"Ship Carrying Weapons for Syrian Rebels Splits in Half/Sinks" Topic

World maratime news confirms that a Japanese container ship has split in two and sunk.

"Before it's News" has a story saying the container was piled high with weapons for the Syrian "Rebels". That could be hogwash. I'm just posting this as an item of interest, and to remind us all of the importance of logistics!

‘A large fleet named "Mol Comfort" carrying Arms for FSA from the U.S. has crashed in the Indian Ocean as it made its way from Singapore to Jeddah, on board were 4,500 containers loaded with arms for the Syrian rebels'

‘MOL Comfort sank due to yet unclear reasons, sailing from Singapore to Jeddah and after that to North Europe, leaving behind hundreds of drifting containers and a huge aftershock hitting liner sector and all of the maritime industry.

Even the scale of the consequences is hard, impossible, to estimate, not to mention consequences themselves. This is the 1st case in liner sector, when modern ocean-going liner container vessel (built in Japan!) sank in the ocean after breaking in 2 parts, like a poorly built and managed bulk carrier or over aged coaster. Nothing like this ever occurred, and no one believed it was possible, even theoretically. It just could not happen, but still, here it is.'

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When I saw the top image I thought "torpedo", which is echoed in the comments under this article. But I guess this will turn out to be some structural fault and bad loading.

This is very interesting…

That's a lot of guns for the Rebels… sounds like a strange segway from a boat that sunk in a storm to a secret shipment of weapons getting torpedoed.

I wonder how many of the containers will be OK, since I believe they are generally watertight.

I wonder how many of the containers will be OK, since I believe they are generally watertight.

If your cargo agent does his job, duck taping holes, they will probably be rain proof. But not waterproof as there are holes for ventilation in many cargo containers. Of course, there are different types of container for different cargo. BTW, I believe there is a container of GW Warhammer 40K Eldar plastics at the bottom of the ocean somewhere. The container fell off during a storm. That will be an interesting find for some future archaeologist, providing the kits don't degrade in water.

It can't possibly be piled high with only weapons. There were 4300 containers. Just a dozen would yield a huge volume of small arms.

I'm sure the ship won't turn out to be have been hit by a torpedo. But the idea does stimulate the imagination.

The link says both halves are afloat…

The link says both halves are afloat…

Yes, a salvage operation is being organised.

Looks structural to me. Just takes not having water under part of the ship.

The link says both halves are afloat…

Thanks for pointing that out… I must've missed that.

Chalk one up for watertight bulkheads. It is pretty impressive you can break one of those babies in half and both halves still float.

Incredible!

A quick Google didn't turn up any report of casualties. Hope the entire crew is safe.

Very mixed crew of 26 -11 Russians, one Ukrainian and 14 Filipinos s. With this crew makeup it could have been an arms shipment to the Syrian Government or Hezbollah

Update from the Shipping line

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Link from the India Times gives differing information saying ship was in bound to Singapore from Saudi Arabia

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it was an invisible Iranian submarine…..

That's one hell of a structural fault.

Here's a link to the first report of trouble.

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MOL Comfort is an 8000 TEU vessel, when they mention 4500 containers that's a full load of 20 and 40 foot containers.

I seriously doubt that the entire manifest of the ship was exclusively weapons destined for the rebels, if only from the practical point of view, because you could never get enough outbound cargo in Jeddah and subsequent ports (not in this economy anyway) to make up for the loss on the return trip. A container ship that fully empties itself somewhere is a financial disaster and one of the seven signs of certified madness.

Almost all container ships are subject to customer preferential slots so it would be almost impossible to hire a full container ship, let alone one that does a regular line service, most of the slots are shared among various shippers and partners.

Just to give you an idea 4500 containers with 20 tons of cargo each is 90000 tons, the port of Antwerp in WWII moved about half a million tons a month. This would give the rebels the same kind of supply as the allies got through Antwerp in 9-10 days. The entire BEF in 1940 used 3000 tons a day.

My guess is that it may have had a dozen containers or so aboard.

