After the Storm: Rena's Breakup

As predicted by salvage experts, the weekend storm broke the containership Rena in two, leaving the bow section on the reef:

Two days on, the bottom had fallen out of one section, along with the containers, leaving this strange skeleton of hatchway openings and hull:

To recap: On October 5 Rena crashed full speed onto Astrolabe Reef 14 miles outside the harbor at Tauranga, NZ. Remarkably, it held together for months, even though half the 47,000-ton ship was free to rise and fall with the waves, putting enormous stress on the midships section between the floating part and the grounded part. A crack in the hull developed early, and widened:

The numbers at the point of breakup:

• Containers lifted off by salvors and taken to shore: 389
• Containers that fell off before the storm: about 100
• Containers still on board at the time of the breakup: about 900
• Oil pumped out by salvage crews: 1,000 tons
• Oil still on board last weekend: about 400 tons, some of which is now headed out to sea:

There's no report out yet on why the ship went full speed onto rocks that are well known to mariners.

Deadly Elevator Accident: Interlocks under suspicion

Thoughts on information that's been released about the circumstances of Suzanne Hart's death December 14 in an elevator at the Young & Rubicam office building, 285 Madison Avenue, NYC. Here's a photo of the building entrance from NY Daily News, with an NYPD Emergency Service Unit heavy-rescue truck parked outside:

The office building opened in 1926. The accident happened in an elevator in the lower-floor bank, covering floors 1-12. The elevator is a traction device, which rolls along steel tracks while suspended from a steel cable or belt. The prime mover is an electric winch with electronic controls. 

Being licensed by NYC's Department of Buildings, and inspected by contractors, it's supposed to have multiple safety devices that prevent doors closing on people, and to prevent the car from moving without proper command.

December 13: A company called Transel Elevator comes to the building to perform routine work on the elevator. Here's a link to a Transel site. Transel advertises its reliance on non-proprietary control systems for construction and repairs.

December 14: Transel puts the car at 285 Madison Ave. back into service in the morning. It's unclear how much time passes, but at about 10 am the elevator car is on the ground floor, with two passengers inside, its doors open. As Hart begins to step in, a passenger presses the button for an upper floor. The car shoots upward when Hart is halfway in and pins her at the second floor, between the top of the hoistway opening and the floor of the car. The other two passengers in the car are trapped in this horrifying space for over an hour, until emergency workers get enough control of the machinery to extricate them. One has sued for emotional distress. 

There are reports that the impact was so violent the other elevators in the bank had to be checked for damage.

I looked through accounts of other mishaps involving uncommanded elevator movements, and what turned up. Here's a list of factors that investigators (including a firm hired by the Department of Buildings, and consultants hired by the parties) are likely to check.

Timing of events: After the elevator went back into service that morning, were any trouble reports posted before the fatality?

Electronic controls:  These include control panels up in the machinery room, near the hoist motor. Were jumper wires still in place from the repairs? Jumpers -- temporary wires with alligator clips at each end -- are a possible cause when electronics go crazy soon after repair work on it. It's not necessarily a problem to use jumpers for diagnosis while the car is out of service, but the machine must not be restored to service with jumpers still in place; they could short-circuit the interlocks that keep passengers safe.

Counterweights: Were these in proper balance, such that the car had no strong tendency to lurch upward when lightly loaded?

Overspeed governor: Probably not relevant here given the very short distance of travel, but these devices clamp the car to the rails when velocity exceeds a set value, commonly 125% of the maximum speed. They're standard on traction systems to guard against excessive downward speeds, in case of cable break. Some models protect against upward movement.

Doorway detectors and associated interlocks: Depending on the model, these can include photoelectric light beams, safety edges on the doors (the gadgets that look like retracting bumpers at the door edges), and infrared curtains. Any of these should have detected that Hart was in the doorway, which with safety interlocks should have kept the doors from closing. And with the car doors and hoistway doors standing open, the elevator shouldn't have moved at all. 

