Ok, you have to give me high marks for honor. I went to their page, and several of the pictures there make it clear they WERE stupid enough to locate their ‘sea cellar’ way out in the channel. https://www.oceanfathoms.com/lookbook
So I was wrong about that.
However, the channel looks pretty damned big. Odds are they were out of the way, anyway.... but you’re right, without checking, how could they know?
Still, something really bothers me about the whole deal. How much regulation and permits are enough? How many are too many? Wouldn’t it be much better if the government didn’t REGULATE and PERMIT, but instead, INFORM?
“Dear Ocean Fathoms, per your note of 3/14/2022, the location you have chosen seems to be well out of shipping and dredging zones. I hope this information helps you. Have a nice day.”
Well they should probably start with getting a business license.
Really look at it from the other direction. Instead of the story being that their wine got poured out what if the story was “ACE dredger (which remember your tax dollars paid for) takes millions of dollars worth of damage running into uncharted wine barrels being aged by company that did none of the paperwork”? I think you’d read that story and say “those guys are idiots, hope they’ve got enough assets to pay for a new dredger”.
Hazards in water ways work with very simple rules. If you’re putting them there you need to make sure they’re properly charted. If you do anything bad that happens is on whoever did the bad thing, if you don’t it’s on you. In this case regulating and permitting is how you make people get their hazards (and remember pretty much everything man made is considered a hazard) on the damn charts.
And the government can’t INFORM as you want them to if Ocean Fathoms doesn’t do the paperwork to get their hazard on the chart. That’s how you trigger that “dear government I want to sink some stuff here” “dear sinker, bad spot, try over here”.