The recent sinking of the canadian cruise ship in Antarctic waters has raised the question: couldn’t the crew have plugged a fist-sized hole in the hull? In the US Navy, EVERYBODY (officers and enlisted men) are trained in damage control. I remember my training-we would use matresses, odd pieces of wood, anything to plug a leak, then shore up the patch with scaffolding. In many cases, we could stop a leak within minutes. My question: are these crews trained in this? Or are they third-world, poorly paid independent contractors, who will bolt at the first sign of danger? It seems unbeievable that sending a cruise ship into such dangerous waters, these lines woud’nt use trained, merchant marine crews (unionized), who can be relied upon to follow an officer’s orders and prevent a ship from sinking. The passengers were very lucky-I shudder to think what would have happened if the other ship had been far away.
I seem to remeber another cruise ship experiencing a minor fire-which shut the whole ship down. I guess you get what you pay for.
According to South Africa’s Sunday Tribune:
So we have one passenger’s claim that there was a fist-sized hole “and a crack.”
I have no idea how much training is actually given to the crew of large cruise ships. I was moderately surprised at how little damage control training was given to the (union) crews of U.S. ore boats on the Great Lakes. (Of course, a loaded ore boat will sink pretty quickly, regardless of crew efforts and an empty boat will stay afloat a long time with a hole in the hull, so the situations are not identical.) The Explorer was not very big, being less than 2400 grt, and 246 feet long (about 1/10th the size of the other MV Explorer used as a college that is 24,000 grt), so even a smaller leak presents a larger danger.
I’m not sure why you imply that the crew of the MV Explorer might have “bolt[ed] at the first sign of danger.” The ship was abandoned in good order without any sign of panic. (I know that one passenger was quoted with a single comment about panic, but that single comment is the sort one might get when polling any crowd of people in a stressful situation. There were no claims of the crew running for the boats abandoning passengers.)
A supply of duct tape and bubble gum is kept on each deck.
Regarding crewmen bolting in terror (from a story prior to the aftual sinking):Doomed Ship Defies Antarctica Odds
Still, what the hell is wrong that a ship can be destroyed by a *“fist-sized” * hole?
Nothing’s wrong with the ship. It’s the water that creates all the problems.
Fist sized hole and a crack. I don’t know how long the crack was, but the ship was probably not compartmentalized like a naval craft. Reinforcement and bulkheads would have cost money.
Actually, for a ship designed to tackle remote waters, (it was the first cruise ship through the Northwest Passage), water-tight compartments are essential. Still we still have not heard how large the crack might have been and the ship received five separate gigs on its last safety inspection including one for an improperly operating watertight door.
Well, I’m no expert, but I did, uh, “hang out” with the ship’s electrician on a cruise once. I don’t know about damage control, but they can definitely fix a lot of stuff on their own. When the elevators broke down they scavenged parts and made parts and otherwise kept everything working even though they didn’t have the right spares. Last time I saw him was the last night of the cruise when he got called away because there was an engine fire, “nothing to worry about!” - one assumes they got it put out and fixed on their own. As for unpaid third-world workers, it seemed that the head guys in all the departments were Dutch, while their underlings (and all of the service staff) were Filipino and Indonesian, if that means anything. On the other hand, this guy was the head electrical guy for an entire huge cruise ship and he was just 26 or so. (And hawt.)
The hole & crack may have occured in a section of the hull that the crew could not reach from the inside.
It doesn’t seem like a good idea to have those.
Dpending on when the “hole and crack” occured, there may have been little time. If the hull got punctured, and started flooding, and then they took an hour to find it, the damage may have been irreversible.
They exist, though.
A fist-sized hole and a crack have brought many a brave sailor to his knees.
Yarrr. Sailed aboard the Raging Queen, did ye?
I just noticed this, I hope you won’t mind an answer that’s a few days late.
To expand on the answer that mlees gave: for the most part when partitioning up a ship into passenger friendly compartments, there are a number of compromises to to be made.
The biggest one is that most people who aren’t familiar with ships really prefer right angles in their living spaces. But, looking at a ship’s hull, you’ll see that the form is a lot less cut & dried than that. There are curves all over the place, and most of those are placed where they are to maximize the efficiency of the hull passing through the water, or building off that portion of the hull that’s actually in the water.
So a naval architect then finds him or herself stuck with trying to force a compromise between these two sets of forms, and the simplest answer is to build the rectilinial spaces into the hull, as much as possible. But that leaves for remaindered volumes. Very often these remaindered volumes are useful - they are where piping and wiring can be easily passed without having to sacrifice space in the living quarters, furthering the illusion that a ship is really just a apartment building with smaller apartments.
These hidden spaces are called ‘blind voids’ and they’re a huge problem for crews during damage control or firefighting evolutions. Fires can start in them, undetected, until they spread over large volumes of the ship.
Or cracks and holes can occur in the hull, and because of these blind voids, the crew can’t localize them, or worse, have to cut away the false bulkheads forming the blind voids. All of which are things that take a level of training I’d be surprised to hear that cruise ship crews have.
FTM, one of the things that a lot of old salts have been questioning about the Zumwalt class destroyers is that they’re talking about making the crew accomodations all four person cabins or smaller. Which is great, from a livability point of view, and has anyone with Damage Control experience cringing. Open bay berthing doesn’t look nice, is crap for privacy, and generally is unpopular.
But you don’t have to worry about fires or holes in blind voids with it.