An instructive example is that of the USS Missouri in 1950, because it has everything negative associated with it that is possible except loss of life. A new captain on his first time taking her to sea, stupidity, arrogance, ignorance, bad judgement, politics, money, engineering, embarrassment, a large ship and a monumental grounding.
On his first time out of Norfolk, VA on his new ship, the captain decided to take her up to 15 knots in an area he shouldn't have anyway, went to the wrong side of a marker, had multiple people try to tell him he was going to the wrong side of a channel marker and sailed his 57,000 ton ship at 15 knots (at an unusually extreme high tide, for extra bad luck) onto a very, very gently sloping shoal of gooey, slippery solid mud.
There were people looking at each other (who knew the area well) wondering what he was doing, voiced their opinions and when a quartermaster spoke out, received an icy rebuke, the die was cast.
The ship sailed nearly half a mile onto the gooey, slippery mud, and the grounding was so gradual that the first indication they had on the bridge there was a problem was not the decrease of speed, but the overheating of machinery because the intake valves were sucking up mud!
She sat in full view of a major highway for two weeks, and they finally got her off after completely unloading EVERYTHING on the ship that could be moved, waiting for as high a tide as they could. They had 14 tugboats, and divers in the water with water hoses on the bottom using the jets to free mud from the ship's hull while tugs on each side worked in concert to rock the vessel, and tugs pulled astern.
Just amazing.
