Rogue waves.

One or two container ships per year lost to rogue waves would not have a significant impact on the amount of plastic in the (at least four) ocean gyres.

 

They and all the other lost at sea ships carrying cargos certainly do add to it.

A check of the losses reported each year to L of London is a eye opener. They only list their casualities. Not all the sinkings. Many countries do not record & release bad news. Bad for hiring crews & tourism.

The positive spin on it is, the stuff is settling to the bottom in a natural dead zone.

So all governments call in favors of major news media to not spend time on it.

Notice the extremely positive & endless commericials from the oil & coal industry companies? Latest spin is the great oilsands in Canada. Will that lower the price of

I wander. Disregard the last 2 paragraphs.

 

That's still a minor contribution compared to the amount entering oceans because of filthy industrial practices, illegal dumping, detritus thrown from ships, people's littering habits etc.
Claiming that rogue waves sinking a couple of ships per year is a major cause of marine pollution lets the real perpetrators off the hook.

 

I will buy that.

The total junk washed into the oceans by tornadoes, hurricanes & people / companies shoving junk into rivers at night & high water levels around the world is massive. Rivers have ALWAYS been the cheapest garbage disposal system.

 

I'm not sure if it was the same storm or even the same wave mentioned in this video, but it was around that time so it probably was. I came back from leave to the Brent Bravo platform and was told about massive wave damage to the platform Cellar Deck on the North face, 80 to 90 ft above the sea. Steel walkways and bulkheads were severely damaged. The platform was a concrete gravity base Condeep design with three legs and the steel deck and superstructure on top. The Northern leg was the Utility shaft and the drilling casings went down the other two.

People who were on the platform said it felt like the North end of the platform had been raised up and crashed back down. Everybody assumed this was an exageration, but when we were doing our inspections below the deck after we got scaffolding in place, we found that a large export riser (pipeline) that had an S-bend in it was sitting over an inch clear of it's support. I spent some of my apprenticeship on large-bore pipe bending and it looked to me like the bends had been sprung open and resettled in a new position.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCxr_XzyGO8&feature=related

 

Guess The off shore design engineers saved a TON of money by hanging stuff underneath.

" No such thing as a 100' wave anywhere. " " See. It says that right here in this book & reference material I decided to use as proof. "




Did I do good Boss ??

Real good son. Real good.

 

Not the case. The reference materials for that platform WOULD have included a 100 foot wave.

As JE Hardiman says in posts above, waves of that kind of height have been known of and specified for more than 60 years. Especially in offshore design. A 30m (98 feet) has been the pretty standard "design wave" in the northern North Sea since people started putting platforms there.

In this particular case, the question is more like - should the design wave height be 35m instead of 30m, or should wave impact be tolerated in the design - or the design made to avoid ANY wave impact (over a period of 100 years or 1000 years or whatever) ? Or how much wave run-up the sides of the concrete columns should be expected ?

In the open ocean where bigger waves can be expected, the oiler USS Ramapo reliably measured a wave of 112 feet as long ago as 1933, which was reported at the time and re-published many times since. Does not make for good TV I guess.

 

Now now.

Must not panic EVERYONE in the shipping industry.

Keep discrediting the facts as EXTREMLY rare occurances. That has worked for hundreds of years. We will also make sure the severly damaged ships & missing ships are deleted in all news coverages.

We have to find out who is leaking out the Loyds of London Rouge damage reports. That information is very damaging to the design industry.


" Boss. Is it OK if we made simple long skinny underwater submarines to transport stuff ? "

" NAAAHH. We have got everything running acceptably well right now. Very good solution to a big problem. But nobody wants to change anything anymore. "