What an outrage! The incompetently named **“Prestige” ** has taken 60,000 tons of (Black Death) toxic fuel oil to the bottom of Spain’s pristine waters. Any hope of this oil being contained in the fractured tanks is bullshit. Those tanks have had to instantly been imploded under the pressure of the deep. What makes this entire incident a complete travesty, is that these single hulled tankers are “outlawed”.
The laws have been passed that bans these accidents waiting to happen but, it wont be enforced until 2015. Why the wait to ostracize these things!!!
The Spanish waters are not that pristine, having already suffered a tanker loss of comparable size a few years ago.
Do you have evidence that the hull has actually imploded? Or is this simply something that Greenpeace has speculated?
Double hull tankers are not a cure-all: several double-hull ships have suffered devastating fires that led to extra losses because the burning fuel leaked into the space within the hull and then resisted being extinguished because the double hull provided insulation against the cooling agents used to fight the fires.
In general, I agree that:
double hull is better than single hull;
Flags of Convenience states should be penalized for their encouragement of shoddy shipping practices;
and all nations should work to get floating wrecks off the seas.
However, Early Out’s observation is accurate. It takes time and money to replace the older ships and simply declaring that they can no longer sail would bankrupt shipping companies and drive the prices of all shipped commodities (especially oil) high enough to force a worldwide depresssion.
Some choices are easier to rant over than to implement.
That’s painfully obvious. I also realize that double hulled tankers aren’t exactly rolling off the assembly line however, I fell that the deadline could and should be moved to avoid further mishaps. I apologize to my fellow Dopers for not posting this thread in "In My Humble Opinion" forum. This is more of a vent then it is a Debate. Perhaps it should be moved.
!!Sorry!!
It is a matter of physics not just speculation. The hull of such tankers are certainly not engineered to withstand the extreme pressures of 11,000 feet of seawater.
The depth however, could also act as a blessing in disguise. The temperature should solidify the fuel thus preventing it from flowing into the sea,for a while anyway"
It’s still a preventable catastrophe!
Oil isn’t very compressible. If it’s full to the top with oil it might survive the trip down. If it’s half empty, my guess is it would implode after a few hundred feet. And that would be visible now.
====================================================================== Of course the hulls aren’t designed to withstand that much pressure. They’re not submarines, after all.
I was obviously making a sarcastic remark!!! MONTY
Oil isn’t very compressible. If it’s full to the top with oil it might survive the trip down.
I haven’t mentioned but, I hope you haven’t forgotten that the ship has already spilled out over 10,000 tons of it’s cargo before it sunk to the bottom.
First off, do you realize the size of these things? They dwarf many entire office buildings. One does not throw them together on an assembly line like a Civic.
Second, Phillips has just added the second Endeavour-class double-hulled tanker to it’s fleet in as many years, and are on schedule to add another each year until 2005.
Just because you don’t see it happening, doesn’t mean it ain’t happening.
Which has what relevance to a discussion regarding how swiftly we can replace the single-hull fleet and whether we should interrupt the world economy while we wait for the replacements to arrive?
By all accounts, the Prestige was a poorly maintained ship that had no business taking on cargo, regardless of the number of hull separations. A better argument than demanding that all single-hull tankers be scrapped might be to demand that all ships meet minimum levels of maintenance, regardless of the amount of compartmentalization. This would have the effect of removing actual threats to the environment from ships that are actual risks, while creating less of a negative impact on shipping than simply declaring one hull type to be “bad” and removing them, regardless of their seaworthiness. I suspect that the number of poorly maintained tankers of either single- or double-hull design is smaller than the number of single-hull tankers in use.
Irrelevant factoid: The S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was of double-hull construction.
