The Baltic Ace Lacks Grace

Conrad Has Just Dug Up Another 'Be Amazed' Vlog

This one is 'The Most Expensive Mistakes In All History'  being the original that has spawned two successor vlogs, one of which we've partially covered.  The initial items cover the 'Deepwater Horizon' disaster, which we covered years ago, and the crash of a B2 stealth bomber, which lacks the kind of narrative depth I need for an Intro.

     So!  I am going for a story that I must have encountered in the media at the time yet which I completely forgot about.  Art!

     Here we have the MV 'Baltic Ace', built in Poland and operated by Ray Car Carriers of the Isle of Man.  It was constructed - you may be ahead of me here - to carry cars, eight decks of them, all lashed down to prevent movement during transit.  Art!

     I'm sure you wondered, like Conrad, how they got the cars on board when there are no hatches on the top deck.  Through two giant roll-on roll-off ramps at the stern, which I have helpfully illustrated above, and you're welcome.  With good drivers and careful parking, they could fit 2,132 cars into this floating allotment.  Presumably those were smaller cars, as on this occasion there were 1,400 Mitsubishis on board.  Art!

     This is the 'Corvus J', a Teuton-constructed Cypriot-owned freight vessel.  If I were a better blogger, I'd give you statistics about how long both ships were and what tonnage and their respective captain's inside leg measurements, etcetera etcetera.  But I won't. 

     ANYWAY actually I will, as I've just come across a very interesting investigative document from Cypriot Department Of Merchant Shipping.  The BA, it seems, came in at almost 4 times the mass of the CJ, being 23,498 tons versus 6,370.

     On the night of December 5th 2012, with high seas and poor visibility, the two ships collided 39 miles off the Dutch coast.  The Corvus J remained intact and upright, but the Baltic Ace suffered catastrophic hull damage and capsized within 15 minutes, killing 11 crewmen.  6 of their bodies were never recovered, with the other 13 survivors being rescued by the Corvus J and the Dutch Coast Guard.  Art!

Corvus Jehosophat

     That's the collision site, which is near the eastern end of the English Channel, one of the busiest and most constricted marine routes across the globe, meaning it was a major shipping hazard, not to mention a pollution risk.

     Ooops.

     Such a peril could not be allowed to bother the burghers of Bruges, or the denizens of Delft, nor the natives of Norfolk, so a salvage operation was mounted in March of 2014.  Art!

     BA makes a major flub here, calling this a 'company'.  It's not, as the word 'Rijk-' gives the game away, being Dutch for 'State'.  This is the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, whom engaged two Dutch firms to carry out salvage operations.  Art!

     You may be unsurprised to know that 'Mammoet' is Dutch for 'Mammoth'.  The marque gives it away.  They maintain some ENORMOUS kit for marine salvage work, which must cost tens of thousands of Euros per day to hire.  I did do a quick dig on the subject, but Mammoet advise they treat costs on a case-specific index.  I did note -

- specialized salvage operations often scale to the millions of dollars depending on the complexity of the wreck or recovery

     We'll come back to that.

     Step One: remove 540,000 litres of fuel oil from the BA's tanks, which seem to have been constructed by Polish craftsmen who were the children of Polish craftsmen, as the North Sea remained pollution-free.  Art!

     There then begins an operation to salve the BA by cutting it apart underwater into 8 pieces and retrieving each enormous piece of scrap metal individually.  Art!

     Sorry I don't have any puny humans to scale this, but what you're seeing here is the removal of relatively small debris from the wreck site.   I can show you another still with various car debris scattered around.  Art!

     That gives you an idea how absolutely mahoosive these salvage vessels are, and the chunks of BA that they were bringing up to the surface.  Art!

     The the bill became due.  Art!

     The cost of the salvage alone.  Art!

     Sorry to mix currencies.  This is how much the BA cost to construct.  Art!

     Here we have the Corvus J repair bill.  Seems a bit high to me for a bit of bow damage but I am not a marine insurance regulator, so what do I know?  Art!

     All those Mitsubishis that never got a forever home.  There's no mention of the missing bodies so I must assume that none were found, which rather interrupts the sense of closure.  Art!

     Ooooh that's expensive.

     And do you know what?  That Cypriot forensic examination worked out that the collision itself was down to human error, and that if both bridge crews had been paying attention and communicating properly, it would not have happened.

I Remember THIS

As you should surely know by now, Conrad has a somewhat ghoulish interest in the structural failure and collapse of dams.  If this happens in daylight there is a safety factor where people can see what's going on and evacuate.

     Not so at night.  Here is an item brought up on my news feed.  Art!

     When they say 'tallest' they mean a dam constructed at the highest elevation in Europe.  What you see here is the Vajont Dam in Italy.  It was constructed in the Dolomites, which are a mountain range, because in hydroelectricity height = power.  Their hydrostatic analysis was sorely lacking, because the mountainside next to the dam's lake was frangible and slid into the lake on 09/10/1963.  Art!

     Here is the dam at completion.  Note the large lake made of water, as lakes are intended to be.  Art!

     The terrain behind the dam, as it is today.  No trace of lake to be seen.

     It was a disaster of epic proportions, with a death toll to boot.  There is no exact definition but the most widely-accepted total is 1,190.  This is the kind of total you get when engineers eff up their calculations..

Wow, rather dark as of so far.  I think we need a bit of cheering up!

Rather More Pleasant Yet Less Of A Pheasant

A pheasant in terms of 'What The Pluck' as we are still SFW on the blog.  Art!

     I am guessing that Yuka Iguchi is Japanese and she is publishing a book called 'Le Chouchou', yet what 'Tokyo News Mook' is remains unclear.  Possibly the medium under which this story is being told.  None of which explains who Yuka Iguchi is nor what her life story is about.

     Conrad baffled.  Logarithm demented.

Angry Birds, Ukrainian Edition

Skip if you're a big fan of Putinpot or the orc regime.  Or even a small fan of them.

     One of the most significant drone strikes that the Kozaky have carried out was over the 16th and 17th of May, when they gave Badad Duh, the Mordorvian capital - I hope Ol' Tolky isn't spinning in his grave at 33 RPM with my usage of his verbiage as insults - a thorough pounding.  The orcs were both angry and terrified.  Art!

     Here you see x6 Kozaky drone streams, heading out in 6 different directions to the total of 107 arrows, which may include multiple strike teams in a single arrow.  We may get to see the end results on 'Jake Broe' in a couple of days yet; he tends to put up compilations of official Kozaky Firepoint drone videos.  The thing is, the orcs cannot mass enough air defences to counter these drones especially as the drones focus on air defences.  There seems to be a lesson in there somewhere.

Finally -

Rocking out with the crown prince of horribleness, A G Bierce -

"Imagination,n: A warehouse of facts, with the poet and liar in joint company."