port/government, not the ship. They drive to just outside the entrance, then they get off onto a tugboat or some other small utility vessel.
Harbor pilots are licensed by the state (Maryland) require a degree from one of the maritime colleges, deck license, …, are represented by a pilots union (Association of Maryland Pilots) but are employed independently.
> The Florida Alliance of Maritime Organizations reported that Florida pilots' annual salaries range from US$100,000 to US$400,000, on par with other US states that have large ports. Columbia Bar pilots earn approximately US$180,000 per year. A 2008 review of pilot salaries in the United States showed that pay ranged from about US$250,000 to over US$500,000 per year.
Having visited the Columbia River Maritime Museum (I would strongly recommend if there) https://www.crmm.org - that is 100% correct. Its a place that they send other pilots to do things like rough water training.
I was curious about power outages as well, and why tugboats aren't required for all container ships that navigate under bridges. I'm not arguing that tugboats MUST be mandated; just wondering about the cost/benefit analysis. This claims that power outages are more common now (but doesn't cite sources/stats) in areas (specifically California) where diesel fuel is required, rather than bunker fuel: https://baykeeper.org/news/column/tugs-test-towing-giant-shi... It also makes it clear that relying on tugboats to be on standby and "swoop in to the rescue" is seriously wishful thinking where bridge safety is concerned. This article from 2019 is about a power failure due to an Oil Mist Detector that didn't have a "harbour mode" option of keeping the engine running at reduced RPM so you can still maneuver. It also shows the link between engine failure and a need for tugboats under "lessons learned":
"– Although it is tempting to free harbour tugs as quickly as possible, in the restricted waters of a small port their assistance can be invaluable should something go wrong."
On the other hand, what safety or economic issues do tugboats cause? It will probably become a topic of discussion or investigation at least.
The American courts should hit Maersk really really hard financially and get them to foot the bill for all losses of the bridge collapse. Shipping companies should not be driving vessels of these huge tonnages with such poor levels of redundancy and poor levels of manning.
It is insane for a 100,000 tonne vessel, that takes so long to stop due to its incredible inertia, that can find itself many thousands of miles from land, to rely on one engine, one gearbox, one shaft and one rudder; without sufficient secondary and tertiary back-up systems. Why was there no battery back-up, or motor on the shaft? Surely the bow thrusters should have a battery back-up to stop such a lurch to starboard.
How can all of the generation and all electrical busbars fail at once? Even if the fuel was bad, surely the generators should draw on separate fuel tanks. For such a large and relatively modern ship to suffer a total power failure is complete corporate incompetence.
If, as some allege, the refrigeration containers were causing problems, and total power outages occurring before sailing, the vessel should not have sailed, certainly at night. If this is the case, The Master needs locking up. But, poor man has to take the blame, because he is cheaper than a Danish Master and his Singaporean employer (if he is employed and not a contractor) also operating in a cheaper flag state than Denmark. The Singaporean Company also needs hitting hard if the culture was the cause of the Captain sailing after such alleged pre-sailing power outages.
Maersk outsource to reduce personnel and running costs. They use the cheapest crews, cheapest ships and need hitting very very very hard. We might then stop this culture of wealthy shipping companies using every method possible to avoid complying with IMO and more rigorous Nation State standards, operating in the shadows and ducking accountability and responsibility.
Does that mean this was effectively captain error? Like in response to a power outage the decision was made to try to reverse and rather than arrest forward momentum it just pushed their forward vector into the piling?
I would tend to think so. The pilot should have anticipated prop walk and known that the ship had no chance of stopping before the bridge.
I’m trying to find a color coded current map. Wind too. I wouldn’t expect wind or current to cause the pronounced heading change that is visible. The drift seems possible.
Note: I’m an experienced dinghy/keelboat sailor, but lack virtually any experience driving boats under power, much less commercial vessels
It seems the excellent windy.com has wind and current data from the incident still available. Looks like current was <0.2 kts and wind was 6 kts south-east. So both should be completely negligible.
