At 01:33 AM 2/10/99 -0500, Bob Mauritsen wrote:

>AT the risk of being simplistic, this suggests to me that
>some effort by those in power should be made towards creating
>a vessel or device that *could* drain it even in high seas.

Uhhh...at the risk of seeming really rude, do you really
believe no such efforts have been made?

If the ship breaks apart, there's a high degree of financial
loss involved. Insurance will cover much the ship owner's
cost and cleanup, etc, but the shipping industry has never
viewed its vessels as disposable.

>Perhaps a ship with special extendable legs or something.
>I mean, they have oil platforms in the North Sea, for heaven
>sakes.

Yes, and they take years, not hours, to build.

And they aren't built on heavy seas on the beach. We're talking
15-20 foot waves in water that's maybe 20 feet deep on the
downswing, if we weren't, this EMPTY ship would be floating,
not stuck hard aground.

And oil platforms have failed, too.

One can build stable structures on the beach, of course,
there are plenty of piers and docks and the likes. But
you're talking about something mobile, at least I assume
you are. Building a pile-driven structure able to deal
with such seas takes a long time, and the building itself
doesn't happen in storms. You build it to withstand
storms afterwards, you don't build it IN a storm.

The North Sea structures you mentioned are assembled
with divers, huge specialized equipment, especially.
They are not assembled in the stormy season...

> They build the Glomar Explorer (or challenger, I forget
>which) to lift a soviet sub, didn't they?

Yep.

It failed to perform its mission, though it got some
significant pieces up.

But this sub was sitting on the bottom where the Soviets
didn't believe it could be salvaged. In other words,
the Glomar ship was built in oh, years or at least a whole
ton of months (if they modified an existing hull), not hours
or days.

And the salvage operation still failed to complete its
full mission, which was to raise the sub intact.

> On All Things
>Considered today, Boris whats-his-name presented a satirical
>tale about American inventiveness. So, what's the problem?

Physics. Blame God for making water so damned heavy and
fluid at the same time, not to mention those big winds.

Do you have ANY idea how much energy is released when a
20 foot wave breaks onto a ship? At 8 1/3 lbs a gallon
moving at high speed, it's a lot. It breaks steel plates
that make the ship a ship to begin with (or at least the
welds or rivets holding it together).

Open-sea refuelling take place with two ships under power
moving fast enough to maintain the ability to steer. The
hoses are slung in the air by booms, and distances are
very close between the two boats. You don't put hoses
in the water when you have huge seas, they break.

One could try this approach with the New Carissa, but the
problem with getting another boat close enough to use
this technique is that that second boat would get stuck,
too. You move it close, the seas move it up and down,
it loads 400,000 lbs of oil, it sits lower like twenty
feet away from the ship its sucking oil from, and boom!
it's on the sand. And of course the seas and winds are
pushing it onshore the whole time, and since it's trying
to sit next to a stationary ship it too must hold still,
which means water isn't moving against its rudder, which
means it can't steer, which means ... well, this ain't
a pretty picture.

Some of the most competent intuitive engineers and problem
solvers that exist work in the ocean. It's highly unlikely
you're going to come up with any ideas they've not thought
of.

One salvage ship was readied to move on site within hours
of the grounding of this ship, but storms were such that
it couldn't cross the Columbia bar (which has claimed
more ships than any other geographical feature in the world).

It's not like they've not tried.

The answer with ships is to keep them from being grounded
in the first place.



- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza at pacifier.com>
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