No one was injured... damn.

I'm surprised the crane legs are set up in such a way as to allow contact with a ship like that... I get the whole moment-arm issue with loading heavy objects over an extended distance, but maybe I should be more amazed this didn't happened sooner.

Dan - Owner
http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

Pretty amazing that could happen. The cranes are on rails and permanently set that distance from the edge of the dock. Having any ship available to ram it is pretty odd. Perhaps the facility was designed for captured shipping. All the ships were measured, the place built, years later an 'alien' ship shows up that doesn't fit within the original design.

They are so lucky that crane collapsed in just that specific way or most the people in that building would've been pancaked.

Keith Cress
kcress - http://www.flaminsystems.com

What surprised me the most is the audio feed on the tape. Now I don't speak Arabic, but I assume that if the voices we heard were people who were at least in close proximity to where those monitors were showing the activity on the docks, that at least one of them would have expressed shock and horror at what was transpiring. Even after the crane had fully collapsed and the dust was starting to settle, it still sounds as if no one had noticed it yet. And you could see that the ship was moving rather fast and coming it bow first toward the quay, that alone should have raised alarm with anyone whose job was to be monitoring the activity on the docks. I mean, if you watch, you can see that some people on the ground and certainly the crew members on the ship, knew that there was a problem and something big was about to happen.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
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John, I assumed this was watching the security feed after the fact.

----
The name is a long story -- just call me Lo.

Perhaps, but I would still have expected some change in the tone and tenor of the voices that are heard as, first the ship starts to rapidly nose in, hits the quay and then the crane starts to collapse. Perhaps someone here on Eng-Tips who DOES understand Arabic could give us an idea of what was being said.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

The ships HUGE - just came in too fast by the look of it. How they dock things like that I don't know without more incidents.




This site has good details https://www.blueoceana.com/?p=1647 amnd implies it's not uncommon.

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simply requiring cranes to be moved to a position beyond the docking zone until ship is secured sounds like a good ideal to me.

It looks to me to be a combination of errors:

> The bow portion of the ship hit the crane; as shown in the photo above, the bow section bulwark significantly overhangs the hull at that point, so it's possible to get part of the ship well past the edge of the pier. This is clear due to the ship moving WAY TOO FAST. A cruise ship would have taken much longer to get that close to the pier, and any bow overhang of the pier would be noticed and corrected immediately.

> The crane is possibly out of position compared to the rest of the cranes, which are much further sternward.

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Thanks for posting a great video. Rarely do you see a collapse video where the cause is so clearly shown in the video itself.

Quote (byrdj)

simply requiring cranes to be moved to a position beyond the docking zone until ship is secured sounds like a good ideal to me.

Knowing what I know about dockside procedures in cargo terminals.. they measure unload times very precisely. The many minutes that would be required to reposition all of the pick equipment for the ship to dock, then move it all back again would likely be deemed an unacceptable change in schedule- even if it would be by far the safest approach. on top of that, large cargo terminals like that don't just dock one ship at a time.. if they move all the cranes to clear one vessel, they're possibly just in the danger zone of the next one.

I'm curious as well how this accident actually unfolded- from the video it appears that the ships is moving quite a bit faster than it should be. There's some reports on the site that the harbor pilot is under investigation, though that may be procedural and not directly indicative of a mistake on his or her part.

It is amazing how big that crane is. There was a company I interviewed with for a PLC programming job in the twin cities that makes super cranes for ocean oil platforms. It was hard to wrap my head around how big it was and why you would ever need something that big. The department was bought and sold depending on whoever needed a super crane. I believe TransOcean owned them when I interviewed with them.

I was impressed at how easily the diagonal girders broke apart at the connections.
With all the traffic around the base it was a miracle no one was killed.

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