Would somebody blow up a ship to stop a few dozen containers to make it into Syria, would be far easier to make the containers "vanish" once they are offloaded. Torpedoing a ship under the eyes of the world isn't really smart given all the time and effort investigating this for insurance purposes.

As for photos, these are pretty busy shipping lines and there would be several other vessels in visible range at any time.

No way this was an accident.

It is quite possible to break a ship's back just by loading it badly, so I don't see what grounds we yet have for excluding the possibility of it being an accident.

All the best,

John.

Badly maintained ships are all too common. This kind of thing happens all the time.

Chances of this being a torpedo are about zero. There would almost certainly have been more damage, and the sub would have made sure it sank, instead of just breaking in half.

People sure do love conspiracy theories, based upon random speculation and bad reporting, though.
-Kle.

Pretty impressive, actually.

Break a small ship in half (say, via torpedo), and you'd be looking at 3 minutes to completely sunk, max (and usually more like 90 seconds!).

Looks like those big container ships have serious watertight integrity!

Yes, no matter how/why it happened, it's a bad thing … if you are the crew … And I tend to believe it's a maintenance problem …

Did I just see an Akula class under the split in the first picture?

Ya gotta love the tinfoil hat-wearing brigade. Everything's a conspiracy! There are no coincidences or accidents! Huge numbers of people can keep incredible secrets for decades!

This just in: The SS Edmund Fitzgerald. Was it sunk by Quebecois separatists in a refurbished Nazi sub? Film at 11.

It must be a wonderful time to be a modern international thriller writer! Real life just keeps on writing your plots for you.

' Yitzak Barzel, top Mossad agent, is faced with his most dangerous mission yet, when Russia secretly plans to ship their most sophisticated weapons to Syria. Weapons so ludicrously powerful they threaten the safety of not only Bazel's beloved homeland, but the ENTIRE WORLD!

Acting as a deckhand, on the Mol Comfort, a container vessel carrying the lethal cargo, Yitzak must draw upon all his knowledge of origami mini-submarines, Chav Magoo and Yiddish swearwords, to outfox, and outwit: Russian agents, Greek ship owners and the really, really militant wing of AQ. Barzel knows the deranged Syrian, known as the 'dentist, must not get his hands on the world-beating ex-Soviet weapons, designed to destroy NATO armies, in one deadly strike.

The top Israeli operator must though face an opponent even more deadly, who could, at a click of their keyboard, stop his mission from being a success. A foe so implacable, many carefully planned 'black' operations have had their cover stories shattered, and the reputations of the participants destroyed….the internet conspiracy junkie! The merest hint that the Mol Comfort's sinking was not a genuine accident, but an act of sabotage, could plunge the world into GLOBAL CONFLICT!!!'

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Seems somebody messed up the loadplans.

Those cunning Juice! Overloading the containers eh, brilliant.

Usually the ships don't just break in half. However, the container ship industry typically loses about 2000+/- containers each year due to improper fastening and such during storms and etc. I couldn't believe that number when I read it while researching information about cargo container ships.

Iceberg? "I'm king of the world…(splat)…oh, drats!"

I read that it's about 10,000 containers lost (roughly one an hour), but bear in mind that 5-6 million are in transit, as we speak (type?). Maersk, have 600 container ships and the size is getting bigger, with their Triple-E class carrying 18,000 alone.

"It is quite possible to break a ship's back just by loading it badly, so I don't see what grounds we yet have for excluding the possibility of it being an accident"

"Badly maintained ships are all too common. This kind of thing happens all the time."

I would have to say the section of the article that states,

"Nothing like this ever occurred, and no one believed it was possible, even theoretically. It just could not happen, but still, here it is." or this statement, "This is the 1st case in liner sector, when modern ocean-going liner container vessel sank in the ocean."