405 yards/15 = 27 yards. And that's if the ship instantly accelerated to a 0.2 kt drift, which it wouldn't. Wind acceleration on the vessel than current.
yeah, noted. But it does seem like the heading change was so dramatic and the smoke pouring out after power recovery that something happened with the prop. And while it may have been currents, the lack of heading change before the smoke seems to suggest there was an intervention that caused heading change.
Ship travel, much like orbital mechanics, are so often non-intuitive if you're not familiar with how much effort it takes to make significant speed changes vs. heading changes. And speed changes often affect the heading as well if you're not careful.
Yes, they have the responsibility, not the captain, as evidenced by the specific insurance they carry.
Of course, lawyers will try to spread the blame around (who chose the pilot, did captain's actions or orders somehow get in the way of the pilot; did captain not ensure engines were working properly...). But the base responsibility lies with the pilot.
It probably helps the captain that this was a ship owned and operated by a very big vertically integrated company (Maersk). Most ships are owned by smaller companies with a few (10-150) hulls and then chartered out. And while in this case the ship was chartered (along with crew) I bet Maersk's systems are stronger than your average charterer's.
> Legally, the master has full responsibility for the safe navigation of their vessel, even when a pilot is on board. If they have clear grounds that the pilot may jeopardize the safety of navigation, they can relieve the pilot from their duties and ask for another pilot, or, if not required to have a pilot on board, navigate the vessel without one. In every case, during the time passed aboard for operation, the pilot will remain under the master's authority, and always out of the "ship's command chain." The pilot remains aboard as an important and indispensable part of the bridge team. Only in transit of the Panama Canal does the pilot have full responsibility for the navigation of the vessel.
You might have misunderstood the difference between controlling the ship and commanding it. The Panama Canal Authority pilot controls navigation and maneuvering to get through the canal but the captain is still in command of the vessel and ultimately responsible for it.
Canal accidents cost so much that they're each individually investigated and insurance companies fight over who is liable. Sometimes it's the pilot's fault and ACP's insurance pays out, sometimes it's the shipping company's insurance, and sometimes they split the cost.
This news report [1] confirms there were two pilots at the time of the accident. Baltimore Port runs a dock pilot from the Key Bridge to the port itself, and after the Key Bridge, a harbor pilot who takes the ship (I believe the rule is any vessel > 100 tons, and all non-domestic ships of any tonnage must by Maryland state law be piloted in this manner) out to the mouth of the bay.
The after-accident report and insurer and re-insurer wranglings will be a fascinating read, I'm sure. It will be a miracle if the taxpayers escape unscathed for the rebuilding of the transit spanning the harbor, and it falls entirely upon the insurers and re-insurers.
As dramatic as this accident was though, and the many parallels I can draw from its lessons to software engineering, IT operations, cybersecurity and so on, I'm not as sanguine believing it will really drive home to organization leaderships the evergreen advice to pay down your tech debt, maintenance matters, organizational culture/esprit de corps counts, the operational teams are just as important as the engineering teams, etc.
I too, have read about Baltimore pilots for the first time today. If you’d read a bit further, the Pilots use either intercoms and sometimes radios to send instructions to the captain while they’re elsewhere on the ship. If they were using intercoms, and there was no power, that would do it
> In Baltimore, as in most harbors, a local pilot comes on board to guide the ship. Is this their responsibility?
I would doubt the pilot would have ordered the power to the ship to be cut and for everything to go dark right before hitting the bridge. Pretty sure they were probably telling them to navigate away from the pylon.
That timeline implies that there was only four minutes to respond. Is that correct? Where was the ship going? Does it travel under this bridge on its own power rather than a tug boat?
What I am wondering is: why couldn't the bridge have been blocked off preventing casualties? It seems like more than just the boat and operators' failing if there's no time or secondary precautions if such failures occur.
I wonder if it makes sense to protect bridges with pylons like they have in front of buildings to stop cars and trucks.
It was blocked off the shortly after the ship pilots sent their mayday signal and declared an emergency, giving the traffic that was on the bridge time to make it through.
