Who's got a boat and some spare time? Flotsam & Jetsom

[John Ranalletta]

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cargo-ship-carrying-thousands-porsches-bentleys-audis-stranded-sea-after-massive-fire

 

"Keep in mind, according to Maritime Law, whoever recovers the ship is entitled to compensation under the "law of salvage". Of course, if pirates get there first, they might take the entire cargo for themselves, if they could find a way to move or tow the ship away."

 

[szurszewski]

Saw that yesterday - suggested to the wife that maybe Bentley would do a one-for-one deal where if you rescue two, give them back one and they'll give you the title for the other one!

[Rinkydink]

Hooking up my 14 ft flat bottom to the truck as we speak!!

[wbw6cos]

Good luck on proper registration for any vehicles recovered.   HA 

[Scott9999]

1 hour ago, wbw6cos said:

Good luck on proper registration for any vehicles recovered.   HA 

If you could document the salvage, you could register every, single (usable) vehicle on that ship anywhere in the USA.   Ownership is conveyed via the salvage.

 

Having been to sea, and been IN four Typhoons (including one where the eye passed directly over our ship), salvage of a sinking hulk on the high seas is not for the faint of heart.  If you have the financial wherewithal, the courage, and the ability to salvage that ship ...

 

.... you deserve the proceeds from every one of those vehicles, plus a lifetime free pass for no-speed-limit travel anywhere in the USA.  😏😁

[wbw6cos]

If I had the money,  I would just buy it new and clean from the showroom floor.  

[Hosstage]

1 hour ago, wbw6cos said:

If I had the money,  I would just buy it new and clean from the showroom floor.  

Check for hidden fire and flood damage.....

[John Ranalletta]

This doesn't look good at all.

 

[wbw6cos]

Good luck on proper registration for any recovering any vehicles recovered worthy enough for registering.   HA

[roadscholar]

No idea if this is the case but someone today said a VW EV started the fire.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna16675

[Hosstage]

5 hours ago, roadscholar said:

No idea if this is the case but someone today said a VW EV started the fire.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna16675

A rumor started by Hyundai...

[ESokoloff]

7 hours ago, Hosstage said:

A rumor started by Hyundai...

More like a rumor started by an EV foe.

Yes Lithium ion batteries are on board & on fire making the situation more difficult but it’s too early to tell what the initial cause of the fire was. 

[Hosstage]

16 minutes ago, ESokoloff said:

More like a rumor started by an EV foe.

Yes Lithium ion batteries are on board & on fire making the situation more difficult but it’s too early to tell what the initial cause of the fire was. 

I do get a kick out of "early reports" indicating the cause, let's just throw someone under the bus before we have any facts. That's never caused problems in the past.

[Rougarou]

21 hours ago, ESokoloff said:

More like a rumor started by an EV foe.

 

 

 

 

Must be a whole underground anti-electric vehicle group........might even be classified as a terrorist organization.

[ESokoloff]

52 minutes ago, Rougarou said:

 

 

 

Must be a whole underground anti-electric vehicle group........might even be classified as a terrorist organization.

Seriously?

[Rougarou]

43 minutes ago, ESokoloff said:

Seriously?

 

Are they a terroristic EV Foe?

 

I see no where in that article that the possibility of a battery starting the fire was began by an "EV Foe",..........Seriously???

[ESokoloff]

1 hour ago, Rougarou said:

 

Are they a terroristic EV Foe?

 

I see no where in that article that the possibility of a battery starting the fire was began by an "EV Foe",..........Seriously???

Ok, now I understand.

You need to keep up with the discussion.
Were discussing the starting of rumors we’re as your jumping to the starting of the fire. 

[Hosstage]

That's pretty funny! We have absolutely no proof, but let's just put it out there. Luckily gasoline is nowhere near as flammable or explosive as a battery. Unfortunately too many people will believe batteries are to blame right away.

Personally I think it was started by drunk monkeys that were smoking cigarettes. It happens way more often than the media reports...

[Rougarou]

1 hour ago, ESokoloff said:

Ok, now I understand.

You need to keep up with the discussion.
Were discussing the starting of rumors we’re as your jumping to the starting of the fire. 

 

 

Nooooooo, I think you are actually missing it.

 

Yes, starting rumors, but you clearly stated that it was possibly by an "EV Foe",......WTF is that?   A terroristic organization like ELF?  Is there a whole underground of people that are anti-Electric Vehicles.  

 

I don't really care how the fire started, just I'd like to know these EV Foe people and what their agenda is......I'll need to put them on my Terrorist Watch List.

[ESokoloff]

Im out, I know when I’m beat.

[Hosstage]

There is a group of idiots that were blocking charging stations with their gas powered vehicles to make a statement. Not sure what the statement was, but it was stupid, whatever it was.

