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> But really if we don't want accidents like this to happen the ship should have redundancy. A 10,000 TEU container ship is one of the largest and heaviest movi

by mlyle 3y ago

> But really if we don't want accidents like this to happen the ship should have redundancy. A 10,000 TEU container ship is one of the largest and heaviest moving structures ever created by man. Why is it acceptable that it is driven by exactly one engine powering one screw in front of one rudder? Perhaps because we have a whole lot of them going and a very low frequency of events like this. Maybe there's some lighter weight interventions we could do that would further halve the risk of something like this happening that are less costly than fully redundant engine and drive. They're supposed to have emergency steering gear. Why didn't it work? Maybe ships should have an auxiliary genset running while near land.

jordanb 3y ago
> Perhaps because we have a whole lot of them going and a very low frequency of events like this. This is literally the second major loss of control/allision incident this month. https://www.tradewindsnews.com/casualties/out-of-control-container-ship-crashes-into-three-cranes/2-1-1613625 https://www.tradewindsnews.com/casualties/out-of-control-con...
- pests 3y ago
  Seems pretty low to me. How many is too many?
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    Do we need kindergartens to be safe? How many dead kids is too many? /s Seriously, in England it is a legal requirement to have redundant brakes on a freaking bicycle. A dude that hit a grandma with a bicycle due to 1 non-functional brake went to prison. But a giant container ship needs nothing? What is the cost of fixing this bridge and + lost lifetime earning of all the people who dies + compensation to their families? Is that really cheaper than installing batteries plus electric motor? Now imagine this ship would hit a bridge in daytime, when it’s clogged with traffic?
    - whats_a_quasar 3y ago
      Cost/benefit analyses are just a fact of life. I see your point, but without really considering the question we don't know what the proper response is. It is not obvious to me that we need to mandate backup power systems, there are an awful lot of ships entering ports around the world each day and very few bridge collapses.
      - pests 3y ago
        Its not obvious to me either. Let alone the opportunity cost.
      - lenerdenator 3y ago
        The problem is that the bridge collapses that do happen are just catastrophic. The economic impact alone will be massive for Baltimore. But will the responsible parties pay out that damage in full? Unlikely. Cost-benefit analyses aren't designed to evaluate the total risk a business venture presents to everyone who could possibly be involved; they're designed to evaluate the risk posed by a problem that will launch lawsuits that will play out in courts for years, if not decades. Meanwhile, some injured parties settle for pennies on the dollar, laws change, and in the absolute worst-case scenario, major shareholders draw down their positions in the corporate venture that caused the problem. The world keeps on spinning, and just maybe some regulatory agency will pay attention to the report issued by the likes of the NTSB and USCG. The process does not adequately protect the public.
        lazide 3y ago
        Regulations are written in blood, because trying to make everything safe pre-emptively is impossible economically for a number of reasons. Primarily being, you can’t (usually) realistically force people to spend the money on something that isn’t clearly an actual problem. And that fundamentally means until someone ‘bleeds’/a big enough disaster happens, some things won’t get fixed. See the triangle shirt waist factory for an example of what it took to be able to force people to pay for certain kinds of fixes. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_...] Since folks aren’t currently burning down the NTSB’s offices or the like, it also seems like your opinion that the public is not currently adequately protected isn’t a majority one? The only way we’ll ever hit zero accidents is if we are all dead, it’s impossible to do anything without some risk.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - EasyMark 3y ago
    at this rate it won't be hard to knock out several more major ports by the end of the year.
    - pests 3y ago
      What rate? 1 a decade? Or longer? When was the last time this happened?
- peteradio 3y ago
  Conspiracy... some adversary is waiting for opportunities during unfavorable/aberrant conditions and triggering simple failures at impossibly inopportune times. Without any redundancy, conditions it looks like a freak accident. It would be interesting if you could come up with a likelihood for each conditions to have overlapped temporally. If someone comes to the conclusion that its possible to create the triggered failures it would be prudent to forbid sailing in conditions that might lead to these supposed "fly under the radar attacks".
zrm 3y ago
> Maybe there's some lighter weight interventions we could do that would further halve the risk of something like this happening that are less costly than fully redundant engine and drive. Redundancy doesn't inherently have to cost a lot more. For example, if you have three engines driving three props, they can each be 1/3 as large, and not necessarily weigh much more if at all. But then if you lose one, you lose 1/3 power rather than experiencing total loss of control.
- mlyle 3y ago
  > Redundancy doesn't inherently have to cost a lot more. For example, if you have three engines driving three props, they can each be 1/3 as large, and not necessarily weigh much more if at all. Yah, from aviation everyone moved to twins because tri-jets and four engine jets were too expensive in comparison. Things don't scale up or down perfectly; in practice you end up with more maintenance. But it seems like here they lost steering, so maybe there's something better we can do to keep steering more of the time (the cutover to emergency steering gear isn't instantaneous or perfect).
  - EasyMark 3y ago
    but two engine jets can fly on one engine for a while, however a one engine boat this big is an uncontrolled juggernaut when it has some speed and no engine because it doesn't have any redundancy.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      Sure, I'm not saying what the ideal trade-off is. I'm just saying: - The current accident rate due to lack of redundancy isn't too awful. - Adding redundancy increases cost, even when it seems like you have the same total power or whatever. My bias is towards a bit more redundancy than we have now, but not massive changes.
    - hanche 3y ago
      > but two engine jets can fly on one engine for a while Not just for a while. They must be able to do so indefinitely, until you run out of fuel. Of course, you are going to want to get it back on the ground long before that happens.

