This ship was almost 1,000 feet in length. The only places you’re going to see boats like that are in the open ocean, in huge ports, or the Great Lakes, and even on the Great Lakes, they’re going to be that long but not stacked that high.
Each of those containers is indeed the size of a semi-trailer, or better yet a railroad boxcar.
The Baltimore bridge deck was 180 feet above the water.
Si_Amigo is also missing the nifty fact the ship’s captain did send a “mayday” (I think it was more likely an SOS) message. That’s how the authorities new to stop traffic from going onto the bridge.
The ship’s staff knew it was out of control, and did their best to avoid the accident.
But its fun to speculate on such senarios in this forum, gets people going.
What I’m trying to get across is the difference between what actually happened (most likely an accident) and an actual terrorist hijacking. Sure they sent a Mayday when they knew they had lost control, but a terrorist attack would not be so sudden in a harbor and a Mayday would have come much earlier.
More likely that tugboats would be used to slow the ship down and that response teams from helicopters and Coast Guard cutters would be used to stop them before they got close enough to a bridge with significant speed.
But having bombs dropped and torpedos being launched is much more fun to think about.
A hijacking implies that the hijackers are armed - which means that any tugboat attempting to nudge the ship should expect to be fired upon.
Also, @andrewm’s post in the other thread suggests that tugs are privately owned/operated vessels - in other words, like planes at an airport, they may require permission for their activities and might have to follow harbormaster directives to assure overall harbor safety, but I don’t believe they can be ordered into harm’s way; it’d be like a cop ordering nearby civilians to help him end a hostage situation.
Also also, as noted upthread, tugs can’t do a whole hell of a lot to a container ship without its acquiescence, especially if it (the container ship) is already moving forward with significant speed.
It would be hard to get the ship up to speed in the first place unless they totally wiped out the crew and took down their indivudual cell phones. There would be advance warning well before they left the dock. Can’t see them even leaving the dock with hostiles aboard like the 9/11 hijackers did. Get there soon enough with a SWAT team and it just becomes another hostage situtation.
Maybe this would work better for the hijackers if they just took a cruise ship, let it leave port and then hijack it back to the bridge. I’m just thinking about plausible senarios.
Don’t need to wipe out the crew. Either keep them at their stations (at gunpoint) to operate the ship according to your instructions, or keep them away from their stations (also at gunpoint) so you can operate the ship yourself without their cooperation. The latter of course would require that your terrorist crew know the basics of how to sail a container ship, but they don’t have to be top-notch experts in order to get the ship moving. While tugs may be useful for preventing damage while leaving the pier, I suspect a departure is possible without the cooperation of tugs, even if things get scraped up a bit along the way.
The take over would have to be highly coordinated to keep all of the ships crews from setting off an alarm. Big ships don’t just undock and go at a moments notice. It would be much easier to hijack a passenger ship, wait until it was out at sea and then hijack the crew and turn the ship around. Just saying, why take a chance in getting stuck in port when it would be relativily easy to obtain your goal with a large passenger ship? That and its more terrifying.
Who is going to give an order to sink a passenger ship full of well to do old people? Passenger ships have been hijacked at sea before and passengers thrown overboard. If I were going to take out a bridge this would be a much perferred option as it has a higher chance of success. Just saying.
Question is, are passenger liners big enough to cause the damage to a large bridge? Could speed help make up for the differance in mass of a cargo ship.
Damage in a collision is roughly proportional to energy, and energy scales with the mass of an object, but scales with the square of its velocity. And I don’t know the details, but I would expect that a ship close enough to port that it’s going under a bridge would ordinarily be going at much less than its normal maximum speed (but one that’s deliberately trying to collide for high damage might be going at even greater than its normal maximum).
I had thought that modern cargo ships were much more massive than cruise ships, but from a quick Google, it looks like they’re about comparable, with the largest of both being in the vicinity of 10^5 tons. So, yeah, it probably would be a lot easier to get a hijack crew on a cruise ship: They’d masquerade as just ordinary passengers until the moment came. Though this would depend on the other passengers not fighting back: Even if most of the other passengers are unarmed, there are a lot of them.
And how brave they’re feeling. The “sit tight and wait it out” urge would be strong.
And I’d make sure my hijackers knew how to run things, otherwise the hostages are really in control. What am I gonna do, shoot the captain to prove a point and then not be able to steer the ship?
They may not be drunken brave enough at the start of the cruise to get up the nerve to try to fight.
However, the scary part to me is that there could actually be teams of people working on cruise ships right now that are actually casing the place, some of them could even be in security positions. If they knew how to cut off the bridge and engine room without drawing attention to the passengers it could all be over in less than an hour. A quick announcement that they were returning to port for a mechanical failure or medical emergency would not draw attention until it was too late. Then people who figured out what was happening may just jump overboard.
For those who weren’t around when it occured, here is the wiki link to the Achille Lauro hijacking. It only took four people. And check out the photo below.
I don’t know the ins and outs of current cargo or cruise ship security. But 9/11 represented a sea change in thinking in the airline and in the law enforcement communities.
Namely that bad guys were not necessarily simply taking hostages to extort the authorities for ransom (money, prisoner release, propaganda, etc.) and so a go-slow, cooperative, gentle gentle response process was the path to least loss of life after a long, drawn out, and very nerve-wracking wait.
Instead, the bad guys had already decided all lives were forfeit and they we just interested in the vehicle and incidentally the people as a weapon to hurt the enemy with.
My point being the crew of Achille Lauro pretty well followed the “script” then in effect for hijack response. As did the passengers. I strongly suspect the script is different now for the crew and I’m quite sure it is for at least some fraction of the passengers.
As to this and unrelated to the above …
On the cruise ships I’ve been on recently the lowest deck with openings to the outside is still ~50 feet above the water. That’s a big jump. Nobody aboard the Dali was much injured by the collision. And any debris would fall on the ship’s bow, an area already off limits to passengers. IMO as to the collision itself by far the safest place to be is on the ship, not having jumped off it.
The logistical challenges of a small hijacking team systematically slaughtering 3000+ passengers suggests that’s not their plan either. Doing your best to hide, or hide within the crowd, is probably the optimal play. Unless you know you have some reason to be singled-out-able for “special” treatment.