 

 

[Red]

Got this story in an email from a friend.  Could be an EV foe is a subset of the group this guy represents.

 

 

The rest of the story...read it ALL so as to be really informed 

 

What is a battery?' I think Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System. That's important.

 

They do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators.  So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.

 

Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?

 

Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.

 

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.

 

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

 

All batteries are self-discharging.  That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

 

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.

 

But that is not half of it.  For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.

 

Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.

 

In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.

 

The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.

 

Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.

 

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk.  It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

 

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just one  battery."

 

Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?"

 

I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.

 

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

 

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

 

There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent.  "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.

 

If this had been titled…  "The Embedded Costs of Going Green," would you have read it? Please share if you wish. 

 

[Hosstage]

This Yale Study doesn't seem to agree 

[Red]

I wasn't defending or promoting the  data in the mass forwarded email.  Simply pointing out that there are those who border on militant anti EV.  It does strike me as odd that electricity generated by fossil fuel transmitted hundreds of miles over an antiquated copper wire, stored in a very big battery, then finally transferred to a vehicle which is then used to propel a vehicle is better for the planet that simply using fossil fuel to begin with.  Just using the rule that no energy transfer is 100% complete would lead one to believe that all those steps might take it's toll on green competitiveness.

[Scott9999]

On 2/21/2022 at 7:38 AM, Hosstage said:

That's pretty funny! We have absolutely no proof, but let's just put it out there. Luckily gasoline is nowhere near as flammable or explosive as a battery. Unfortunately too many people will believe batteries are to blame right away.

Personally I think it was started by drunk monkeys that were smoking cigarettes. It happens way more often than the media reports...

Well, let's see.

 

a) It's a cargo ship.

b) Assuming that the crew did not report and engineering problem ...

c) The fire started in a cargo hold.

d) Ergo, something in the cargo, started the file.

e) Industry has extensive experience loading cars on ships, and of course, most are containerized. 

f)  Even if the containers broke lose due to improper storage, or usually rough seas, the most that would likely happen is a bunch of damaged containers and maybe, the cars in them.  (Where would the ignition point be?  Hmmm, but more on that in a second.)

g)  Assuming that the reports that Lithium batteries caused the fire, came from the crew evaluating the fire and cargo below deck, they probably know where the electric vehicles are stored.  if those containers caught fire, and burned, well, again, where is the likely point of ignition?  On the other hand, most lithium battery related fires  occurred during the charging cycle, and one would assume nothing was charging down in those containers, inside the ship's holds.   Fire starting inside a container, inside an inert vehicle, would seem unlikely unless there was some accelerator involved, and a point (cause) of ignition.

h) If the crew had no clue what started the fire, other than it did not start in engineering or crew's quarters, then logically, the fire still started in the cargo, more specifically, within sealed containers holding vehicles.  Again, wouldn't the crew know their manifest?  Wouldn't they be able to pretty quickly, and accurately, identify what is IN the containers in section of the hold, where the fire originated? 

i)  The most likely cause of lithium fire problems due to a suspected chemical reaction, versus the traditional fuel, oxygen, ignition fire triangle.  What causes that chemical reaction is the $Billion question currently sinking this ship. Having just read a white paper on likely causes of Lithium battery fires, the most likely culprits if these vehicle's batteries were the ignition point would be damage to the vehicles,  their batteries breaking open (again heavy weather in the area the ship was transiting), with the lithium combining with salt water entering the hold.   Once those electric car batteries catch fire, the description in that paper feels analogous to a coal or tire-refuse fire, i.e. it really takes off on it's own, there's little that can stop it.  Interrupting the fire triangle doesn't extinguish the fire (i.e. foam, halon, whatever they are using to smother the fire), because the cause is chemical, and not dependent on external fuel, heat/ignition, or oxygen to continue burning.

 

Regardless of the original cause, I have little doubt that the lithium batteries are the cause of the inability of crew or salvage crews to extinguish it.    I know that battery replacement is no trivial thing, but shipping electric vehicles WITH their batteries feels a little like shipping loose gun powder in bags, i.e. an incident like this, just waiting to happen.

 

As early conclusions about the fire's cause being the EV's batteries may be inappropriate, it sure seems that some are overly defensive about the issue.  After all, it's a proven fact that lithium batteries, under certain circumstances, can cause fires independent of any other source of ignition, fuel, or oxygen.  

