35 ms·

'Ghost ship' washes up on Irish coast

128 points by RijilV 7y ago

ChuckMcM 7y ago
One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite on these things to report back their position once a day once it has been abandoned. Something like that should be able to run for a couple of years at least. Maritime salvage law is always interesting as it feels like it was mostly written in the 1600 and 1700's :-)
- ultimoo 7y ago
  Yep, exactly what I was thinking. Add a small solar panel and it could probably function for a decade.
  - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
    I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then. There's very little intersection between hardware that would last in those conditions and would be cheap enough that coast guards would be willing to just leave it on a ship. Or maybe I'm underestimating the budget of the Coast Guard, but leaving this thing adrift in the first place seems to indicate otherwise...
    - Seenso 7y ago
      > One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite on these things to report back their position once a day once it has been abandoned. Something like that should be able to run for a couple of years at least. >> Yep, exactly what I was thinking. Add a small solar panel and it could probably function for a decade. > I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then. A solar powered GPS beacon may be an exception to that rule. Couldn't you just encase the beacon electronics and the solar panel in a hunk of clear epoxy potting [1], and then secure the thing to the deck with stainless steel screws? For an application like this, it's probably sufficient that the beacon only operate during daylight hours, so you probably don't even need a battery. I don't imagine the electronics would cost much more than that for a PLB [2], so we're talking somewhere in the ballpark of $500. The main expense would be the receiving satellite and sending a helicopter to the ship for installation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics) [2] https://www.rei.com/c/personal-locator-beacons https://www.rei.com/c/personal-locator-beacons
      - shiftpgdn 7y ago
        Even stainless steel will probably fail in the ocean. The sea is an absurdly harsh environment. Look up sacrificial anodes or ultra high corrosion resistant alloys to get an idea of what you need to keep stuff going even for just a few years.
        dasv 7y ago
        We had a monitoring unit in a heavy aluminum box on a buoy a couple km off Biscay (the HARSHLab, heh...) that lasted half a year, until the stainless bolts corroded against the aluminum and the lid flew right off. Polycarbonate boxes have worked better for us.
        shiftpgdn 7y ago
        Won't the polycarbonate suffer UV degradation?
    - ChuckMcM 7y ago
      I agree with you that ocean beacons are treated harshly. That said, we have an interesting exemplar of a battery powered beacon that reports in daily in the NOAA sea buoy transponder package.
    - dasv 7y ago
      Tuna radar buoys are dropped regularly in the sea, and are quite a bit north of $500, I believe. They are not expected to be recovered, work completely off solar, and are closed solid. You need a magnet to turn them on through a reed switch, they don't even have a hole for a button to prevent water ingress.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  In addition to that, it feels like the navy / coast guard could drop that GPS beacon off when they rescue the crew and have a live map that shows the vessels set adrift so that others can avoid hitting them, especially in a storm. Vessel ID and size, GPS coordinates and notify the owner to go pick it up.
  - FillardMillmore 7y ago
    Interesting idea, it sounds like it would certainly be technically possible. But what about the legality? If an owner can't be readily identified, would there be any legal problem with a foreign government placing a GPS beacon on a derelict ship? As others have pointed out, maritime law can be somewhat antiquated in ways, perhaps this is a legal grey zone?
    - LinuxBender 7y ago
      I don't know maritime law, but it looks like the law of salvage kicks in? [1] Hopefully one of the surviving rescued crew could offer hints as to the owner or shipping company. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage
      - lb1lf 7y ago
        The crew are (were) paid by a crewing agency, typically providing a crew to the charterer, who finds a ship from some shipowner or other to offer freight services to commercial clients. The shipowner is invariably located in a PO Box in a jurisdiction which makes Swiss banks seem downright extrovert; however, this is just a shell company controlled by an opaque holding company, &c. Global shipping is a rather murky business, designed to facilitate tax and responsibility avoidance. If this sounds interesting, investigative journalist Ian Urbina published a most informative (and scary) book on the subject last year - Outlaw Ocean.
        FillardMillmore 7y ago
        That book does sound interesting, thanks for the recommendation. Though the global shipping industry is not usually what I read about in my leisure time, this sounds like a worthwhile venture.
- mywacaday 7y ago
  This came ashore only a few miles from where I live, apparently there is a lot of confusion over who even owns the boat, media is saying it was stolen twice, US coast guard tried to identify owner when the crew was initially rescued.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Commercial shipping is one of the shadier businesses out there for sure, nothing should surprise about opaque ownership schemes.