by mlyle 3y ago

jordanb 3y ago

> Perhaps because we have a whole lot of them going and a very low frequency of events like this. This is literally the second major loss of control/allision incident this month. https://www.tradewindsnews.com/casualties/out-of-control-container-ship-crashes-into-three-cranes/2-1-1613625 https://www.tradewindsnews.com/casualties/out-of-control-con...

pests 3y ago
Seems pretty low to me. How many is too many?
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  Do we need kindergartens to be safe? How many dead kids is too many? /s Seriously, in England it is a legal requirement to have redundant brakes on a freaking bicycle. A dude that hit a grandma with a bicycle due to 1 non-functional brake went to prison. But a giant container ship needs nothing? What is the cost of fixing this bridge and + lost lifetime earning of all the people who dies + compensation to their families? Is that really cheaper than installing batteries plus electric motor? Now imagine this ship would hit a bridge in daytime, when it’s clogged with traffic?
  - whats_a_quasar 3y ago
    Cost/benefit analyses are just a fact of life. I see your point, but without really considering the question we don't know what the proper response is. It is not obvious to me that we need to mandate backup power systems, there are an awful lot of ships entering ports around the world each day and very few bridge collapses.
    - pests 3y ago
      Its not obvious to me either. Let alone the opportunity cost.
    - lenerdenator 3y ago
      The problem is that the bridge collapses that do happen are just catastrophic. The economic impact alone will be massive for Baltimore. But will the responsible parties pay out that damage in full? Unlikely. Cost-benefit analyses aren't designed to evaluate the total risk a business venture presents to everyone who could possibly be involved; they're designed to evaluate the risk posed by a problem that will launch lawsuits that will play out in courts for years, if not decades. Meanwhile, some injured parties settle for pennies on the dollar, laws change, and in the absolute worst-case scenario, major shareholders draw down their positions in the corporate venture that caused the problem. The world keeps on spinning, and just maybe some regulatory agency will pay attention to the report issued by the likes of the NTSB and USCG. The process does not adequately protect the public.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Regulations are written in blood, because trying to make everything safe pre-emptively is impossible economically for a number of reasons. Primarily being, you can’t (usually) realistically force people to spend the money on something that isn’t clearly an actual problem. And that fundamentally means until someone ‘bleeds’/a big enough disaster happens, some things won’t get fixed. See the triangle shirt waist factory for an example of what it took to be able to force people to pay for certain kinds of fixes. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_...] Since folks aren’t currently burning down the NTSB’s offices or the like, it also seems like your opinion that the public is not currently adequately protected isn’t a majority one? The only way we’ll ever hit zero accidents is if we are all dead, it’s impossible to do anything without some risk.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- EasyMark 3y ago
  at this rate it won't be hard to knock out several more major ports by the end of the year.
  - pests 3y ago
    What rate? 1 a decade? Or longer? When was the last time this happened?
peteradio 3y ago
Conspiracy... some adversary is waiting for opportunities during unfavorable/aberrant conditions and triggering simple failures at impossibly inopportune times. Without any redundancy, conditions it looks like a freak accident. It would be interesting if you could come up with a likelihood for each conditions to have overlapped temporally. If someone comes to the conclusion that its possible to create the triggered failures it would be prudent to forbid sailing in conditions that might lead to these supposed "fly under the radar attacks".

zrm 3y ago

> Maybe there's some lighter weight interventions we could do that would further halve the risk of something like this happening that are less costly than fully redundant engine and drive. Redundancy doesn't inherently have to cost a lot more. For example, if you have three engines driving three props, they can each be 1/3 as large, and not necessarily weigh much more if at all. But then if you lose one, you lose 1/3 power rather than experiencing total loss of control.

mlyle 3y ago
> Redundancy doesn't inherently have to cost a lot more. For example, if you have three engines driving three props, they can each be 1/3 as large, and not necessarily weigh much more if at all. Yah, from aviation everyone moved to twins because tri-jets and four engine jets were too expensive in comparison. Things don't scale up or down perfectly; in practice you end up with more maintenance. But it seems like here they lost steering, so maybe there's something better we can do to keep steering more of the time (the cutover to emergency steering gear isn't instantaneous or perfect).
- EasyMark 3y ago
  but two engine jets can fly on one engine for a while, however a one engine boat this big is an uncontrolled juggernaut when it has some speed and no engine because it doesn't have any redundancy.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Sure, I'm not saying what the ideal trade-off is. I'm just saying: - The current accident rate due to lack of redundancy isn't too awful. - Adding redundancy increases cost, even when it seems like you have the same total power or whatever. My bias is towards a bit more redundancy than we have now, but not massive changes.
  - hanche 3y ago
    > but two engine jets can fly on one engine for a while Not just for a while. They must be able to do so indefinitely, until you run out of fuel. Of course, you are going to want to get it back on the ground long before that happens.