Unconventional Wisdom

Mumbai is playing host to an unusual visitor these days: A cargo ship MV Wisdom, has mistakenly found berth at the popular Juhu beach in Mumbai. The sight is attracting huge crowds and on Sunday, almost a lakh of people are said to have thronged the beach, forcing the police to make “Ganapati visarjan type” arrangements to avoid accidents.

What exactly has happened?

 MV Wisdom, a 25-year old Cargo vessel was being towed by another tug vessel Seabulk Plover to Alang in Gujarat from Colombo. Alang, a small coastal town in the Gulf of Khambat in Gujarat, with a population of just 18,464, is known for its ship-breaking industry and recycles almost half the ships recycled anywhere in the world. On 11th June, 2011, somewhere along its way, the towing cable between Seabulk Plover and MV Wisdom snapped and the vessel drifted towards Mumbai coast. Apparently, the crew of Plover did not realize the cable had snapped until Wisdom was too close to the coast, and when they did, it was too late for Plover to attempt a rescue!

What about the ship?

MV Wisdom was built in 1985 by Rickmers Werft, Bremerhaven, Germany and carries a Singaporean flag. It is 147 meters long, and reportedly weighs 16000 tonnes. Wisdom is primarily a cargo ship, and carries a load of upto 9000 DWT (DWT, or Deadweight Tonnage is a measure of how much total weight a ship can safely carry, including the weight of cargo, fuel, crew etc., and is equal to around a thousand kg.) by weight and 700 TEU by volume (TEU, or Twenty-foot Equivalent Units, is a unit of cargo capacity by volume, approximately equal to a container that is 20 feet long X 8 feet wide X 8.5 feet in height).

When the cable broke, the ship was 11 nautical miles off the Western Coast of India i.e. a distance of around 20 km and must have been sailing at a speed of not more than 3-4 knots (6-8 km per hour). The ship has no fuel and no crew.

The ship design is a double bottom continuous hull from peak to peak bulkhead.  A double bottom is a ship hull design and construction method where the bottom of the ship has two complete layers of watertight hull surface, which provides added strength and robustness to the ship.

The technical details of the ship are given below:

Type of ship:                Cargo Ship   

IMO Number:              8417558         

Flag:                             Singapore

MMSI Number:           564239000     

Callsign:                       S6AC5           

Length:                         147.0m

Beam:                          22.0m

Is something fishy?

Questions have certainly been raised. Owners of the ship are still unknown. It is also being asked as to what the ship was doing so close to the coast, and inside of the country’s vital installations such as oil rigs when the normal route from Colombo to Alang should have been from further away in the high seas. It is also known from International Maritime records that Seabulk Plover has some very powerful radio equipment onboard, as well as qualified specialist radio operators. Plover set sail from Colombo on 28^th May 2011, but stopped updating her position to the International Maritime Organization after 30^th May 2011. (The International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires all vessels over 299GT to carry an Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponder on board, which transmits their position, speed and course, and some other static information such as vessel's name, dimensions and voyage details. For more details of the AIS project, see here). It is also not clear where is Plover now, and why its crew was not arrested or detained.

You can refer some interesting articles here and here.

What next? 

Authorities have so far failed to salvage the ship and tow it back into the sea. To get it afloat, a water level of approximately 4 meters is required.  The next attempt to salvage the ship will be made on July 3 when high tide is anticipated to be 4.58 meters. On that day, two tug boats of 90-tonne pull capacity will try to pull the ship and take it back atleast 3.5 nautical miles into the sea where it can anchor safely.

If the attempt fails, I hope we can look forward to a new sea-side restaurant.

Remembering Ashok

I received an SMS from Western Railway yesterday. The message said “Your hurry could lead your family to worry. Save your life for your family. Use subways and foot over bridges to cross railway tracks”. I would have instantly deleted the message as I normally do, but my mind went back – many many years ago, to a person I knew, who had died while crossing the Railway tracks…..

Ordinarily, it would seem surprising that so many deaths occur while crossing railway tracks. After all, a train is predictable – it is easily visible due to its size, it does not start or stop suddenly, runs on well defined tracks and has much less maneuverability than say, traffic on the road. Yet, statistics indicate that more than 2,000 people die every year crossing the railway tracks in Mumbai alone i.e. six per day. A few months before I was born, my grandmother died this way. And nearly twenty years ago, so did Ashok.

Ashok was nobody. Working as a peon in a government company, Ashok was as nondescript a person as one could be. He was barely five feet tall, frail, dark and wore thick framed glasses. He was soft-spoken, innocent and harmless. Qualities that made him the butt of jokes and taunts in his office. And yet, Ashok took all of it in his stride, never getting angry or upset. He seemed to have reconciled to the fact that this was bound to happen. As if the sole purpose of his existence was to give others a superiority complex. Everyday, Ashok came to office on time, and did his work diligently and sincerely, such as wiping off the furniture, dusting off the heavily stuffed files stacked in rustic cabinets, or brining tea for the staff from outside. He never complained about anything. Occasionally, he borrowed money from me. Hundred rupees, two hundred, sometimes five hundred rupees, promising to repay after the salary day. He always kept his promise. Until the last one.

One evening, Ashok left office as usual, and never returned. He was run over by a train while crossing the tracks on his way home at Jogeshwari. 

When the rich and the famous die, obituaries are written about them, praises sung, and their names immortalized. I am sure Ashok had no such luck. Except for his immediate family who must have felt his absence, Ashok was soon forgotten, and nobody spoke of him ever again.

Until this message that came to me yesterday reminded me about him again.

We all know that we are going to die one day. What we don’t know is, when and how the death will come. When Ashok left office that fateful evening, little did he know that his time had come. And for him, like the two thousand others in Mumbai that year (and every year), God chose the Railways as the engine of death.

An extraordinary mission for safety of air travel

On 1^st June 2009, an Air France aircraft flying from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Paris, and carrying 216 passengers and 12 crewmen disappeared over the Atlantic. After close to two years of intense search, the debris of this aircraft are believed to have been found, more than 12800 feet under the sea. Read the extraordinary story here, don't miss it.

Investigators will now try to recover the flight recorders, lying at a place “.....here the sea is perfectly black, temperatures approach freezing and water pressure is equal to the weight of a car on a postage stamp......”. Hardly anyone has gone to such depths before, and the challenges the investigators face include “.....the presence of numerous bodies, some still strapped into their seats and preserved by the cold water and lack of oxygen or light.....”. Will the investigators bring up only the flight recorders, or also the bodies and hand them over to their relatives? Heart wrenching scenes would result, old wounds would be uncovered.

Read the full history of flight AF447 here.

Why are the investigators doing all this? Their mission is to establish the cause of the crash and make future air travel safer.

Air travel is becoming safer in India too. Read our contribution to this here, or here.