Bourbon Dolphin capsizes

Ace - I do NOT talk CRAP I leave that to you, all I do is say it the way it is, if you don't like it that's your problem! You jumping red lights is relavant, by stating that it isn't indicates that you do! (probably regularly) If you wish to follow the law do so - all of it - if you don't your too far away to bother me (probably - other than your designs killing my mates). All I stated was that there are times when the law is not followed - OK it should be, but for various reasons it ain't. And this is by everybody, including the law makers at times! But at least admit it does happen - You are not perfect - nobody is, I know I'm not I admit it!

So lets move on from there, (don't bother slagging any further I can beat you at that too! Yes I know - you THINK I'm a tosser, I KNOW you are!) Chuck has added something new to this which I think is very relavant to this, how's about you, do think this or does it not fit into your perfect world?

 

Sometimes more knowledge does not produce the desired effect

With nothing but respect for professionals in every field, I want to share a thought of mine on safe design and operations.

CAD and the parallel advances in scientific research and testing have yielded much more detailed and accurate knowledge of the ability of materials and designs to withstand various forces. With this knowledge, safety factors are calculated precisely.

There was a time when boat and ship design was not so precise, because much of this knowledge did not exist. It was recognized that modeling of forces was largely based on assumptions and estimates. Boats and ships that were successful in extreme conditions were often those known as "overbuilt" or "overdesigned", shorthand for saying that they were designed and constructed with very large safety factors, based on conservative estimates of the strength of materials. Companies that overbuilt/overdesigned gained reputations for quality, because their products lasted longer and resisted extreme conditions better. Not to overbuild was to risk failure, since the "proper" safety factor was recognized as an estimate based on assumptions and limited observations.

As the tools of analysis have become more sophisticated, it is possible to calculate stresses and material strength more precisely. Inevitably, safety margins have been reduced. This is not because there is less concern for safety, but because more is known about the variables. Electric motors produce the same horsepower with smaller windings now because builders know much more precisely what is needed under a specific range of operating conditions, and because computerized controls make it possible to regulate operating conditions more precisely.

99% of the time the result is consistent performance at lower costs. When those extreme conditions occur, however, conditons outside the calculated safety factors, there is no additional reserve, and failure occurs. At sea, the cost of failure is often high.

I don't profess to know the answer. Products that are too costly without recognized benefits to justify the additional cost are not competitive. All decisions are the results of value judgements and priorities.

I'd be interested to hear other thoughts on this.

 

safewalrus,

You silver tounged devil. In your previous account of your working experience you must have left out that tour of duty in the diplomatic corps.

Anyway, no I am not perfect and I make many mistakes. I also learn from each of them and don't knowingly repeat them. All that I have been saying to you is that when you say that the calculated GM of a vessel is not relevant, that you are VERY wrong. I will leave it at that.

On the comments of Captain Chuck, they are certainly valid. You would think that the mate would know port from starboard, but I've been surprized by things like this before. The anti-roll tanks have already been discussed. If they were in use then that was a mistake. Likely there were a multiple of small mistakes made in this situation that added up to the disaster. First, the GM was likely too low. Secondly the vessel was doing a job that it was marginal in being able to do. Thirdly, the assist vessel did not do its job. The rig gave bad advice that the ship belatedly followed. Antiroll tank active, maybe. Ballast shifted wrong, maybe. Likely we will never know, but I am sure we will get many more regulations that have to be met, likely most of them not even relevant to what happened.

On the comment of the Kodiac vessel that capcized in the GOM, that vessel had undergone a signifigant late life modification and its stability was marginal at best. No one can plan for breaking and shifting deck cargo. You can have a vessel that fully meets all requirements but if a major failure occurs, all bets are off. How much engineering went into the space shuttle and yet just one faulty seal caused it to explode. Try as we may to be perfect, we just won't ever be.

 

In my opinion boats and ships are generally speaking safer than ever, in spite of safety margins being significantly lower than only some decades ago. This is due to better materials, design and construction techniques. (Not to talk about better safety equipment, comms, etc, etc)

 

I agree. Still, I believe the question of reduced safety margins is worth some thought and discussion.

 

Good evening to you all - We have been shuffling around beautiful (said with tongue firmly in cheek) downtown Fourchon offloading cargo and getting ready to take on some diesel.
I am not sure how much Ballast the Dolphin could have transferred. The vessel I am operating has two sets of split ballast tanks - the #2's hold 630 bbls apiece, and the #8's can hold 698 bbls - this give about 211 Long Tons ballast on each side of the vessel if using salt water 205 LT Fresh. The weight of the 5000' of 3" chain that they removed from their stbd locker should have only been around 190 LT. They should have been able to counteract this by transferring around 600 bbls from one side to the other. A little less if the chain lockers are more inboard, such as on the vessel I am on.

