

The wreck of the Kulluk - ilamont
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-wreck-of-the-kulluk.html?_r=0

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DonCarlitos
Craig Matthews, cited and pictured in the article, is my son-in-law's father.
He's told this story a few times in my presence and I've always got the
chills. What this article doesn't mention is that when he grabbed the floating
cable, the size of a man's arm, with the grappling hook, the two vessels were
both riding up-and-down on monster waves. So first, they had to synch both up
to even make the grab possible. To hear him tell it, it was a totally hair-
raising experience. His peers now know him as "The guy who tied THAT KNOT on
THAT DAY." It may be the most famous "Bowline" knot ever after that write-up.

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jonah
Reminds me of the Cougar Ace story:
[http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/...](http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_seacowboys?currentPage=all)

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keithpeter
" _Between 5:34 a.m. and 11:29 a.m., according to a later computer analysis by
Rolls-Royce, the Aiviq’s “wire tensile strength overload” alarm went off 38
times. It was set to trigger at 300 tons. The alarm, a piercing ring, would
not stop until Newill acknowledged it on the computer screen. New to Alaska
and new to a ship that was new to the world, Newill later claimed that the
alarm never went off. Coast Guard investigators concluded that he mistook the
tension alarm for another alarm that was known to be acting up._ "

Dialog box on screen saying _which alarm_ might have been an idea perhaps.
Software was obviously logging all the events.

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thrownaway2424
Nothing in the article suggests this alarm is based in software. Couldn't it
just as easily (in fact rather more easily) been a strain gauge hooked up to
an amp and comparator with a buzzer?

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jws
_…would not stop until Newill acknowledged it on the computer screen…_

Sounds like software to me. I suppose you could put a computer controlled
relay into your physical system, but the software would still have to know
which alarm it was disabling.

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thrownaway2424
Huh, you're right. I read it twice without parsing "on the computer screen."

Anyway, the lesson I took away from this story was that you shouldn't have
alarms that regularly go off and are known to be spurious.

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pm90
Extraordinary story. What I always found strange was how super rich
corporations like Shell will skimp in making purchases of the required safety
mechanisms, try to avoid taxes etc. and will ultimately end up with disasters
such as this one, which could have been avoided if the tug had been stronger
or better equipped, and the shackles had been new and strong.

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jws
The shackle gets a lot of ink in the media, and it did fail. The questions
about who inspected it and how seem a bit misplaced given that it was rated at
120 tons and the tow line alarm registered over 300 tons more than 30 times,
so missing provenance or not, it seems like the shackle was performed beyond
its design limits and beyond what the engineers required. They were just
wrong.

The towline itself was only rated to 85 tons, the towline manufacturer did
well.

~~~
radiowave
Typically, shackles of this sort have a safety factor of 5, meaning that if
the maximum working load is 120 tons, the minimum breaking load should be >=
600 tons. Strictly, once the maximum working load has been exceeded, the
shackle should be considered compromised. I don't have experience with any
shackle on that scale, but my feeling is that you ought to be able to expect a
good shackle to withstand 30 pulls to half of its minimum breaking load.

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jonah
Some followup stories from the local radio station:

[http://kucb.org/news/article/heavy-lift-ship-arrives-to-
retr...](http://kucb.org/news/article/heavy-lift-ship-arrives-to-retrieve-
kulluk/)

[http://kucb.org/news/article/coast-guard-releases-
findings-o...](http://kucb.org/news/article/coast-guard-releases-findings-on-
kulluk-grounding/)

[http://kucb.org/news/article/shells-kulluk-drill-rig-
headed-...](http://kucb.org/news/article/shells-kulluk-drill-rig-headed-back-
to-unalaska/)

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keithpeter
[http://arcticready.com/classic-kulluk](http://arcticready.com/classic-kulluk)

Took a few seconds before I realised that arcticready.com is a parody produced
by Greenpeace. I was previously unaware of this whole saga.

