I believe I read in an earlier article that the ship grounded at high water, always the worst scenario. Additionally, as the photo shows, while she was initially perpendicular to the reef with only the forward half grounded, she is now parallel and fully grounded along the entire length of the ship. I wonder how the wood and fiberglass hull is going to hold up to another couple of weeks on the reef.
It’ll buff right out.
Well I am guessing there is a Captain that lost his Navy drivers license for good!
I like the crocodile tears of the Philippine officials. The longer the ship stays there, the greater the “environmental damage” it will cause and the greater the fines, which the USG will pay with an apology. If they had their way, that ship wouldn’t move for years.
Navy officials have indicated faulty digital navigation charts may have led to the grounding.The captain should have known better than to trust those GPS driving directions. Recalculating.....
It’s pretty impressive reading about how they plan to recover this ship, despite the sea pushing it towards the center of the reef and wrecking the hull. I imagine that for most of human history, up until maybe a century ago, this ship would have been doomed to become part of that reef.
Actually, thinking about this has reminded me of the story of Captain Streeter, a Great Lakes steamboat captain who ran his ship aground on a sandbar near Chicago in the 1800s. He couldn’t do anything about it at that time, so he decided to leave the ship there and used it to conduct business that was illegal in the Chicago city limits, like gambling and serving liquor on Sundays.
Eventually, he got people to dump the debris from the Chicago fire on his sandbar and backfilled the lake all the way to the shore, creating the neighborhood called Streeterville.
“Rear Adm. Tom Carney, Joint Group Unit Guardian commander, said two contracted heavy-lift ships from Singapore are scheduled to arrive next Wednesday or Thursday at the site near Palawan Island to begin removing the stranded ship.”
Does the US navy have the capacity to do this type of thing instead of contracting it out?
Advertise it as an adventure cruise with a Midnight Chocoholic Buffet and I bet you get 2,000 people to push it off the reef. You could even charge them $2,500 a piece for the trip. Put a zip line on it, and the Australians would pay even more.
I'd have to FIRE that security company!