The Ensco Kodiak II had a similar, nonfatal, incident when they had around 5000' of chain on one side of the deck and ballast on the other. They were running weather patterns and when the vessel turned in the seas the chain slid to the ballasted side of the vessel and they flipped to 90 degrees and sank within 30 minutes - partly due to the engine room escape hatch being open and submerged.

You can imagine that in the exact same circumstances if they happend to be pulling on an anchor the added dynamic force of the chain pulling them back would have easily capsized the vessel.

It has been an amazing change in the past few years in the GOM with the ability to stop work no questions asked. All it takes is the buzz word "SAFETY" and you can call a stop to any operation. The bridge officers and our office management have passed this BD scenario back and forth and we have found a couple of instances where we would have called a halt to operations to get the situation under control.

Here is one 'poser' of a question. I wonder if they ever reduced power after going full throttle to avoid the Highland Valor? If they didn't this would add tremendously to the maneuvering difficulties and the tension on the winch and vessel. If I were in the same position (using the perfect optics of hindsight) I probably would have reduced power to get the chain on bottom and gotten the vessel headed where I needed to go. We have to use that technique a lot on this boat since we only have two 600 HP tunnel thrusters.

Another poser is how the Highland Valor was able to successfully able to hook the chain in only 10 minutes. If we were J-locking chain like that we would have brought the hook up a long ways before declaring being "hooked on the chain" I think it would be a minimum of around 30 minutes of wire recovery before this would happen - they either have a wicked fast winch or got in too much of a hurry.

 

I have been reading the rest of the posts - Here is my opinion (rant) on Stability Booklettes. They are totally and utterly unused by any vessel in the printed form they are supplied to the vessels. Who is going to physically sound every single tank and weigh every single piece of deck cargo every time you move the vessel or load a piece of equipment? Sorry folks. We must deal in reality not make believe. I entered all of the data contained in our booklette in a simple excel workbook and just fill out a loadsheet with the best guess on what's on the boat. Then we can see what the probable stability of the vessel is. The stability book, as supplied, doesn't even give us the option of figuring the GM - only KM (I have the excel sheet do this, but nothing even mentioned in the 'official' stability booklette).

They also have totally impossible demands, such as, "thou shalt not load deck cargo over 12 feet in height" (possibly different wording there). Do they actually expect us to shut down an anchoring operation when we are told to deck a 14' diameter buoy? We know that it is safe and the vessel will remain stable. I really detest the fact that they have in place regulations and rules that we have to knowingly violate every day. Especially now that they have dusted off the 'maritime manslaughter' law in this country. I try to be as safe as possible and just do the job to the best of my ability knowing that if somebody gets injured or killed it is my buttocks that is going to be flying from the yardarm - put there by a whole multitude of these regulations that are impossible to do on a daily operating basis. S'cuse me while I go and fill out my refuse log, GMDSS log, Cargo Securing Equipment Log, Company log, and the sound the vessel and weigh every piece of equipment so I can work out the stability longhand.

Damn...I'm sounding cynical aren't I. Time for more coffee.

 

yes cf velie,
At the end of all that it just IMO, comes down to experience and common sense and what feels right
But then I am a man who has always hated rules,
moral of story, be a single handed sailor and bugger off someplace where people can't tell one what to do!!
But nice post thanks

 

Yor statements agrees with the usual practice the world around among the fishing fleets (which I know better than AHTS world). All captains I talk to tell me they never ever open the stab booklet. And it seems to be the same in all countries. A lot has been written on the matter, as the report I attach to this post.

That's why the present tendency is to mount aboard systems able to measure period of balance and some of the rolling characteristics, as well as displacement at any given moment by means of draught sensors, and from there integrate GM. Such computerized devices only inform about initial stability, but for the inmense majority of the cases that's good enough.

Has to be remarked that such devices only are useful if adapted to the specific vessel they are mounted into, after several hundreds of hours of recording data in real life aboard. The GM-T characteristics cannot be directly introduced to the computer from the stab calculations, as when at sea the period of balance is usually not the natural period of balance of the vessel, as it has an strong influence by the one induced by waves.

I don't know in your country, but in Spain it is mandatory to include a means of quickly deducting GM, providing nomograms or tables where you enter with period of balance (measured in calm waters, attention).

Well, a 14' diameter buoy has its CG around half of that, so 7'. What's given usually (or it should) is the maximum height of the CG of deck loads and its maximum amount. It can be asumed that cargo is homogeneous and prismatic, so the maximum height of it can be asumed to be twice the height the NA took for the CG. But the important thing is not only the CG, but also the total weight. So if your vessel is able to carry seven or eight hundreds of LTs on deck with a maximum height of 12', it's not a problem at all to load a 14' diameter buoy if total weight on deck are only some dozens of tons (other stab considerations being correct, attention). Not everything can be written in the stab books. It's precisely the common sense and expertise of the captain the one to be applied at any given situation

I fully understand. Yes, life of captains is not (and never has been) easy. That's because they have a great responsibility in their hands, not being the lesser the lives of the crew. We have to find a way to do captains' lifes easier, helping them to quickly take decissions, as well as downsizing the amount of 'paperwork'. Stab measuring devices, black boxes, etc, are steps in that direction.

