https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/world/asia/navy-ship-mccain-search-sailors.html
Search teams scrambled Monday to determine the fate of 10 missing Navy sailors after a United States destroyer collided with an oil tanker off the coast of Singapore, the second accident involving a Navy ship and a cargo vessel in recent months.
The guided-missile destroyer, the John S. McCain, was passing east of the Strait of Malacca on its way to a port visit in Singapore at 5:24 a.m. local time, before dawn broke, when it collided with the Alnic MC, a 600-foot vessel that transports oil and chemicals, the Navy said. The destroyer was damaged near the rear on its port, or left-hand, side.
Half a day after the crash, 10 sailors on the ship remained unaccounted for. Five others were injured, none with life-threatening conditions, a Navy official said. Ships with the Singapore Navy and helicopters from the assault ship America were rushing to search for survivors.
Also at Reuters.
Previously: U.S. Navy Destroyer Collides With Container Vessel
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @07:00PM (4 children)
Consider that this might be sabotage or other such happenings? Finding anything in the ocean is not easy. Finding something and crashing into it is vastly harder. Beaching a military vessel is similarly bizarre. The first time is a freak accident, the second time is incredibly bizarre, the 4th time (in 8 months) is.. well it seems hard to keep seeing these as accidents.
I see three options:
- Lightning striking once, twice, thrice, and err fourice in the exact same spot.
- Very poor training of the individuals manning the ship.
- Some sort of nonchance related failure of hardware or manpower. Sabotage, hacking, electronic disruption, etc.
I find the chance argument to be increasingly unlikey and I think the lack of training is also unlikely. Are there other viable options?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Monday August 21 2017, @07:12PM (2 children)
It was not in "the ocean" (implying wide open spaces) it was in or just emerging from the Strait of Malacca which is an extremely busy waterway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @07:06AM (1 child)
The width of the Strait of Malacca ranges from 40km at the narrowest to 320km. If our destroyer decided to cruise at max speed in our "extremely busy waterway", it would take it somewhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours to get from one side to the other. Again, even in [most] waterways the ocean is a really really big place.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday August 22 2017, @09:41AM
According to Wikipedia, the Strait of Malacca is 2.8 km at it's narrowest point (the Phillips Channel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Malacca [wikipedia.org]
There's a chart here: http://oceanring.com/images/page24map.jpg [oceanring.com] or bigger, here: http://oceanring.com/images/page36map.jpg, [oceanring.com] which shows the shipping lanes. By eye, from the scale, at the narrowest point, the two shipping lanes (one for each direction) occupy a total of 1 1/2 minutes of latitude, which is roughly 1.5x1.85 km, or 2.8km, so each lane has a width of about 1.4 km (although they are probably different widths).
To be fair, I don't know the location of the collision - it probably wasn't at the narrowest point. As far as I can make out, it was pretty much where the symbol for a Straitrep Reporting Point is printed, just north of the Horsburgh Light. The shipping lanes are still quite narrow there - about 3 minutes of latitude.
You get a better view of the intensive use of sea area in the Strait by looking at this chartlet of anchorages around Singapore: http://www.mpa.gov.sg/web/wcm/connect/www/6e290f3d-d3c5-435b-ae5a-8f734451feba/anchorages12.jpg?MOD=AJPERES [mpa.gov.sg]
The actual area is well mapped by British Admiralty Chart 2403 "Singapore Strait and Eastern Approaches".
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 21 2017, @07:12PM
Not so hard anymore?
WORLDWIDE SHIP TRAFFIC UP 300 PERCENT SINCE 1992 [agu.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]