    - itismetheidiot 7y ago
      this was resolved mostly after the PRESTIGE incident and now shipping is no more or less as shady as all other major industries. The Flag Administrations have records of the beneficiary Owners and you can go to http://www.equasis.org/ http://www.equasis.org/ and get plenty of information about the Owners of the vessel.
      - lostlogin 7y ago
        > shipping is no more or less as shady as all other major industries. The more I think about this the worse it sounds. Big oil, car manufacturing, aviation, big tech companies, big pharma and agricultural companies. As soon as you think of a big industry you recall a recent or ongoing scandal. It’s grim.
- smoyer 7y ago
  Adding an AIS transponder to that kit would also be a great way to enhance safety - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    AIS transmits much more frequently usually between 3 minutes and 2 seconds depending on speed. [0] AIS is also supplemental and basically every large vessel will have radar available that will spot these kinds of dead drifting ships. [0] Large 300 ton+ ships are type A: https://help.marinetraffic.com/hc/en-us/articles/217631867-How-often-do-the-positions-of-the-vessels-get-updated-on-MarineTraffic- https://help.marinetraffic.com/hc/en-us/articles/217631867-H...
    - smoyer 7y ago
      True ... but there are thousands of us that sail (sailed) small yachts which have a more limited range if they have radar at all (power consumption and antenna height cause certain restrictions). AIS on the other hand works great and also integrates with chart plotters for collision alarm with relatively small amounts of power. Small yacht sailors generally assume that cargo vessels will NOT try to avoid them, so having the ship continue on its (drifting) course wouldn't be too surprising.
      - drcross 7y ago
        I had a small AIS transponder on my 30 foot boat. All smart and prudent skippers will have one now that the tech is so cheap.
      - rtkwe 7y ago
        I realize I half finished my thought the main issue with adding AIS is the increased frequency increases power draw means you need a larger battery for this beacon. Either that or a solar panel which is more expensive and would get grimy over time and eventually fail.
- luckydata 7y ago
  A lot of things can be done, the problem is getting countries to be responsible about it and implement sane laws. This is not a technological problem.
- toomanybeersies 7y ago
  I don't think that ships are abandoned and properly lost at sea very often. It's uncommon enough that it was on the front page of the BBC news website, and it's on the front page of HN.
- josteink 7y ago
  > One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite What do you mean by GPS beacon? It gets a GPS-position and transmits it... where? Using what carrier? You do have AIS already, and it is absolutely battery-operable, but I’m not sure to what extent the equipment is battery operated in the real world. A typical aid transmitter
- thdrdt 7y ago
  When the crew is rescued from a ship I can imagine they see the ship as lost and it is probably going to sink. Because that's why they rescued the crew in the first place. So GPS won't help much. But I can imagine an other kind of beacon could be useful to recover things from the sunken ship.
- dasv 7y ago
  My company [1] is developing a solution just like this one, with added inertial monitoring. It is meant for studying a vessel's or a platform's maximals movements at sea remotely, for fuel consumption optimization in principle, but it is also useful for black box purposes. It does not use AIS but Iridium, so the device can relay custom information. In this case, it could have been useful to know about the vessel's health from how it was moving: it would have been very easy to know if it was going to sink if it would have begun to list to one side permanently, for example. It would have been just a matter of dropping our box and a big solar panel on deck. [1] http://core-marine.com http://core-marine.com
pvaldes 7y ago
Saving dismantling expenses like a pro. Trow it into the nature and now is problem of another people.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Dismantling expenses should be a negative number for any mostly metal structure other than a nuclear reactor. All that steel is worth something.
  - growlist 7y ago
    Ships are often full of asbestos, hydraulic fluid, poisonous bilge etc., not to mention this one has been floating around without upkeep so might be structurally dubious. It's not as simple as 1. Climb onto ship 2. Fire up blowtorch 3. Profit
    - iguy 7y ago
      Sure, but there's an industry which does this. Although whether their price would pay for towing it from Ireland to Bangladesh or wherever, I have no idea. Edit: turns out there are more places doing this in Europe than I realised (and in Turkey). There's a map here: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/ships/list.htm https://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/ships/list.htm
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        Should only need to tow it to Turkey (I know for a fact there are marine salvage yards there) or maybe Libya (they probably have a few as well). There's no lack of more local (than the far east) places to scrap a ship, probably environmentally cleaner to do it locally too.
      - mattmanser 7y ago
        No, there's an industry that claims to do this, just like there was an industry for global plastic until the Chinese government shut it down because it was essentially a scam.
LeifCarrotson 7y ago
