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 wen…
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.
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.