Its pretty clear there is something odd about this accident. hahhaha Let alone it was in good enough condition for the different sections to remain floating after breaking apart. lol

On the military channel they use to have a series called Untold stories of the Navy SEALs. They also use to be on youtube and Hulu. But the show told the story of SEAL missions that were de-classifed. One of them was a cargo ship was carring regular products. But stashed away in the cargo was a radioactive material. The Intel did not know if it was a bomb or what. but it was aboard the ship illegally, not declared and was in route to a USA port. So the SEALs left a sub on small boats. Met the cargo ship in the middle of the ocean at night. Sneaked aboard and planted charges down in the hold at key locations. The SEAL's sneaked back off the cargo ship and blew holes in the hull of the ship. As it was sinking and the crew sent out a distress call. A UK navy ship happened to be in the area and rescued the crew. According to the show the ship sunk, all crew were saved and the insurance company paid out on the sinking cause it was ruled as mechanical problems.

If and I stress if this was not an accident, which there is always a first time for everything. So it very well could have been an accident. But if it was not, I'd bet something like this was done to break it up into sections like it did.

"Ya gotta love the tinfoil hat-wearing brigade"

I also don't really see the need to ridicule people because they like to speculate on what could have caused a ship to break up like this. Especially when its clearly reported in the article that this is a very rare circumstance. So rare its not ever happened in the ocean with one of these types of ships. lol

So not sure how people posting "what if" scenerios makes this into a conspiracy theory??? Let alone the person who originally posted the story stated, "will turn out to be some structural fault and bad loading."

It was caused by global warming, yes, that's it.

The Liberty ships were notorious for breaking in half due to bad welds.

Thing is, any ships flexes some as the waves move down the hull. If you put all the heavy containers at the ends of the ship, the lack of weight in the middle will bend the keel. Notice how much higher the broken ends of the ship are riding than the bow and stern?

Thank Gary that our Reaper Bones made it before this happened!

And The Gonk wins the thread!

"Ya gotta love the tinfoil hat-wearing brigade"

I also don't really see the need to ridicule people because they like to speculate on what could have caused a ship to break up like this.

Speculation is fine, leaping to conclusions is not.

Especially when its clearly reported in the article that this is a very rare circumstance.

So was the Edmund Fitzgerald. So are a lot of accidents.

Let alone the person who originally posted the story . . .

I wasn't referring to the OP, nor to anyone else who posted in this TMP topic. Google the story and read some of the comments posted online, though. Many posters "out there" bypassed speculation altogether and decided with no evidence that this was a deliberate act by <insert political entity of your choice here> for <insert reason of your choice here>. THEY are the tinfoil hat-wearing brigade to which I was referring. Sorry I didn't make that clearer.

jpattern2, I sorry, I understand what you were meaning now. I thought you were talking about Chortle the original poster on this topic.

"read some of the comments posted online"

Very true and agree with you on all fronts. the reason this is big news is for the very reason it has not happened before. that in of itself does not mean it was done on purpose. But it is fun speculating how it could be done on purpose… :-)

I think Coopman hit the nail on the head of what causes this accident. lol

Ironwolf – it wasn't a container ship but….

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Subsequent report found it was a rust bucket about which repeated concerns had been expressed.

I have been following the story of MOL Comfort for a few days now. The company I work for has two containers of winter 14 clothing aboard the ship. These were for the fist winter season deliveries but are going to be a bit late in the shops.

The ship was carrying goods from China and Vietnam. The cargo was consolidated onto a big ship in Singapore on the way (eventually) to Hamburg.

I am sure that the 4,372 containers are mostly filled with consumer goods, toys, non perishable foods, materials and light engineered parts for Europe.

I think the whole thing about Syrian arms is complete is rubbish.

Mick

"The Liberty ships were notorious for breaking in half due to bad welds."

Offtopic – An inventor had the idea of making ice ships for the Canada-UK run in WW2. The ships were to be made in Canada with ice made from water mixed with wood chips, which melt more slowly than straight ice. They fooled around with the idea, making prototypes, but did not forge ahead. Interestinly, it was said that they were more resistant to torps than conventional ships.