> Normally, damaged or sunken ships remain the property of their owners, who are responsible for securing a solution... Sounds like that was written on behalf of public companies who imagined they'd always want to assert their ownership rights. It was not written while mindful of the possibility of anonymous LLCs who have a salvage bill, an environmental problem, and rescue operations expenses tied to the ship and would rather it sank in the middle of the ocean...
- jessaustin 7y ago
  If that's what they would rather, they should have scuttled it before now...
Animats 7y ago
Well, Ireland still has a Receiver of Wrecks. It's their problem now. Any of the big salvage companies, Titan or Smit or Mammoet, can deal with such a wreck if paid to do so. It's expensive, but routine. Ireland has local salvage companies, too. Once it's decided who pays the bill, one of them will probably be brought into deal with the mess.
- core-questions 7y ago
  So there's no value in the ship itself that makes the salvage a profitable operation?
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    Probably not, if it made commercial sense the law of salvage already makes that option available. It might conceivably matter that the wreck is now in a somewhat more convenient place rather than the middle of the ocean, but probably it's just too low value for it to be economic to volunteer. Somebody will have to get paid explicitly to tidy this up.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    The ship probably has value, the potential lawsuits regarding how it came and went probably eclipse that. Once you touch it whoever feels wronged is gonna try and lay claim to any money you made scrapping it and whether or not you win you get tied up in court doesn't really matter, it's still the last thing you want to do in a low margin industry. This is one ship, you're not gonna make a ton of money off it, not worth screwing with for most entities capable of scrapping it. Whatever town this washed up on is gonna have to pay to get rid of it. I'm sure some teenagers will find the time to steal some souvenirs before that happens though.
    - sjg007 7y ago
      That's not how it works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage
iamthebot 7y ago
Can't they just ask the crew who the owner is?
- lb1lf 7y ago
  The crew won't know; they are supplied by a crewing agency acting on behalf of the charterer acting on behalf of &c. Really - it is quite common for mariners not to know who the owner is.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Pretty common for most employees to have no idea.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Really? That's incredibly weird.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  From TFA: So what's the story behind this mysterious ship without a crew? This is actually the meaning of the term "ghost ship".
joe_the_user 7y ago
Basically, it's a race-to-the-bottom as far as responsibility for the externalities [1] of ship-based transportation goes. Why does Bolivia, a land-locked, third world nations "have one of the largest commercial fleets in the world"[2]. If responsibility for the negative parts of shipping can be shifted indefinitely, it means it never goes into costs, which facilitates trade and "wage arbitrage" [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_labor_arbitrage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_labor_arbitrage
- PostOnce 7y ago
  Bolivia was not always landlocked, and very much still resents losing its coastline to Chile during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific They would like to regain control of said coastline. In fact, they have a holiday to commemorate said loss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%ADa_del_Mar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%ADa_del_Mar https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2015/05/09/beaches-of-the-future https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2015/05/09/beaches-of...
  - dgemm 7y ago
    They still have a navy, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivian_Navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivian_Navy
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    Wouldn’t Bolivia have been a relatively new country in 1880? Like a multiple of years have passed since that time than before?
    - karatinversion 7y ago
      Roughly the same ratio in Bolivia's history as the Civil War is in the United States'. Some people still make a big deal out of that.
NwmG 7y ago
if anyone is interested in this topic of how these things happen and the general lawlessness of the seas due to tragedy of the commons I highly recommend Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina
- rezgi 7y ago
  Thanks, that looks like an interesting read after I'm done with Sandworm by Andy Greenberg (also a good read)
_bxg1 7y ago
> Various authorities had become aware of its aimless drift around the world. It was last spotted in September 2019 by a British Royal Navy ship. I wonder if the mythological archetype of the "ghost ship" originated from cases like this: unidentified, unmanned ships roaming the seas on their own, in a time before there was a global record of abandoned ships. Doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to assume they're crewed by ghosts.
mothsonasloth 7y ago
On coastal Scotland we get all sorts of things washing up thanks to the Gulf Stream; from the ubiquitous coconut, to political placards from Jamaica.
BetaCygni 7y ago
It turns out the premise of the brilliant game "Return of the Obra Dinn" was not unrealistic at all. Highly recommended! https://obradinn.com/ https://obradinn.com/

