Thursday, November 19, 2020

It's lucky the harbor was shallow...

 

Here's a video clip of the small container vessel MV Mentari Crystal capsizing at the dockside at the Port of Tanjung Perak in Indonesia last Monday.  Note the explosive snapping of a mooring line 9 seconds into the video.  It wouldn't have been healthy to be caught in the whiplash!



She ended up with her hull (probably her bilge keel) resting on the bottom of the harbor.  Getting her out of there is going to be interesting, what with the threat of pollution from her fuel tanks.

I've no idea what caused the capsize.  I doubt it was overloading alone, although that may have been a factor.  If she sprung a leak, it'll be even more difficult to shift her.

Peter


4 comments:

Old NFO said...

Yeah, that's going to be a mess. I'm betting she was cross loaded incorrectly, and when they started picking containers, they unbalanced her to starboard. And those were probably 2 inch hawsers that snapped. They would have gone through somebody and not even slowed down.

Steve Sky said...

I was noticing the sound of the Diesel engine grinding to a halt, and it made me wonder if it was ingesting water. If so, the engine is gone as well.

Aggie said...

I would bet it's ballast control. If they were working the containers, the Engineer would be shifting ballast to hold trim as the vessel's Center of Gravity moves around. Wouldn't be the first time someone forgot to check valves.

PM said...

@Aggie:
When I saw Peter's post my immediate thought was of MS Zenobia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Zenobia.

I've dived the wreck and it's quite splendid, but I'm glad I wasn't carrying the insurance on it [GRIN].