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posted by Fnord666 on Monday August 21 2017, @04:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-US-Navy's-annus-horribilis dept.

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


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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday August 22 2017, @09:41AM

    by pTamok (3042) on Tuesday August 22 2017, @09:41AM (#557447)

    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.

    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".