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.
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.
Edit2: Bloomberg has an economic look including info on autos. ~$500 million in March 2024 so far. Honda, Mercedes, Subaru likely worst hit. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJmvXiCWkAAgDcE?format=png&name=...
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.
Baltimore StreamTime also has live view with ongoing discussion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83a7h3kkgPg