Just found the wiki:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete

One of my friends is a salty old sea dog of long experience on merchant ships. When we were looking through scrapped ship parts in Chittagong ship breaking yard he pointed out an analogue computer used for helping crew to balance the load. He said it was all very easy now, with computers to handle this. Perhaps not :-(

Another aside, my friend's father was a U-boat captain during WW2. He had a patrol zone around Norway. He survived the war, but never saw a thing to shoot at.

The Swanland, however, was carrying stone, which is an unfortunate cargo to be carrying if there is any loss of buoyancy, rather like scrap iron, or any ore cargo. Any ingress of water and the vessel sinks like a ….. stone.

"Very mixed crew of 26 -11 Russians, one Ukrainian and 14 Filipinos s. With this crew makeup it could have been an arms shipment to the Syrian Government or Hezbollah"

You mean a crew that resembles that of most modern cargo ships? Even UK flagged vessels often have Russian, Polish & Ukrainian officers. The Irish flagged ferries running from Holyhead to Dublin have Lithuanian crews. The nationalities of the crew onboard a vessel owned by a large shipping company are no evidence at all of the carriage of arms. None.

As a former seafarer I read and occasionally contribute to a shipping forum, the view there, supported by some technical and expert evidence, is that she was built in Japan using experimental steel and to a new design to minimise weight. The loading and cargo stowage planning are all done ashore by computer to minimise time in port, so stowage/weight distribution is unlikely to be a factor. She was on passage for Jeddah then Hamburg, which again makes arms for Hezbollah/Syrian rebels unlikely, unless they were to be sent to Syria by road vehicle from Jeddah.

Chouan, what do you make of the way the (former) center of the ship is riding in the middle pic of the set? That's the one where the two halves are side by side, but the broken ends are riding much higher in the water than the undamaged portions.

That's the opposite of what I've seen for torpedo strikes on modern warships, and I'm assuming that a non-explosive structural collapse would have the same waterlines.

(It's great having a former professional merchie sailor around, Warships are very different than merchant ships.)

I would suggest that the loading was such that there is more weight in the after part of the stern section and the forward part of the forrard section. However, apparently a lot of the boxes were reported as being empty, so it is unlikely that loading stresses alone would have caused the fracture. If the loading had been unbalanced enough to have caused the fracture itself, obviously aided by the ship's working in a seaway, I would have thought that the two ends would be very much more unbalanced, with the stern and the bows much further in the water than they appear here. The cargo computer calculations for these ships are very sophisticated, and generally very accurate; they have to be as the rate of load and discharge is paramount in the operations of box-boats.

The ship was headed FROM Saudi Arabia TO Singapore. Would be a tough route to get any weapons to Syria.

Also, the halves did not sink. The shipping company is in the process of recovering most of the containers now. They admit some of the containers are lost, but expect to get most of them off the ship.

No, the ship was sailing from Singapore, stopping in Jeddah, then going to Hamburg.

If the loading had been unbalanced enough to have caused the fracture itself, obviously aided by the ship's working in a seaway, I would have thought that the two ends would be very much more unbalanced, with the stern and the bows much further in the water than they appear here.

How much more water would a big boxboat like this draw for each ton (or tens/hundreds if that's easier) of cargo?

On my 19kton boats, it took several tons of weight to get a single inch shift in draft.

The cargo computer calculations for these ships are very sophisticated, and generally very accurate; they have to be as the rate of load and discharge is paramount in the operations of box-boats.

I don't doubt it, but it sure seems like something got severely screwed up. And the easiest point of failure would seem to be human error in (not) following the loading plan.

No human error involved, the loading sequence is also computerised. The problem is almost certainly structural and a design fault either in architecture or materials. Cutting corners, again, that's where the human error lies.

MOL's Loop 1 service does not go to Syria. The closest is the Suez canal but it does not stop there. Jeddah is the closest stop, and that would still be a haul.

The shipowners have requested that the sister ships all return to Japan to the builders for remedial extra strengthening work to be carried out, which cofirms that it was a structural fault, not a loading/weight distribution fault.