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?
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.