128 points by RijilV 7y ago

One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite on these things to report back their position once a day once it has been abandoned. Something like that should be able to run for a couple of years at least. Maritime salvage law is always interesting as it feels like it was mostly written in the 1600 and 1700's :-)

ultimoo 7y ago
Yep, exactly what I was thinking. Add a small solar panel and it could probably function for a decade.
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then. There's very little intersection between hardware that would last in those conditions and would be cheap enough that coast guards would be willing to just leave it on a ship. Or maybe I'm underestimating the budget of the Coast Guard, but leaving this thing adrift in the first place seems to indicate otherwise...
  - Seenso 7y ago
    > One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite on these things to report back their position once a day once it has been abandoned. Something like that should be able to run for a couple of years at least. >> Yep, exactly what I was thinking. Add a small solar panel and it could probably function for a decade. > I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then. A solar powered GPS beacon may be an exception to that rule. Couldn't you just encase the beacon electronics and the solar panel in a hunk of clear epoxy potting [1], and then secure the thing to the deck with stainless steel screws? For an application like this, it's probably sufficient that the beacon only operate during daylight hours, so you probably don't even need a battery. I don't imagine the electronics would cost much more than that for a PLB [2], so we're talking somewhere in the ballpark of $500. The main expense would be the receiving satellite and sending a helicopter to the ship for installation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics) [2] https://www.rei.com/c/personal-locator-beacons https://www.rei.com/c/personal-locator-beacons
    - shiftpgdn 7y ago
      Even stainless steel will probably fail in the ocean. The sea is an absurdly harsh environment. Look up sacrificial anodes or ultra high corrosion resistant alloys to get an idea of what you need to keep stuff going even for just a few years.
      - dasv 7y ago
        We had a monitoring unit in a heavy aluminum box on a buoy a couple km off Biscay (the HARSHLab, heh...) that lasted half a year, until the stainless bolts corroded against the aluminum and the lid flew right off. Polycarbonate boxes have worked better for us.
        shiftpgdn 7y ago
        Won't the polycarbonate suffer UV degradation?
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    I agree with you that ocean beacons are treated harshly. That said, we have an interesting exemplar of a battery powered beacon that reports in daily in the NOAA sea buoy transponder package.
  - dasv 7y ago
    Tuna radar buoys are dropped regularly in the sea, and are quite a bit north of $500, I believe. They are not expected to be recovered, work completely off solar, and are closed solid. You need a magnet to turn them on through a reed switch, they don't even have a hole for a button to prevent water ingress.
LinuxBender 7y ago
In addition to that, it feels like the navy / coast guard could drop that GPS beacon off when they rescue the crew and have a live map that shows the vessels set adrift so that others can avoid hitting them, especially in a storm. Vessel ID and size, GPS coordinates and notify the owner to go pick it up.
- FillardMillmore 7y ago
  Interesting idea, it sounds like it would certainly be technically possible. But what about the legality? If an owner can't be readily identified, would there be any legal problem with a foreign government placing a GPS beacon on a derelict ship? As others have pointed out, maritime law can be somewhat antiquated in ways, perhaps this is a legal grey zone?
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    I don't know maritime law, but it looks like the law of salvage kicks in? [1] Hopefully one of the surviving rescued crew could offer hints as to the owner or shipping company. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage
    - lb1lf 7y ago
      The crew are (were) paid by a crewing agency, typically providing a crew to the charterer, who finds a ship from some shipowner or other to offer freight services to commercial clients. The shipowner is invariably located in a PO Box in a jurisdiction which makes Swiss banks seem downright extrovert; however, this is just a shell company controlled by an opaque holding company, &c. Global shipping is a rather murky business, designed to facilitate tax and responsibility avoidance. If this sounds interesting, investigative journalist Ian Urbina published a most informative (and scary) book on the subject last year - Outlaw Ocean.