Kind regards.

 

Thanks a lot for the info. I'll work on it.

I still refuse to believe they wrongly transferred ballast the wrong way, or they were using Flume tanks. But in fact something had to go terribly, terribly wrong, so.....

That's excellent. I hope the same is happening in other areas, too.

Something else to be taken into account is the direction in which full throttle was applied at the very last moments. 12000 kW applied with rudders fully sided impose a significant capsizing moment on the vessel, as well as the modern thrusters, which are well under bottom level. With the vessel strongly tilted, a burst of power in the wrong direction can be enough to suddenly capsize it. I know of specific cases where this happened.

Cheers.

 

I don't believe that, Stu. You have to be more precise: You hate other's rules, not yours. That's because you keep yourself mentally young: You are still a rebel....

 

The stability book we have on board only mentions height of deck cargo - not VCG of cargo. I actually filled out an SMS non conformity on this issue since we have wire storage reels where the center is approx. 20' above the main deck. This was passed back up through management and into the hands of the same firm that had comepleted the stability booklette in the first place.

Their reply was that this weight could be figured using the added weight section of the booklette and basically no to worry about the maximum cargo height.

My issue is that what if, god forbid, something happens aboard my vessel and there is a court inquiry. I can only imagine the lines of questioning...

"What did the stability booklette state regarding maximum cargo height?"

"What was the height of the 14' buoy on your back deck?" I would be strung from the nearest yardarm!

This is only one small example of the many, many items that I face every day that makes it truely impossible to obey every law as written on the books.

 

Here's one for discussion:

I realize that we will never really know what happened, but I still believe that the ballast was trasferred wrong for one simple reason - the vessel started "with a small list to port" - this was AFTER they had 1800 meters of 3" chain out (roughly 190 Tons). Then at 16:55 they registered 290 tons (at the winch) and the witness stated "Large Movements had then begun in the vessel towards port" and "the First Mate was working on getting as much ballast as possible over to the starboard side".

When the vessel had the chain paid out and there was a small list and they were loosing position to starboard we have to assume that the situation, in stability anyways, was somewhat static. The weight had been removed from the locker, all the available thrust was acting to try and get the vessel to Port, and the tension was acting on the starboard inboard pin on the stern.
When the Highland Valor lost the chain again the stability situation shouldn't have changed to make the vessel make the large movements to port. The only situation that I see actively changing is the transferring of ballast.

I can say from experience that it is very easy on some systems (such as on large tanker control consoles) that it is very easy to get confused on which way to shift ballast to correct a list. This is why I would like to see what the bridge control was set up like. Remember that they are also seated facing aft, which does strange things to the "Port and Starboard" sides for the inexperienced - or when under stress. If I had a dollar for the number of times that there has been momentary confusion between port and starboard when we go to tie the vessel, or enter a movement on the DP system, etc. I could be retired by now.

I don't think that this would be possible when you have the tension of the chain trapped between stern pins I have towed many rigs and have had maximum power applied and never felt the stability be in danger. One of the interesting facts is that when you are working heavy loads, such as pulling anchors, the rudder is often used in the opposite direction most would think since the chain (or wire) will keep the vessel from pivoting the rudders will help lift the stern in the direction needed to go. (apply starboard rudder to move the vessel to port, etc).

regards,
Chuck

 

OK Ace! pax!

the one thing nobody has mentioned is the presures on ther master and crew from the Rig! And these can be tre - men - dous to say the least - remember that little clause that most charter parties have about instant removal of ANY person from the contract for ANY reason, which the client does not even have to state! If that's not gauranteed to put the the master on edge before he starts nothing will!! And of course who would admit to putting anybody under that presure! Some vessels have a tape recorder wired up to the VHF as a precaution - I just hope that the HV had such a thing and that it was ON! because to my mind this seems to have a lot to do with it! things wouldn't get done until the pressure is on and then......(but hell what do I know about it?)

And Chuck I do agree with the fact that as we get better skills so the the tolerances can get smaller - but in certain activities the over engineered vessel gets away with it the boat running to fine tolerances doesn't!! Down to money again! the poor bloody seafarer don't matter the money do!

 

I love an over-engineered boat. The one I am on is very, very stable and really is forgiving where many of the other anchor vessels aren't. If I could figure out how to post pictures I would show this vessel compared to some other AHTS's in the gulf with huge storage reels on the same level as our bridge. THAT would make me nervous.

The best thing going right now for the seafarer is the fact that there is a shortage of qualified individuals. We can make demands and get them met where in the past it was keep your mouth shut or find yourself out of work. I know I can pick up a phone and find a new job in less than five minutes, so I can really afford to be safe. Even in the past couple years I have seen more and more jobs halted to discuss things and hash out the process over the radio with input from all parties.