Bourbon Dolphin capsizes

Do you realize, Mike the Walrus? Maybe the fault was not only an operational man-made mistake, neither fate.....Maybe we are opening here a door to the mathematics garden of the gods.....

 

Perhaps a stupid question (i am not a naval architect),
arent ships such as this, fitted with safety devices, such that the handled loads exceed limits of safety, the loads are released?
I would imagine the scale of the load in this case was not only large but also applied at an unacceptable angle. Perhaps an attachment point not strong
enough to take this load transversely, by design, could save the ship, by simply breaking.

 

Hi Omeron,
Simply - no there are no "safety devices" fitted (apart from the quick release which the crew were reported to have operated).
Have a look at pictures of the operations these vessels undertake - note the gear they handle - there would need to be a failure point built into the gear they are handling - then the gear would be no use for the job it is intended as the operational loads (once the anchor is set and the anchor handler has finished it's job) may well need to be much more than the anchor handler can handle
Think of a standard ship anchor windlass setup - where in that set up could you fit a safety device such as you describe - ie how can you dump all the anchor chain quickly enough?
Reading through the reports I believe that the cause of the BD accident was a chain of events that by themselves might have been ok but put together resulted in the disaster.
BD was to assist, that changed, HV could not maintain her hold on the chain / went the wrong way, lowering the tow pin, transferring ballast (increase in FSM), weather conditions may have played apart, and so on....

 

Not really! Good enough for general cargo ships but not OSVs.

If the shipboard loading program showed a GM of 0.26 m then the vessel did not meet this IMO minimum value.

IMO A.469 (XII), Intact stability for OSV:
The initial metacentric height GMo should not be less than 0.35 m = 1.15'

You still have 4 more criterion to Pass and with 1.15' GM we F = fail all of them (see attached loading condition).

This 0.26m GM is highly suspicious! Must have the Admiralty Lawyers salivating.

 

Yes, indeed!

Nice job, thanks.

 

so Smartb and Guillo, are the gz and Gm calculated by computer these days?

 

"Perhaps a stupid question (i am not a naval architect),
arent ships such as this, fitted with safety devices, such that the handled loads exceed limits of safety, the loads are released?
I would imagine the scale of the load in this case was not only large but also applied at an unacceptable angle. Perhaps an attachment point not strong
enough to take this load transversely, by design, could save the ship, by simply breaking."

no offence in the next statements !!!!!
But obviously you have never been to sea or had to work with equipment of this magnitude. If there were safety break points built into any of the equipment people would and will die Imagine if you will standing on a deck with a piece of metal (one link of chain ) that weighs more than your car that has a one edge diameter of more than what your arms can reach around you can appreciate it unless you have dealt with it or you are moving equipment to a location and the wind and waves are excessive and you hit the fail point and you loose your tow people trying to regain control and now you a loss of productive movement and a loose tow in adverse conditions
I feel the accident that happened to the BD is a huge loss but it was caused by a external force being applied to her if her stability was at risk there would of been incidents in the last years logs that were consider abnormalities at the time but now would shine light on the recent tragedy but there is not.
I do have a theory on why the GM was low when ever I was in the harbor being loaded I would load my tanks to maintain stability at the dock side most embarrassing to capsize at the dock and truly inefficent to unload those tanks standing still also with all the supplies that would most likely be on board for the rig

The questions that I would like to have answered is
One, Where the fuel was taken from maybe off the starboard tank ?
Two, What was the Highland V. doing and exactly where was it located?
Three, What was the rig winch doing at the exact moment of the incident ?
Four, What were the sonar graphs showing ? Bottom configuration and anything else in the water ?

in review of all the photos that I can find it seems that everything is to port on this vessel and almost in all of them she seems to have a predisposition of listing to port look at the last photo of her 40 minutes prior to this incident the port 1/4 again is in the water

Capt. F. Laursen (retired)

 

smartbight, acearch72:
I didn't do the numbers, but could GM = 26 cm have been caused by deck cargo when leaving port, as Laursen points out? That could make sense....

Jack,
Nowadays is all computers.....But when I have to check computers' mistakes (Errors in programs or faulty input data; I have experienced some of those) I go back to basis and do it by hand.

 

.....Or even when I don't believe what I'm getting from the computer!
From time to time we get really surprising results when revising some stab books of present vessels duly authorized to sail the seas; or captains who are sailing their vessels almost in capsize conditions, among other bizarre things.....

 

Upon further reflection, I don't believe the .23m GM is correct, for these reasons:

1) As stated before, if the IMO required would be more than this, so the stability run would fail.

2) Bells and whistles and sirens would be going off and the vessel might even show capcize on the screen.

3) While the master is not obliged to follow the stability run and can do what he pleases, the stability check must be entered into the ship's log as a part of the record. Why would a captain risk this? Even if nothing happened once the logs were reviewed, as they will be, he would lose his license for operating in an unsafe condidtion.

4) Therefore the reported GM of .23m must be incorrect.

And yes, obviously deck cargo would lower GM, but I don't recall anything that leads me to believe there was deck cargo, but they may have had anchor spreads loaded on. There was 1 anchor left on deck, so if they were setting #2 that would lead to believe that they brought the anchors out. They were 18tn Bruce anchors, so even if the spread were for 8, that's less than 150ltns of deck cargo. Almost nothing. I really don't think this was a contributor, but who knows?

 

As you can see in the pictures LazyJ; Computers, joysticks, fuel monitoring with Fuel Trax, real time GPS satellite tracking from the main office, etc.

 

I agree, such a low GM seems very unprobable. Either it is a typo or witness declarations are simply not right, although he states he "wrote that in his log book" (sic)

By the way: Witness states GM as 0.26 m and average draught 6.5 m, to be precise.

Interesting: http://bourbon-online.com/media/corp...n_offshore.pdf is not accesible anymore. Now it seems to be password protected.

 

FYI, In the past few years I have worked on at least 6 new builds and none of them (zero, nada, zip) had computerised stability programs - they only had the stability booklet that is required by the IMO, and that had a very limited number of condition. these are some of the reasons why I made my own workbooks.
A computer program for stability cost extra! Now what did the company say was more important, people or profit, oh well both start with "p" so are interchangable as it suits them.

 

ah Smart, I see NOBELTEC NAV on the pc, even I know how to use that!!!!!
that's the best nav prog I ,ve ever used

 

belle work on that photo, lovely engineering in my eyes, So from departure, all the tank soundings are linked to the puter, and constantly monitor the gz gm You know, so funny we had a 6m long dip stick)CAN first mates, still do this longhand? or are these skills disappearing?