Container Ship Breaks In Two, Sinks 361
Cliff Stoll writes "Along with 7000 containers, ship MOL Comfort broke in half in high seas in the Indian Ocean. The aft section floated for a week, then sank on June 27th. The forward section was towed most of the way to port, but burned and sank on July 10th. This post-panamax ship was 316 meters long and only 5 years old. With a typical value of $40,000 per container (PDF), this amounts to a quarter billion dollar loss. The cause is unknown, but may be structural or perhaps due to overfilled containers that are declared as underweight. Of course, the software used to calculate ship stability relies upon these incorrect physical parameters."
Titanic? (Score:2, Insightful)
Together with her sister ships, MOL Comfort was the first container ship classified by Nippon Kaiji Kyokai to utilize ultra high-strength steel with an yield strength of 470 MPa in her hull structure.
Stiff brittle ship snaps like golf club in heavy seas?
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Save a dime, Lose millions. (Score:3, Insightful)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes... because the shipping company doesn't worry at all about overloaded containers or ships at all.
We'll just ignore the massive costs should go something go wrong that they are oblivious to in your world.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:5, Insightful)
because the shipping company doesn't worry at all about overloaded containers or ships at all.
Why should they? They're insured.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, +/- 1000 pounds would probably be good enough, and even that might be more sensitive than actually needed. A typical shipping container weighs on the order of ~30,000-50,000 pounds (~15,000-25,000 kg). A ship isn't going to sink because a declared-as-40,000 lb container was actually 40,050 lbs. Even if a company loading 1,000 containers systemically mis-declared by 50 lbs and they all got loaded in some asymmetrical way, that'd still only be a 50,000 lbs error, equal to about one shipping container. A modern cargo ship is not going to sink because of an asymmetric load, or an over-load, equal to one shipping container.
If underdeclaring weight became a stability problem sufficient to sink the ship, my guess is that a substantial number of the containers were reporting numbers way off the real values.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:2, Insightful)
> Why should they? They're insured.
Wow you're dumb.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't think the insurance company might have a problem with this? If the shipping company was insured, the insurance company will eventually step in and demand the shipping company fix the issue or start denying claims. If the shipping company wasn't insured, well... they end up going out of business. Either way, the problem is self correcting over the long term.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:4, Insightful)
The theory about self-regulation works just fine. It just doesn't stand up so well, when governments step in and bail out the industries and or insurance companies.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you could stand to learn a lot more about insurance.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because businesses are run by people, and people aren't rational.
The *rational* thing to do is make sure your ships are safe so that you don't waste a quarter billion dollars. However, since it's *unlikely* that a ship will sink, people in pursuit of immediate profits overload them. People love playing the odds.
Also, absent any real numbers about how much extra money companies can make by slipping on tons of extra cargo, you can't say for sure that this *isn't* more profitable than doing things safely. That is, if you practice Randian amoral rationality, it may actually be the *rational* choice to load your ships up so much they occasionally break in half, because it might ultimately save you money.
Hogging (Score:5, Insightful)
It looks to me more likely the problem was excessive weight at the bow and stern rather then midships, the effect is called hogging and is a known way to snap a container ship (or oil tanker) in half, both have occured in the past.
Basically the keel (The BIG beam running all the way from bow to stern down the bottom of the hull) can only take so much sheer stress and if the weight distribution does not match the localised boyancy implied by the current displacement you can very easily bend the ship.
If and how it came to be loaded that way will be one of the things on the investigators list.
There is of course software used to look at this stuff but it cannot realistically be run on the dock during a very tight turnaround, so the declared weights are used as the only data available in advance of starting loading. Not only does that mess of linear algebra have to give a fully loaded ship with the centre of mass and moment of inertia in the right regions (Important for stability and handling), it must also ensure that the total cargo mass per linear meter is roughly the same as the boyancy of that meter of wetted hull at all times during the loading.
Further shippers will sometimes pay a premium for say not having a can of high value goods put in a corner on top of a stack where it is somewhat more likely to be lost, and some of those cans may be 'reefers' (Refridgerated containers) requiring both power and ventilation to remove waste heat, the problem swiftly becomes complex, doubly so as the ports stacking order also feeds into this if you want loading to go smoothly.
A nasty accident, but nobody died, and the hull and cargo will have been insured, so a better outcome then is sometimes the case.
Hope that explains why it is not just about total weight.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:4, Insightful)
What I find surprising is that you'd even be able to buy/operate container lift cranes that don't provide feedback on the weight of items they are lifting.
That's a big, expensive, high-throughput, piece of capital equipment; and if it breaks down outside of a scheduled service window, there's a strong possibility that a container port, one or more shipping companies, and whoever owns the stuff in the containers is going to be giving the crane operator, and the poor maintenance minions, hell until it's fixed and the disruption is cleared.
When my $50 POS hard drive is monitoring a dozen-ish variables to try to predict its own death so as to avoid inconveniencing me, I'd have assumed that a container crane would be providing all sorts of feedback on power consumption, motor condition, strain on various important bits of the structure, etc, etc. such that it would be fairly trivial math for the crane operator to automatically compute the approximate weight of each container loaded as they load it.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:5, Insightful)
The theory about self-regulation works just fine. It just doesn't stand up so well, when governments step in and bail out the industries and or insurance companies.
Then I guess it worked real well in the 19th century, when governments didn't step in and bail out the industries and or insurance companies. Except it didn't.
Oh, I know, I know! It works in the Platonic ideal of a libertarian paradise! To the extent that it doesn't work in our reality, it cannot not mean that there is anything wrong with the theory. Rather it must mean that we've deviated from that ideal world in some way, and must pay for our sins.
Libertarianism: being based on axioms, how can it be wrong?!
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you for listing the ways in which self-regulation doesn't work. If it worked, then all those penalties should have been more than enough for them not to be so careless with the ship. The idea of regulation is to prevent problems, not to factor into some after the fact "they'll pay their dues" calculus.
Re:Declared underweight? (Score:4, Insightful)
A town in Quebec was just last week blown up due to deregulation allowing the railroad to self-regulate. While it's true the railroad will go out of business so will most of the businesses in that town not to mention the 50+ people killed. The businesses depending on the railroad may also go out of business as well.
For some reason people want to have the railroads regulated now.