The roro car carrier MS Golden Ray has capsized to its side in Saint Simons Bay in Georgia. Four crewmen are missing and at this point prayer is called for when hope fades.
I was recently on a very large cruise ship. Help me understand how lethal this would be to those aboard.
How long would it take for a ship to go from right-side-up to laying on its side? If it happened quickly the danger would be greater than if it took twenty minutes to fall over. (Right?)
We were in a room, while all this happened we would fall from the floor to a wall. Say we would fall three meters. But the whole darn ship would be falling much further. Would we be protected from this greater force if our room remained intact?
I understand all furniture and big stuff on a well-founded ship are secured in place against such a accident. Is this correct?
Really big stuff might be secured, but certainly not all the furniture. Here’s a video that shows the piano has been locked down, but not much else.
On a seagoing RORO car carrier, I wonder whether cars would be strapped down or not. I am familiar with the two car ferries operating on Lake Michigan, the coal-fired antique SS Badger and the more modern catamaran Lake Express. On these vessels, motorcycles do get strapped down, but cars don’t - and the lake can get pretty rough.
Even if cars on the Golden Ray were strapped down, I doubt the tie-downs would have been rated to cope with the entire weight of a vehicle in the event that the ship rolled 90 degrees as it did. My guess is that anyone in the cargo bay would have been crushed by cars sliding across the deck, and I wonder whether the cargo bay perimeter walls could have held all that weight back, either.
There was also the fire, which was serious enough to prevent boarding by rescue personnel.
OTOH, the vast majority of passengers were able to escape the Costa Concordia when it ran aground and capsized. To be fair, that ship took about half an hour to go from listing 20 degrees to completely aground on its side. No idea how quickly the Golden Ray rolled over.
the Herald of Free Enterprise, a large RoRo ferry capsised over 30 years ago; it took something like two minutes from the first roll to ending up on its side on a sandbank with the loss of nearly 200 people.
This report of a 19-year-old’s experience gives a flavour of what it must have been like:
Here is a detailed article about the salvage operation of the MV Cougar Ace. It seems most cars were still secured with straps.
All the cars in the ship - $103 million worth of brand new Mazda cars - were scrapped anyway, because selling them would have affected consumer confidence in their vehicles.
Nope. Destroyed. Car and Driver, maybe jalopnik IIRC, had a magazine article about the dismantling. Dealing with the airbags was one of the bigger issues. I also remember reading that a group of enthusiasts wanted to buy the Miatas, and start a spec racing league with them. Mazda, fearing liability, said nope to that too.
The problem with hypothetically dumping them onto the 3rd World is that Mazda couldn’t guarantee that some vehicles might make their way back to someplace with a more robust products liability bar.
I wonder if this capsizing was due to improper ballasting?
I used to work at a place that made tie-downs, from giant reels of yarn to the finished product. Our strongest tie-downs were rated at 20,000 pounds break strenght. Some customers ordered those sewn together 2 or 3 layers thick. The full weight of a car is trivial.
Fair enough. Given my experiences with the Lake Michigan ferries not tying cars down, I’m surprised to learn that ocean-going RORO ships tie down their cars. high-strength tie-downs like the ones you describe are certainly useful for securing a car to a trailer, which can experience considerable jostling - but they seem like overkill for large-ship-based transport, especially when you think of the labor required to inspect/install/remove tie-downs for several thousand cars. In the case of the Cougar Ace featured in the excellent article scr4 linked to, they certainly kept nearly all of the cars out of the water, but ISTM the end result - the total loss of all the cars was the same as if no straps had been used.
My guess is the same outcome will befall the cargo of the Golden Ray - that is, deliberate demolition of all salvaged cars to avoid any potential liability.
Pleasantly surprised to hear the last four crew members are safe. I was not optimistic after hearing about the fire being so bad that it kept rescue personnel away at first.
This paper has pictures of typical lashing of cars on ‘Pure Car Carriers’ like Golden Ray. Also picture of cars shifted in a previous casualty. It doesn’t seem you can count on the vehicles not shifting when the vessel heels way over, past the point at which it can right itself. The lashings are there to (theoretically) prevent cargo shift from being the reason the ship heels over to where it can’t right itself.
On disposal of salvaged new cars on wrecked car carriers, in past cases the car company has contractually required complete destruction of each part of each salvaged car. In the real world of brand value and legal liability the risk/reward of trying to foist those cars or parts off on somebody is obviously massively negative for the owner of the brand. The risk to them is that somebody else does that on the side, so they are willing to pay more to document with a reliable salvor that all parts were destroyed.