Most (all?) of the people on the bridge were contractors repairing potholes.
> I wonder if it makes sense to protect bridges with pylons like they have in front of buildings to stop cars and trucks.
They're called "dolphins" and some bridges do have them.
> It was blocked off the shortly after the ship pilots sent their mayday signal and declared an emergency, giving the traffic that was on the bridge time to make it through.
Will have to do some more reading as it's very confusing what the ship was doing and what it should have been doing under normal circumstances. In the video, it almost looks like it was steered directly into the bridge. Very confusing.
> They're called "dolphins" and some bridges do have them.
It's fairly horrifying how fast the bridge collapsed after the moment of impact on the pylon. The whole span seemed to fall in totality almost at once. If anyone was on that bridge at the moment of impact, they were in the water a couple of seconds later.
As an inland armchair-captain, I want to admonish that tugboats should probably always be stationed around bridges to intercept such off-course mariners.
It seems much more reasonable to only disengage the tugboats that were already helping the container ship get under way once it clears navigation hazards like the bridge, instead of keeping 24/7 quick-response tugboats at the bridge that try to intercept an out of control ship in a bare few minutes.
Moving large boats across water is slow. The Francis Scott Key bridge was 8600 feet long, or 1.4 nautical miles. AFAICT there were just over 4 minutes from the time that the first power outage started until the ship struck the piling.
A modern harbor tugboat can go perhaps 15 knots. In 4 minutes this means it would travel 4 nautical miles, at the very best (running start in correct direction).
So let's say that there would have been 4 minutes for a tugboat to (1) become aware of the problem, (2) travel to the location of the ship, (3) figure out what it needs to do, (4) maneuver into position [keeping in mind it might need to move to the other side of a 900' ship moving 8 knots] and (5) move the ship. And this assumes that the tugboat was idle in the first place.
There just would not have been enough time to do anything meaningful if the tug wasn't already right at the ship, on the correct side.
> A modern harbor tugboat can go perhaps 15 knots. In 4 minutes this means it would travel 4 nautical miles, at the very best (running start in correct direction).
It's probably pedantic, but I don't understand your math. Knots are nautical miles per hour. To travel 4nm in 4 minutes would imply a speed of 60 knots. At 15 knots, you would travel 1 nautical mile in 4 minutes. (15kn/60min * 4min = 1)
Apparently (this is just via someone on Reddit who supposedly heard/read it somewhere) the ship mayday'd on losing power hoping the bridge could be cleared.
But why not (or did it?) also just blast its horn repeatedly, drawing attention so people on or near the bridge would notice it and realise something was wrong and perhaps even where it was headed?
I'm sure it's not allowed generally and not the protocol and whatever ... But it does seem like a common sense & do whatever you can sort of situation to me?
AIUI most souls on the bridge were construction workers filling potholes, not drivers. But either way I'd have thought a certain amount of horn blowing would catch my attention just for being out of the ordinary, even though it's also not ordinary for ships to (need to) signal me.
Ya the people on the bridge would have less than 4 minutes to figure out the ship is crashing then to clear 2500 feet of bridge. When you're working with construction equipment you'd probably not notice till you had seconds left.
4 minutes is a lot longer to save your life than nothing? And do you really think that's the answer, that was the calculation on the ship - well they only have 4 minutes until we hit anyway, so there's nothing they can do, not worth it?
I wasn't criticising anyone, I was 1) asking if that happened; 2) asking why it might not have.
I think the answer is much more likely that the loss of power disabled the horn (as others have suggested) than that the crew thought it wasn't worthwhile because there was insufficient time for anyone on the bridge to fare any better anyway!
So, it turns out they did call in an emergency and the police did shutdown the bridge. The police had no direct way of reaching the workers and weren't going to wander out there with an imminent impact. So, evidently, no there was not enough time.
'So,' I said that in my initial comment. The police may not have had a way to reach them, but the horn would have. There was a lot more time than none, who's to say if it would have helped. I think the correct answer is as given by others, that actually the loss of power would have disabled the horn too.
