Ships with Arms on Board

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Sailfree

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With the recent breaking up of the container ship and its geographical location any chance that it was carrying arms and the breakup was intention to prevent delivery?

There was also the container ship that suffered fire damage in the atlantic and was towed back to Germany (?). There was a series of explosions that appeared more than the effects of a fire on a delivery of fridges or washing machines. Has anyone heard anything more about that one? Any signs in the wreckage of arms exploding?
 
I think Israel has scrambled Jets to sink a container ship carrying "nuclear materials" to Iran, but I can't see that being the case here. There aren't just fridges and washing machines on container ships anymore. Most of the chemical industry has equipment and chemicals manufactured in the far east and then shipped over here, other industries too.
 
Any suggestion of how you might break the back of a container ship and not alert the crew to what you'd done? Setting a fire amongst containers would hardly seem a feasible way to achieve that.
It sounds a little far-fetched?

But why would anyone even suspect this when there's no suggestion that the ship did anything but break up in bad weather?
 
MASH said:
Any suggestion of how you might break the back of a container ship and not alert the crew to what you'd done? Setting a fire amongst containers would hardly seem a feasible way to achieve that.
It sounds a little far-fetched?

But why would anyone even suspect this when there's no suggestion that the ship did anything but break up in bad weather?
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You are mixing two different incidents. In the second there was a fire but the size of the explosions were inexplicable as no declared dangerous manifest.
 
I quite like listening to the reporting to Tarifa Traffic.

'Are you carrying any dangerous cargo?'

' Yes, Liquid Natural Gas, sixty thousand tons.'


Eeek
 
I'm not mixing incidents. I know nothing of the second (Atlantic) incident, I was referring to the recent breakup in the Arabian Sea.

I hardly think that explosions on a container vessel are "inexplicable" as no one imagines that the contents of containers are always as described.
 
I manage big boxboats.

Question one - no, absolutely impossible. The ship suffered a compression fracture of the double bottom; you can see this in the video and stills.

Bad accident and causing a great deal of worry in the industry. Lucky no-one was hurt.

Question two - the problem is not arms, which are carried amidst armfuls of bureaucracy, but dangerous goods (fireworks, cigarette lighters, the list is almost endless) which some smartarse has decided to ship are ordinary cargo to save the higher freight rate that we all impose to cover the cost of handling dangerous goods.
 
As a former box boat officer I can assure you that they carry an awful lot of explosive stuff. Very rarely do you see one not flying flag Bravo. They carry everything from mining explosives to photographic chemicals to containerised tanks of oil products. Mix all that with the clothes, wood products and everything else you could imagine and you have the ingredients for one heck of a BBQ!
 
Ships break up because they are badly built and worked to death and the third world crews are expendable!
 
ffiill said:
Ships break up because they are badly built and worked to death and the third world crews are expendable!
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Unfortunately for your theory this one was five years old, built at an excellent shipyard, owned by one of the world's oldest and most reputable shipping companies and carried 11 Russians one Ukrainian and 14 Filipinos. The problem lies elsewhere and a lot of people in the classification societies are poring over hot computers trying to find the mistake. Luckily both halves remain afloat and can be towed in, so we will get to see just what went wrong.
 
MASH said:
Minn, is the fire we saw evidence of a likely/common result of a vessel coming apart like that?
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I think that is very unlikely; the "usual" cause of cargo fires in container ships is bad stowage of items of cargo inside the container in which they are being carried.

Incredible as it may seem there are always some people who simply don' understand that the oceans of the world are not always as calm as a millpond, and who fail to lash and secure cargo inside containers. Inflammable and/or explosive and/or oxidising cargo gets loose and we have another cargo fire...

A tanker or a gas carrier is much more likely to catch fire as a result of structural failure, but they are far stronger ships in the first place.
 
So this vessel not only broke in two but simultaneously suffered a substantial fire somewhere deep within the cargo or the structure around/below it. It would be a bit of a stretch to imagine they were unconnected then. There was no sign of a widespread fire high up in the cargo, or in the superstructure.
 
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MASH said:
So this vessel not only broke in two but simultaneously suffered a substantial fire somewhere deep within the cargo or the structure around/below it. It would be a bit of a stretch to imagine they were unconnected then. There was no sign of a widespread fire high up in the cargo, or in the superstructure.
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So far as I know, there was no fire involved in the breaking in two of the MOL COMFORT. You may be confusing two separate incidents.
 
Take a look at the photos - there is one that clearly shows a considerable amount of smoke and others that may well show some. And it doesn't look as if it's coming from the smokestack.

http://c.gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/mol-comfort-in-half.jpeg

http://mangoworldmagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/mol-comfort-loss-set-to-be-costly-for.html

http://cf.gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/BNBRF-uCQAAHMQi.jpeg and look closely to the right of the vessel

http://www.seanews.com.tr/article/ACCIDENTS/104724/
 
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