 

But, what do I know ..... where's TEWKS?  Damn firefighter's are never around when you need their expert opinion ....  🤣🤣🤣

[TEWKS]

1 hour ago, Scott9999 said:

But, what do I know ..... where's TEWKS?  Damn firefighter's are never around when you need their expert opinion ....  🤣🤣

What’s the old saying when you have no idea…”that’s above my pay grade” . Not rocket science here but, I can say it takes way more water to extinguish a well established fire than most people would believe. So once “out of control” “ on a ship” they’d have an almost impossible time at stopping it. USS Bonhomme Richard

[Hosstage]

I still say it was caused by monkeys smoking cigarettes 

[Rougarou]

 

3 hours ago, Red said:

I wasn't defending or promoting the  data in the mass forwarded email.  Simply pointing out that there are those who border on militant anti EV.  It does strike me as odd that electricity generated by fossil fuel transmitted hundreds of miles over an antiquated copper wire, stored in a very big battery, then finally transferred to a vehicle which is then used to propel a vehicle is better for the planet that simply using fossil fuel to begin with.  Just using the rule that no energy transfer is 100% complete would lead one to believe that all those steps might take it's toll on green competitiveness.

 

I didn't get a feel that the article you posted was anywhere near anti-EV, just pointing out the "extended" costs of EVs and alternate energy in general.  

 

 

2 hours ago, Scott9999 said:

Well, let's see.

 

e) Industry has extensive experience loading cars on ships, and of course, most are containerized. 

I dunno about that.  I don't think that the majority of manufacturers ship their vehicles in containers.  I watched a ship in Long Beach pull in, drop ramp and drive out plenty of new Mercedes.  You could see inside the belly and weren't a container to be had in there. 

 

Gotta figure, how many vehicles can you fit in a 20ft or 40ft container vs just parking them side by side.

 

Something like this

 

 

As a side note, 1987, the USS Saratoga was moving from Mayport to Portsmouth for SLEP.  Of course, you can't very well ship all those vehicles the the crew has, so, where'd they go.  Flight deck and hanger deck.  I got to drive my car right up the ramp into the hanger bay.

 

Not the Sara, but you get the idea.  Looks to be the Truman

 

 

Now mebbe you as an individual will have your vehicle shipped in a box, but I doubt seriously that the mass producers of vehicles box up their cars and trucks to ship around.

 

 

[wbw6cos]

From what I learned in the movies, all high-dollar, stolen vehicles is the US are exported in shipping containers.  

[Lowndes]

On 2/20/2022 at 9:22 AM, Hosstage said:

That's never caused problems in the past.

 

I think there are a couple of airline pilots that might have a slightly different opinion.

 

[Rougarou]

1 hour ago, wbw6cos said:

From what I learned in the movies, all high-dollar, stolen vehicles is the US are exported in shipping containers.  

 

Ya, I'd guess that is probably true, but I highly doubt the VAG will individually box their autos to put on a boat.

[Scott9999]

9 hours ago, Rougarou said:

 

Ya, I'd guess that is probably true, but I highly doubt the VAG will individually box their autos to put on a boat.

Yep, I guess that's my bad.  I had no idea that the Europeans shipped high end, high value luxury automobiles through the Atlantic the same way the Japanese ship their economy Toyota's.  But the Felicity Ace  is in fact, a "RO-RO", which is why so many of them seem to end up like this:

 

 

And their vehicles seem to end up like this, a whole lot.

 

 

 

In any case, the fire is out, the vessel is under tow, the insurance adjusters are probably getting busy alongside the salvage operations, and .... business will continue as usual, less a few 100 luxury autos.  ("Sir, I'm sorry, but your new Porsche will be delayed about about 18 months, unless you're willing to accept a few dents,  burn marks, and some water damage with this delivery, (at a 10% discount, of course).")   🙄😁

[Hosstage]

On 2/24/2022 at 9:19 AM, Lowndes said:

 

I think there are a couple of airline pilots that might have a slightly different opinion.

 

My comment was sarcasm against the idea of jumping to conclusions not causing problems. In fact, early reports based on innuendo usually work out fine. Just ask Richard Jewell. Worked out fine for him.

The batteries may well have caused the fire, they may have just exacerbated it. I'm willing to wait for the report before blaming the batteries 100% as the cause.

[9Mary7]

Those batteries killed a bunch of divers off the coast of California 'couple years back..... cell phone (charging) caught the boat on fire while they slept.

 

One of the reasons I hate flying.........

[ESokoloff]

7 hours ago, 9Mary7 said:

Those batteries killed a bunch of divers off the coast of California 'couple years back..... cell phone (charging) caught the boat on fire while they slept.

 

One of the reasons I hate flying.........

We will never know the cause of the fire aboard the Conception but the cause of the tragedy was caused by negligence on the part of the ships operators. 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_MV_Conception

[9Mary7]

21 hours ago, ESokoloff said:

We will never know the cause of the fire

However the facts known sure point to an electrical fire.

I'm sure that phone chargers had nothing to do with the fire...................................................

[Rougarou]

And down the drink it goes

[wbw6cos]

That means if you still want one, you're gonna need a bigger boat.

[Rougarou]

38 minutes ago, wbw6cos said:

That means if you still want one, you're gonna need a bigger boat.

 

Nooo, you need a long hard black one full of seamen to locate it.