Thus the recent speculation about some kind of serious problem remaining in the electronics at 10 am.

Weaubleau's Round Rocks

Driving back to Minnesota with the family after Thanksgiving, Passenger attempted to amuse Driver with area factoids from Wiki and its links. We were on Highway 13 approaching Osceola, MO, which is north-northeast of Weaubleau. So that prompted a search for information on the enigmatic Weaubleau Eggs, aka “round rocks.”

Google offers this photo:

Thousands have been found in the vicinity, but they're rare elsewhere on Earth. The most common sizes run from golf-balls to grapefruit. Over the years, residents of Weaubleau and Osceola built stairways and walls from them.

Most are round or ovoid, a little flattened on one side. Cracking them open reveals that the bulk of each egg is chert, a hard, glossy sedimentary rock that results when silica replaces portions of calcium-carbonate limestone. Flint is one type of chert.

Weaubleau eggs often have a small piece of gray or greenish mudstone at the center, hence comparisons to eggs and their yolks. Sometimes the mudstone may hold the fossil of a conodont, a tiny, toothy eel. 

Round rocks sometimes occur together in ancient gravel deposits. This geology paper on the Weaubleau crater calls them shale-filled paleokarst pockets. Here's a photo from that paper:

The current consensus among the rock-minded is that the round rocks originated with a meteorite impact circa 320-340 million years ago. Given that there are three non-concentric rings visible with synthetic-aperture radar, the cause may have been two or three serial impacts in close proximity. At any rate, something produced rings of shocked rock, the largest of which is about 12 miles in diameter.

Weaubleau counts as one of the Top 50 biggest meteor impacts detected on Earth, and offers more visible remnants than the average site. 

There's another possible distinction, even rarer if confirmed. Weaubleau could be one of a near-linear string of craters along the 38th Parallel:

If these are not coincidental, the Weaubleau event would be part of the only known serial-meteorite-impact on Earth.

But this caveat: Planetary geologists say a serial impact on Earth is improbable. Given the Earth's relatively weak gravity well, compared to that of Jupiter, terrestial gravity is supposed to be too weak to break up even poorly cemented comets. So before agreeing, they'd want more proof that the 38^th Parallel craters are of the same age. 

But the Moon appears to have several crater strings from serial impacts, so it's not impossible.

Back to rock hunting. The best place to find a specimen is near the rim of the crater. North of Osceola, we turned off the main highway and found this estimable egg in a ditch:

It's a little more than seven inches in diameter, and weighs 13 pounds, so it's on the upper end of egg size. And no, we don't plan on breaking it open to see if there's a baby conodont fossil inside.

What would form such odd objects, and in such great numbers? One TV news account surmised that the eggs were formed immediately by the impact and flew like so many cannonballs from ground zero. More likely is that the impact threw out little pieces of mudstone from the crater that, in time, prompted chert formation. The phrase doesn't roll off the tongue like the term "cannonball," but rockhounds say that Weaubleau eggs are spherical nodules of chert that nucleated around siltstone clasts.

Rena's Box Score: Storms set the pace

There are hints that a newly invigorated container removal effort at the MV Rena, still grounded off New Zealand, may not have much longer to operate. 

Rena's hull is seriously cracked and likely to finish breaking in two if the weather gets bad enough. It's amazing to me that it's still in one piece at all, given that the bow has been on the rocks for more than two months while the stern remains afloat, defying tides and ocean swells.

