The USCG doesn't miss much, but that doesn't mean that it gets fixed. Until proven otherwise, I am skeptical that whatever mechanical failure occurred could not have been prevented with better maintenance. We live in a world where "CHEAP" is the key thing. This is a commercial vessel and the operator is responsive to the market, meaning …
The USCG doesn't miss much, but that doesn't mean that it gets fixed. Until proven otherwise, I am skeptical that whatever mechanical failure occurred could not have been prevented with better maintenance. We live in a world where "CHEAP" is the key thing. This is a commercial vessel and the operator is responsive to the market, meaning they are cost sensitive and need to deliver "CHEAP" to their customers. Freight customers only see price. This necessarily leads to minimizing maintenance.
If we require better maintenance, prices of goods will increase marginally. If we keep tugs on major vessels until they are safely out to sea, prices will increase marginally. This incident will cost billions of dollars, but the "CHEAP" benefit has been accruing for years. Was it worth it?
Finally, I live very close to the Golden Gate Bridge. Freighter traffic into and out of San Francisco accelerates out of the Bay, under the bridge, and into the Pacific. When I say accelerates, I mean they line up the entrance to the bridge miles away and start accelerating. Would going out of the Bay at a reasonable pace really impact operations? See my comments about "CHEAP" above.
Yea I'd agree with all of this. It could very easily come from human negligence on the maintenance side, but I doubt it came from the USCG not flagging something. And if there were corners cut, it was either to keep things cheap or out of simple laziness. Whether that came from the crew or from the maintenance yard (the ship recently went under maintenance) will be determined by the coming investigation. But I doubt very much it's from any shortcomings via the USCG.
Tugs are a good idea and the US Navy routinely uses 1-3 tugs to get ships in and out of their pier operations even with bridge crews that are more than triple the number of manning that commercial ships use and even in ports that don't have bridges traversing the entry/exit channels.
Just to bang on my "CHEAP" drum a bit more, I calculated out what it would cost to keep two tugs on alert 24 hours a day all year under the Golden Gate Bridge. Crowley Marine charges $2760/hour for general tug services. Leaving two tugs on alert 24/7 would cost about $48m.
The Port of Oakland, the largest port in the area, moves around 2.2 million TEUs (essentially a measure of a container) annually. If you divided the cost of the tugs out across all the container traffic into Oakland, each TEU would cost about $21 more.
What does this mean for you, the American consumer? Let's look at bananas. Each 40 foot container (2TEUs) carries about 117,000 bananas. The additional cost of $42 (2x$21) for the tugs on site would add $0.00036 per banana.
To further put that into perspective, the recent rebuild of the Bay Bridge cost $6.5 billion to build.
The USCG doesn't miss much, but that doesn't mean that it gets fixed. Until proven otherwise, I am skeptical that whatever mechanical failure occurred could not have been prevented with better maintenance. We live in a world where "CHEAP" is the key thing. This is a commercial vessel and the operator is responsive to the market, meaning they are cost sensitive and need to deliver "CHEAP" to their customers. Freight customers only see price. This necessarily leads to minimizing maintenance.
If we require better maintenance, prices of goods will increase marginally. If we keep tugs on major vessels until they are safely out to sea, prices will increase marginally. This incident will cost billions of dollars, but the "CHEAP" benefit has been accruing for years. Was it worth it?
Finally, I live very close to the Golden Gate Bridge. Freighter traffic into and out of San Francisco accelerates out of the Bay, under the bridge, and into the Pacific. When I say accelerates, I mean they line up the entrance to the bridge miles away and start accelerating. Would going out of the Bay at a reasonable pace really impact operations? See my comments about "CHEAP" above.
Yea I'd agree with all of this. It could very easily come from human negligence on the maintenance side, but I doubt it came from the USCG not flagging something. And if there were corners cut, it was either to keep things cheap or out of simple laziness. Whether that came from the crew or from the maintenance yard (the ship recently went under maintenance) will be determined by the coming investigation. But I doubt very much it's from any shortcomings via the USCG.
Tugs are a good idea and the US Navy routinely uses 1-3 tugs to get ships in and out of their pier operations even with bridge crews that are more than triple the number of manning that commercial ships use and even in ports that don't have bridges traversing the entry/exit channels.
Just to bang on my "CHEAP" drum a bit more, I calculated out what it would cost to keep two tugs on alert 24 hours a day all year under the Golden Gate Bridge. Crowley Marine charges $2760/hour for general tug services. Leaving two tugs on alert 24/7 would cost about $48m.
The Port of Oakland, the largest port in the area, moves around 2.2 million TEUs (essentially a measure of a container) annually. If you divided the cost of the tugs out across all the container traffic into Oakland, each TEU would cost about $21 more.
What does this mean for you, the American consumer? Let's look at bananas. Each 40 foot container (2TEUs) carries about 117,000 bananas. The additional cost of $42 (2x$21) for the tugs on site would add $0.00036 per banana.
To further put that into perspective, the recent rebuild of the Bay Bridge cost $6.5 billion to build.