Ship carrying boats listing and abandoned in the Norwegian Sea

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Kukri said:
I always enjoy a friend’s description of a free fall drop. Once everyone is seated (facing aft, head against back rest, seat straps tight, arms crossed and holding straps) the coxswain uses a hand pump to pressurise the hydraulic release. As he does so there is always complete silence in the boat... my friend says “You could hear a pin drop as the release clicks open - except of course the pin would not be dropping, relative to the boat!”

Huge fun! To settle an argument with the then Fleet Manager of P&O Bulk, who said he wouldn’t get into one, I took my then six year old son for a drop - he enjoyed it too!
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I read somewhere, that accidents during evacuation exercises from ships killed more people than drowning did.
Any truth in that?
 
westernman said:
I read somewhere, that accidents during evacuation exercises from ships killed more people than drowning did.
Any truth in that?
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A very well known and much quoted statistic, which comes in several forms, but it applies to conventional lifeboats, not to free fall lifeboats.

At one point about ten years ago our fleet was steaming around the oceans with notices on the conventional lifeboats which read: “DO NOT USE” - that was a particular problem, now fixed, with the “release on load” hooks, which were rather too keen on doing what it said on the label.
 
Kukri said:
I always enjoy a friend’s description of a free fall drop. Once everyone is seated (facing aft, head against back rest, seat straps tight, arms crossed and holding straps) the coxswain uses a hand pump to pressurise the hydraulic release. As he does so there is always complete silence in the boat... my friend says “You could hear a pin drop as the release clicks open - except of course the pin would not be dropping, relative to the boat!”

Huge fun! To settle an argument with the then Fleet Manager of P&O Bulk, who said he wouldn’t get into one, I took my then six year old son for a drop - he enjoyed it too!
Click to expand...
My younger brother was a cox on a freefall lifeboat from his oilrig and being a radio officer would be one of the last off the rig should the proverbial hit the fan.
One of his opposite numbers on a rig he used to be on was on duty when it caught fire, the lad stayed at his post and helped keep radio communications going during the evacuation and subsequent rescue, sadly he lost his life leaving it too late to get from the radio shack to the lifeboat.
My brother had transferred to another rig a few months before, at that time he worked for Marconi Marine.
 
Alicatt said:
One of his opposite numbers on a rig he used to be on was on duty when it caught fire, the lad stayed at his post and helped keep radio communications going during the evacuation and subsequent rescue, sadly he lost his life leaving it too late to get from the radio shack to the lifeboat.
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Oh wow, how tragic.

A brave and heroic soul.
 
dom said:
Oh wow, how tragic.

A brave and heroic soul.
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It was one of the things that my brother told me, that if anything happened, from where the radio shack was to the nearest lifeboat that he would never make it in time, I think they were all brave souls doing that job.

My brother had a FISO (Flight Information Service Officer) qualification to his radio ticket and has been involved in a few rescue operations where he was the air traffic controller co-ordinating the search and rescue, one involved a yacht that was in distress going through the oil fields in the Beryl sector.
 
Alicatt said:
It was one of the things that my brother told me, that if anything happened, from where the radio shack was to the nearest lifeboat that he would never make it in time, I think they were all brave souls doing that job.
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That's a chilling fact; perhaps more thought should be given to some kind of a specialist evacuation system beside the radio shack?

Maybe an ejector seat type thing to launch the operator into the water from where they can then be picked up ...or something else?
 
KenF said:
She is currently about 16nm from land, drifting unmanned with two boats and a coastguard vessel nearby, salvage is planned for 'early' tomorrow.
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While two offshore supply vessels, BB Ocaean and Normand Drott will be attempting to salvage the mother ship Hendrika there is another operation to salvage the renegade, ship jumping first daughter, AQS Tor. The "tug boat Stadt Sløvåg" is assigned to the latter task. (Intrafish.no | De siste nyhetene om oppdrettsnæringen.).
 
JumbleDuck said:
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Thats the funniest thing I've seen in a while. ?

This one is for oil rig height and it seems like they edited the video to avoid showing how abruptly it stops when it enters the water. Looks like it has hardly any forward momentum so it just pops up but they keep chopping the video so its not clear. Must be similar to car crash forces in there.

 
Alicatt said:
My younger brother was a cox on a freefall lifeboat from his oilrig and being a radio officer would be one of the last off the rig should the proverbial hit the fan.
One of his opposite numbers on a rig he used to be on was on duty when it caught fire, the lad stayed at his post and helped keep radio communications going during the evacuation and subsequent rescue, sadly he lost his life leaving it too late to get from the radio shack to the lifeboat.
My brother had transferred to another rig a few months before, at that time he worked for Marconi Marine.
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Ocean Odessy, IIRC, and the toolpusher sent him back, from the lifeboat, for some reason and he died. There was no need for him to stay at the radio station.

Remembering Ocean Odyssey - News for the Oil and Gas Sector
 
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Lifeboats kill a lot of people. 2019 two people died on one of my rigs when the hook released as it was hoisted to the parked position from a test launch. Decades ago other shift colleagues died when the thing released, again on test launch. I refuse to muster drill into a lifeboat. The inspectors can’t be trusted and the operators don’t have a clue how to use the lifeboat davit systems.
 
Athomson said:
This one is for oil rig height and it seems like they edited the video to avoid showing how abruptly it stops when it enters the water. Looks like it has hardly any forward momentum so it just pops up but they keep chopping the video so its not clear. Must be similar to car crash forces in there.
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In a very back-of-the-envelope sort of way, it falls 30m and then decelerates over about 5m, suggesting 6G deceleration. Not quite enough to rip internal organs off their mountings (that's about 9G, they tell me) but not something I'd care to try. Do the seats face forwards or backwards in these things?
 
JumbleDuck said:
In a very back-of-the-envelope sort of way, it falls 30m and then decelerates over about 5m, suggesting 6G deceleration. Not quite enough to rip internal organs off their mountings (that's about 9G, they tell me) but not something I'd care to try. Do the seats face forwards or backwards in these things?
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Backwards. Still scary things to be in. Glad I’m out of all that.
 
JumbleDuck said:
Do the seats face forwards or backwards in these things?
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Seems they all do from the videos on youtube of grimacing people inside them and what others said above. Except the helm which is odd as thats the person who will need their reintas attached the most. Even this short drop looks pretty violent for the helm


This one is 55m but they don't say if anyone was in it

 
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