And storms. A 30-knot storm, with 13-foot waves, is forecast for the weekend. It'll be rough if anybody's working inside:

The crane-carrying barge Sea Tow 60 has stopped trying to lift containers, moving aside for the heavy lifter Smit Borneo. Here's a picture of Borneo on its way to the port of Tauranga, NZ, taking waves in stride:

Borneo has since arrived at Rena's location. It was lifting six containers at a time with the pedestal mounted 500-ton boom, but heavy weather and then a mechanical issue suspended the crane work. Here's containerized cargo arriving on shore:

Here's the current box score ... Out of 1,368 containers on board when the ship hit Astrolabe reef:

• Still on board, mostly below deck: 1,072
• Fell off and whereabouts unknown: 65
• Fell off, but rounded up: 25
• Removed by crane: 206

Containers are still breaking away. I'll post another note after the storm passes.

RED Dawn: Digital Cameras, Moving into Movies

How often does one get to meet one's movie hero?

Not often. I did interview Harrison Ford once about his helicopter training when I was writing The God Machine, and also John Lithgow for Harvard Magazine, but those talks were by telephone, so they don't count as up-close.

The hero-meeting I have in mind was three weeks ago, when I was at a location shoot in Maine for the History Channel. The show will air for the centennial of Titanic's loss: April 2012.

The object in question is the Red One digital camera, which is something I've wanted to see since it came on the market four years ago. The Red One offers a max resolution of 4,480 by 2,304 at 60 frames per second, which is well beyond what any television can reproduce. It's movie quality.

The production unit for Lone Wolf Documentary Group was using the Red on a wheeled crane, which will give a cinema-like feel. 

An operator holding a remote control was responsible for changing the angle, focal length, and focus of the camera. Here's the business end:

Here's a profile, from the company:

Typical attachments to the body are a hi-res monitor, filter,  a battery pack, a storage device, and a carrying handle. The Red is very much a modular design.

I know there are other brands of digital cameras now capable of moviemaking, and a newer Red model, the Epic, surpasses the Red One in features like pixel array. But the One has a special place because it opened the door to more independents by greatly lowering production costs. I first picked up a Sony video camera in 1980, starting reading American Cinematographer, and wondered how long it would be before video could match the 35mm cameras from Arri and Panavision.

I talked to a technician on the set and he said the latest video equipment records light better than filmstock in some respects, including underlit scenes. Very bright spots of the image are still a challenge for video, which tends to wash them out, but bracketing can improve the rendering. 

It's not just a question of resolution; a successful product takes the right combination of lenses, sensors, mounts, image-processing software and workflow, and storage that can reliably handle the huge flows of data. The Red One started with hard-drive storage, but now flash cards are common.

There weren't many skeptics about what a Red One could do after Peter Jackson took up the company's offer to try it out. Jackson did more than play around with it: he hauled two of them to New Zealand and came back with a short-form WWI costumer called Crossing the Line, filmed in two days. It drew a lot of attention at the National Association of Broadcasters' 2007 convention. Here's a low-resolution clip from it, posted on YouTube:

Since then, many major productions have dropped film stock and gone Red, including Social Network and Contagion. Here are more titles. 

There was a long waiting list at first; now availability is better. Renting the Red One body and a package of commonly used accessories costs about $2,500 per week from an LA rental house. 

Rena's New Phase: Container-Plucking

The removal of Heavy Fuel Oil, diesel, and lubricating oil from the Rena is complete enough that the next phase, container removal, has begun.

We're told that a grand total of 1,262 containers remain on the Rena, topside and in the holds. A crane on the Sea Tow 60 has pulled off eighteen to date, after workers freed the corner attachments with cutting torches. Here's a short NZ news item with a video clip.

Pulling containers from unstable stacks and lifting them with a crane that's sitting on another ship -- a ship that's moving independently from the Rena -- is difficult and dangerous, even in the best of weather. Getting close enough to use a cutting torch and attach cables means a rigger is close enough to get smashed. 

Despite the salvor's best efforts, it's likely that hundreds of containers will end up in the water anyway, particularly if a storm comes along. And the work is so difficult and dangerous it can't be rushed with the thought of beating the storms. The best information I've seen on the ups and downs of the salvage work can be found at this blog, Antipodean Mariner. Check it out!