      - FillardMillmore 7y ago
        That book does sound interesting, thanks for the recommendation. Though the global shipping industry is not usually what I read about in my leisure time, this sounds like a worthwhile venture.
mywacaday 7y ago
This came ashore only a few miles from where I live, apparently there is a lot of confusion over who even owns the boat, media is saying it was stolen twice, US coast guard tried to identify owner when the crew was initially rescued.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Commercial shipping is one of the shadier businesses out there for sure, nothing should surprise about opaque ownership schemes.
  - itismetheidiot 7y ago
    this was resolved mostly after the PRESTIGE incident and now shipping is no more or less as shady as all other major industries. The Flag Administrations have records of the beneficiary Owners and you can go to http://www.equasis.org/ http://www.equasis.org/ and get plenty of information about the Owners of the vessel.
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      > shipping is no more or less as shady as all other major industries. The more I think about this the worse it sounds. Big oil, car manufacturing, aviation, big tech companies, big pharma and agricultural companies. As soon as you think of a big industry you recall a recent or ongoing scandal. It’s grim.
smoyer 7y ago
Adding an AIS transponder to that kit would also be a great way to enhance safety - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
- rtkwe 7y ago
  AIS transmits much more frequently usually between 3 minutes and 2 seconds depending on speed. [0] AIS is also supplemental and basically every large vessel will have radar available that will spot these kinds of dead drifting ships. [0] Large 300 ton+ ships are type A: https://help.marinetraffic.com/hc/en-us/articles/217631867-How-often-do-the-positions-of-the-vessels-get-updated-on-MarineTraffic- https://help.marinetraffic.com/hc/en-us/articles/217631867-H...
  - smoyer 7y ago
    True ... but there are thousands of us that sail (sailed) small yachts which have a more limited range if they have radar at all (power consumption and antenna height cause certain restrictions). AIS on the other hand works great and also integrates with chart plotters for collision alarm with relatively small amounts of power. Small yacht sailors generally assume that cargo vessels will NOT try to avoid them, so having the ship continue on its (drifting) course wouldn't be too surprising.
    - drcross 7y ago
      I had a small AIS transponder on my 30 foot boat. All smart and prudent skippers will have one now that the tech is so cheap.
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      I realize I half finished my thought the main issue with adding AIS is the increased frequency increases power draw means you need a larger battery for this beacon. Either that or a solar panel which is more expensive and would get grimy over time and eventually fail.
luckydata 7y ago
A lot of things can be done, the problem is getting countries to be responsible about it and implement sane laws. This is not a technological problem.
toomanybeersies 7y ago
I don't think that ships are abandoned and properly lost at sea very often. It's uncommon enough that it was on the front page of the BBC news website, and it's on the front page of HN.
josteink 7y ago
> One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite What do you mean by GPS beacon? It gets a GPS-position and transmits it... where? Using what carrier? You do have AIS already, and it is absolutely battery-operable, but I’m not sure to what extent the equipment is battery operated in the real world. A typical aid transmitter
thdrdt 7y ago
When the crew is rescued from a ship I can imagine they see the ship as lost and it is probably going to sink. Because that's why they rescued the crew in the first place. So GPS won't help much. But I can imagine an other kind of beacon could be useful to recover things from the sunken ship.
dasv 7y ago
My company [1] is developing a solution just like this one, with added inertial monitoring. It is meant for studying a vessel's or a platform's maximals movements at sea remotely, for fuel consumption optimization in principle, but it is also useful for black box purposes. It does not use AIS but Iridium, so the device can relay custom information. In this case, it could have been useful to know about the vessel's health from how it was moving: it would have been very easy to know if it was going to sink if it would have begun to list to one side permanently, for example. It would have been just a matter of dropping our box and a big solar panel on deck. [1] http://core-marine.com http://core-marine.com

