Here’s the story if your day has been too full of good news and you need a palate cleanser.

  • JazzlikeDiamond558@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    When you are so greedy that you want to maintain and operate 183m long vessel with just 14 crewmembers. The other is no better.

    These are not big vessels, but the crew of 14 is deffinitely not enough. Fatigue sets in almost at the beginning of contract and by the end, you are EXHAUSTED. Literally.

    It is wonder this hasn’t happened before… oh wait…

    • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Well… That depends. How much automation do these tankers have? (Automation with redundancy, if course).

      • tiddy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        I would be suprised if anything past some 1970’s DC sensors to be honest.

        The ships are built by capitalists, theyre about as cheap as ships get

        • JazzlikeDiamond558@lemm.ee
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          1 day ago

          Yes, the tech on board is as cheap as it can possibly get. These are no state of the art ships. Nobody builds that for commercial transport. Some parts are even from dismantled ships… salvaged. I once, personally, took apart a 30 years old switch on a brand new ship (we were the second crew… ever).

          However, crew shortages are DISASTEROUS today.

          Let us take clear example of one crew complement of 14 people (this is just illustrative):

          14 people / 2 departments (deck + engine) = 7 people per department.

          Deck: 1 captain + 1 officer + 1 cargo guy + 3 crewmembers + 1 cook

          Engine: 1 chief engineer + 1 engineer + 5 crewmembers

          And this complement means that Captain/officer and chief engineer/engineer are keeping 6 hours on-6 hours off watch… that is already A KILLER job. Imagine having 3-6 months contract on that regime… IF you come back home you are malnourished, destroyed, exhausted and deranged. Lack of rest and sleep literally drives you mad. Even when you can sleep, these small ships are rocking like the rolercoaster, so you are again f…d.

          Then, for any mooring operation, you need all crew… so, no sleep again…

          Cargo operation is a nightmare from hell.

          I’m not even going to go into maintenance area… with this crew complement, one guy goes to the toilet, you are left without 30% of the manpower and anything that even could be done - is delayed (not that much can be done with 3-4 men).

          Whoever allowed such a small crew complement (looking at you IMO and classification societies) has NEVER EVER been at sea and I wish them all nothing but sea service until the end of their miserable lives.

          Terrible tragedy that one man got lost (crews are today mostly asian and many cannot swim).

          It is a global crime that cargo freights are on the rise (constantly), but the crews and their salaries are reduced.

          • tiddy@sh.itjust.works
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            5 hours ago

            Jesus Christ, and we consider ourselves above ‘slave labour’ when most of those people are probably just there to get a meal. Worst part is all these cuts are just to help Amazon’s bottom line.

            Ive only ever worked with smaller boats or electrical rigs pulled out of larger freighters, from that view alone it blows my mind half those boats are even afloat.

  • wolfpack86@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    “However, one of the 14 crew members on the Portuguese-flagged Solong cargo ship is missing, the vessel’s owner Ernst Russ says.”

    The Solong.

    The universe is trolling us.

  • Delphia@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    It does sound very bad but the ocean is unfathomably fucking huge. Not just surface area but sheer volume, I dont really want to go down a rabbit hole of “how much cyanide in how much water would be considered harmless”, “how much cyanide was the ship carrying” or “how much water is in the ocean” but I hope someone does.

      • riquisimo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 hours ago

        You are a driver of something that moves at the speed of a drunk turtle. Over there is something that is also moving at the speed of a drunk turtle.

        Now, you’re both moving through an ocean. There aren’t a lot of obstacles out here in the ocean, very few trees. Even fewer schoolchildren.

        Your goal is to not hit the other slow thing. Just don’t hit the other slow thing. Move, but don’t hit the other slow thing. You should see them coming from, literally, miles away. Don’t hit them.

  • A_A@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    (…) came out of the blue and collided with the Stena Immaculate at 16 knots.

    so, probably related to fog … … and the worst has been avoided :

    (…) 36 people had been rescued, with one person taken to hospital.
    (…) some jet fuel had leaked into the sea
    (…) The cargo ship had been carrying 15 containers of the chemical sodium cyanide when it collided with the tanker.
    (…) Sodium cyanide has a variety of commercial uses, from being used to plate metals to dye production. It is highly soluble in water (…)

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Stena out here being bad news as any other time I’ve heard of them.

      I used to work in an electronics refurb place. The Stena laptop pallets were straight out of landfills. Just a bunch of muddy laptops thrown onto a pallet. Macbooks priced by the tonne. We had to extract as much value out of that muddy, moldy filth as possible. Lots of people are now using those health hazard laptops without even knowing it.

      Any time someone said “Stena goods coming in a few days”, you just wanted to kill yourself.

  • mmddmm@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    People cry wolf so often nowadays that calling sodium cyanide a “highly toxic chemical” feels like a lie minimizing the damage.

  • WereCat@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Damn it! Now the EU will have to make another 100k electric cars to make up for this ecological catastrophe

  • simple@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    You just know some spiderman supervillain is coming out of that

    • casmael@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Well in this case the front fell off by all means, I’d just like to make the point that that is not normal