I suppose I assumed it was compressed air, that once you had a 'full' (at pressure) tank, you could do a certain amount of blowing even without power. But fair point, I don't really know how they work, and if they are actively electric I certainly didn't know that and obviously that wouldn't have worked and so there's the answer.
> I assumed it was compressed air, that once you had a 'full' (at pressure) tank
Even so, it probably still requires electricity to activate the solenoids to open the valves or whatever. I'm speculating since I don't know how large boat horns work, but I wouldn't be surprised if they require power.
There are specific horn signals (one prolonged, or seven-short-one-prolonged, are what I'd guess would be appropriate here), and COLREGS do explicitly say that you can use whatever you need to get attention in an emergency as long as it's not confusable with some official signal. But as other commenters have noted it wouldn't have been specific enough to get the workers etc to clear the bridge before the impact.
> But why not (or did it?) also just blast its horn repeatedly,
It's hard for people on the bridge to understand what that means. The more it blasts the horn, the more likely people to turn around, stop and maybe get their phones out to take a video what strange thing this ship is doing. By the time they realize the impact is imminent, it's too late, unless they take a helicopter ride.
Because horn blasts are very specifically meant to communicate something to other ships. Once you're in "just blast it" mode you're seconds from disaster. I recognize the nobility of your suggestion, but I don't think it could have saved more than couple lives at most, probably none.
Well yeah, they were only minutes away at the point they lost power, there was very little time to do anything at all, that's why I asked. Personally I can't really imagine anyone holding it against them for using the 'signal that's for other ships' 'incorrectly' or 'against protocol' in such a situation. I think the comments speculating that the horn is either purely or in some way (e.g. solenoid) dependent on electricity is more likely the answer. I think a reasonable human in that situation who knows what's going on (that's why I mentioned that they apparently were able to radio/however they mayday that there's an issue) is going to do whatever they can, including use the horn wrong.
Blasting the horn repeatedly is not a standard signal, but there are standard signals which might apply to a situation like this, for example "vessel not under command", "collision imminent", "vessel reversing", etc.
Don't expect car drivers on the bridge to understand ship signals, though.
Also, how does the driver know what to do? Stopping on the bridge, even well before the point where the ship hit, was clearly the wrong choice. Authorities need to stop new cars from entering the bridge while those on it leave, but that takes more than a handful of seconds to arrange. Unless there are traffic lights, perhaps.
Yes, there's no reason for a ship to attempt to signal drivers on a bridge, nor is there any way for them to do so. Signals are for communicating to other ships.
How much of this is falls on the protocols of the shipping company? I.e. the same shipping companies that gouged the planet during covid - did they strip away safety protocols in order for profits/expediency?
Is this similar to Boeing for the shipping world? I realize it is early to come to any conclusions.
The question of this being a rare one off vs container companies deprioritizing safety protocols is what I am interested. The power failures make me go down this logic of thought.
Boeing makes and sells planes, they don't fly people.
Maersk/ZIM rent container ships from another company who makes them and drive them around.
These are completely different companies. A more correct comparison would be something like Jetblue or American Airlines.
But I seriously doubt there is the result of some kind of profit hungry CEO. However I cannot with 100% say it's not until we find more details. But I feel confident enough to avoid the tin foil hat.
#/media/File:Skyway_Bridge_old_and_new.jpg){kind=link}
He says that at about 1:24 AM the ship loses power (from video feed) while traveling 8.5 knots.
at 1:25.30 power is restored.
at 12:25.59 the ship shows smoke. The ship has already drifted in the channel. It is believed that at this time the ship applied full reverse power as evidenced by the black smoke. (My analysis: the ship drifted but hasn't turned in the channel, more of a translation)
By 1:26.45 the ship has obviously turned in the channel pointing at the pier. Full reverse would cause prop walk to change heading angle;
1:28.52 impact at 7.6 Knots. Camera says 1:28.52, AIS reports the ship still moving at 1:29:35
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N39w6aQFKSQ