Six to eight containers off would be a good day, so months of fair weather would be required to get all of them off. Not too likely.

Anticipating that likelihood, Svitzer's salvors have readied two hundred transponders, and attached them to containers most likely to become flotsam.

A more substantial crane-equipped vessel, the Smit Borneo, is on its way from Singapore and should arrive in a week or two. The Smit Borneo is a heavy-lifter, usually employed for pipelaying in the offshore oil patch. Here's an issue of a Smit publication, The Tug, that mentions the Borneo at work on a sunken drill rig. Here's the vessel, from VesselTracker.com:

A look at the Rena makes the challenge clear. Containers were stacked seven high aft of the deckhouse, and up to six high elsewhere. There are hundreds more containers secured in steel racks called "cell guides," under the decks.

For container geeks, here's a handbook for vessel masters about how containers are stowed on different types of ships, above and below decks. Here's a risk-advisory paper from marine insurers on the problems of container stowage above decks. (Item for future blog: marine insurers are concerned about a rising trend of containers lost from containerships while in transit; there are a variety of reasons for this; one is a scary phenomenon called parametric rolling.)

First, a brief summary about how generic containerships like the Rena stow their cargo. At port, crews begin by lowering and stowing containers in the holds (the cavernous areas below decks). When each hold is full, cranes lift heavily reinforced covers to seal the hatches. These hatch covers are the foundation for hundreds more containers on deck, usually six high. 

Containers in the holds: Each vertical column of containers is called a “cell.” As lowered by a crane, a container slides down a “cell guide" (a strong steel framework with vertical tracks) until it comes to rest either on the base of the cell guide, or another container. 

Containers are highly standardized, which allows the dimensions of the cell guides to be very precise. Precision is normally a good thing, because if there's slack between the cell guides and the containers, movement of the containers at sea will damage the cell guides.

Above decks, the first two or three tiers of containers are held down by steel rods called lashings. These are diagonal tension rods, securing corners of the containers to fittings on the ship structure. These attachments are quite strong ... assuming the containers and fittings are in good shape. If you look at the Rena photo above you can see some of the diagonal lashings -- they look like X's across the ends of the containers.

But containers in tiers rising higher than the lashed ones are more at risk. These upper containers attach to each other at the corners, not directly to the ship structure. The higher and heavier the stack, the more leverage to crush the containers below, or to snap their attachments. Crushed containers are visible at the bottom of the stacks on the stern.

Chasing Contrails at Flight Level 360

Disaster-wise, I'm tracking several developments (evidence of spontaneous fission at Fukushima-Daichi; what went wrong with Fobos-Grunt after successful injection to low-Earth orbit; and the daring plan to pluck shipping containers from the leaning Rena with the Smit-Borneo crane barge) but for now, a word about my sponsor, clouds! This following two trips to California in the last two weeks.

One trip was for an Inviting Disaster safety talk at a NASA facility and the other was to finish location shooting for a History Channel special to be broadcast in April 2012, produced by Lone Wolf Documentary Group. Links to come.

Both flights offered fine weather, which for a cloud-watcher, means heaps of clouds below and a clear sky above. 

One neat back-lighting effect that appeared west of Salt Lake City was produced as sunlight reflected off the snow cover, sending sunlight up through a heavy cloud cover:

And contrails clamored for attention, like these two eye-level streaks at 36,000 feet:

Here's a sunrise-contrail, appearing when I was on the way back:

Here's a contrail as seen from above, also in early morning.

Over eastern Utah our flight paralleled another plane, which happened to be making a whopper of a contrail. The sky was hazy enough, and the contrail big enough, that it actually threw a shadow across the sky:

 

Here's the dark streak that the contrail laid across a low cloud deck and a range of mountains:

That's a big one. More typically, contrail-shadows are faint and not visible at long distances, like these:

Winding up, now back at ground level, here's a summertime time-lapse video of cirrus on a northwesterly wind, followed by a handful of contrails.