pvaldes 7y ago

Saving dismantling expenses like a pro. Trow it into the nature and now is problem of another people.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Dismantling expenses should be a negative number for any mostly metal structure other than a nuclear reactor. All that steel is worth something.
- growlist 7y ago
  Ships are often full of asbestos, hydraulic fluid, poisonous bilge etc., not to mention this one has been floating around without upkeep so might be structurally dubious. It's not as simple as 1. Climb onto ship 2. Fire up blowtorch 3. Profit
  - iguy 7y ago
    Sure, but there's an industry which does this. Although whether their price would pay for towing it from Ireland to Bangladesh or wherever, I have no idea. Edit: turns out there are more places doing this in Europe than I realised (and in Turkey). There's a map here: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/ships/list.htm https://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/ships/list.htm
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Should only need to tow it to Turkey (I know for a fact there are marine salvage yards there) or maybe Libya (they probably have a few as well). There's no lack of more local (than the far east) places to scrap a ship, probably environmentally cleaner to do it locally too.
    - mattmanser 7y ago
      No, there's an industry that claims to do this, just like there was an industry for global plastic until the Chinese government shut it down because it was essentially a scam.

LeifCarrotson 7y ago

> Normally, damaged or sunken ships remain the property of their owners, who are responsible for securing a solution... Sounds like that was written on behalf of public companies who imagined they'd always want to assert their ownership rights. It was not written while mindful of the possibility of anonymous LLCs who have a salvage bill, an environmental problem, and rescue operations expenses tied to the ship and would rather it sank in the middle of the ocean...

jessaustin 7y ago
If that's what they would rather, they should have scuttled it before now...

Animats 7y ago

Well, Ireland still has a Receiver of Wrecks. It's their problem now. Any of the big salvage companies, Titan or Smit or Mammoet, can deal with such a wreck if paid to do so. It's expensive, but routine. Ireland has local salvage companies, too. Once it's decided who pays the bill, one of them will probably be brought into deal with the mess.

core-questions 7y ago
So there's no value in the ship itself that makes the salvage a profitable operation?
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Probably not, if it made commercial sense the law of salvage already makes that option available. It might conceivably matter that the wreck is now in a somewhat more convenient place rather than the middle of the ocean, but probably it's just too low value for it to be economic to volunteer. Somebody will have to get paid explicitly to tidy this up.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  The ship probably has value, the potential lawsuits regarding how it came and went probably eclipse that. Once you touch it whoever feels wronged is gonna try and lay claim to any money you made scrapping it and whether or not you win you get tied up in court doesn't really matter, it's still the last thing you want to do in a low margin industry. This is one ship, you're not gonna make a ton of money off it, not worth screwing with for most entities capable of scrapping it. Whatever town this washed up on is gonna have to pay to get rid of it. I'm sure some teenagers will find the time to steal some souvenirs before that happens though.
  - sjg007 7y ago
    That's not how it works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage

iamthebot 7y ago

Can't they just ask the crew who the owner is?

lb1lf 7y ago
The crew won't know; they are supplied by a crewing agency acting on behalf of the charterer acting on behalf of &c. Really - it is quite common for mariners not to know who the owner is.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Pretty common for most employees to have no idea.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Really? That's incredibly weird.
jessaustin 7y ago
From TFA: So what's the story behind this mysterious ship without a crew? This is actually the meaning of the term "ghost ship".

joe_the_user 7y ago

Basically, it's a race-to-the-bottom as far as responsibility for the externalities [1] of ship-based transportation goes. Why does Bolivia, a land-locked, third world nations "have one of the largest commercial fleets in the world"[2]. If responsibility for the negative parts of shipping can be shifted indefinitely, it means it never goes into costs, which facilitates trade and "wage arbitrage" [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_convenience [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_labor_arbitrage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_labor_arbitrage

PostOnce 7y ago
Bolivia was not always landlocked, and very much still resents losing its coastline to Chile during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific They would like to regain control of said coastline. In fact, they have a holiday to commemorate said loss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%ADa_del_Mar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%ADa_del_Mar https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2015/05/09/beaches-of-the-future https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2015/05/09/beaches-of...
- dgemm 7y ago
  They still have a navy, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivian_Navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivian_Navy
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Wouldn’t Bolivia have been a relatively new country in 1880? Like a multiple of years have passed since that time than before?
  - karatinversion 7y ago
    Roughly the same ratio in Bolivia's history as the Civil War is in the United States'. Some people still make a big deal out of that.

NwmG 7y ago

if anyone is interested in this topic of how these things happen and the general lawlessness of the seas due to tragedy of the commons I highly recommend Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina

rezgi 7y ago
Thanks, that looks like an interesting read after I'm done with Sandworm by Andy Greenberg (also a good read)

_bxg1 7y ago

> Various authorities had become aware of its aimless drift around the world. It was last spotted in September 2019 by a British Royal Navy ship. I wonder if the mythological archetype of the "ghost ship" originated from cases like this: unidentified, unmanned ships roaming the seas on their own, in a time before there was a global record of abandoned ships. Doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to assume they're crewed by ghosts.

mothsonasloth 7y ago

On coastal Scotland we get all sorts of things washing up thanks to the Gulf Stream; from the ubiquitous coconut, to political placards from Jamaica.

BetaCygni 7y ago

It turns out the premise of the brilliant game "Return of the Obra Dinn" was not unrealistic at all. Highly recommended! https://obradinn.com/ https://obradinn.com/