I was watching a Casual Navigation video about a containership sinking and while he has done videos covering whether sea containers float I’m curious if people who respond to these emergencies try to deal with these sea containers on their own like in the event they have trouble getting to a lifeboat and in the case of enclosed lifeboats what do they do with those? Do they get recovered and dragged off? Do they sink them somehow?
Here’s a photo of the kind of lifeboats I am talking about by the way
There are salvage crews that are either hired by the freight company or groups that claim abandoned property. Depends a lot on what it is and where it is.
The newer lifeboats like the one in your picture have a special satellite beacon that signals for rescue when it’s deployed. Depending on the nature of the emergency the crew will hopefully let the rescue team know if they need to deploy people into the wreck to search for survivors or not.
But would they recover the lifeboat? I imagine ships designed for search and rescue might be able to recover the lifeboat but I don’t know if a commercial ship for example that helped out would be cable of doing that
So emergency crews would arrange a boat to fetch the crew on the life boat and a helicopter to grab anyone in dire need. Depending on your proximity to land and your region. You’re looking at either the military or coast guard doing this.
If people need rescued on the sinked ship they dispatch people trained to go into it and search. They use various tools to help narrow it down.
After a few days there’s special groups that specialize in body recovery that go in looking for the dead. Assuming it’s safe, at a certain depth they are considered lost at sea and left there.
I know about the people I’m talking about the lifeboat itself. In movies and TV they usually pick them up and you don’t see the lifeboat again. I’m wondering what happens with the lifeboat
Oh sorry, I thought I covered that. The boat is as much a part of the ship as the cargo. The freight company typically recovers it along with the rest of their stuff if they choose too. Otherwise it goes to the salvage people or left abandoned.
Oh that makes sense. Do you have any idea what the timeframe typically is for that kind of stuff?
I don’t know the specifics, but my understanding is the lifeboat needs to be refurbished and inspected before going back into service typically. Most of my knowledge here is second hand, a chunk of my family are sailors.
Those things aren’t cheap. Someone will salvage it.
Many containers will just sink along with the boat, either because of tie downs or they’re just too dense to float.
Others however can and will float, generally very low in the water which can cause pretty major hazards to navigation. For this reason, many containers will be fitted with salt plugs that will eventually dissolve and allow water to fill the container which will usually be enough to sink it.
However, if the container was sufficiently full of buoyant material, or the salt plug fails, they can float around for a very long time. Sometimes these containers will be salvaged, left to float, or sometimes militarys will use them as target practice with the stated aim of trying to sink them.
As for Lifeboats, generally you want an empty lifeboat to go down with the ship as a bunch of empty lifeboats floating around could draw resources away from the ones with people in them. Plus, most survival craft are pretty securely tied down so that they don’t accidentally release during normal passage or storms.
Most ships are still fitted with self-release life rafts which are fitted with hydrostatic lines that, if the boat was to sink, the raft would be able to break free, inflate, and rocket to the surface if the ship sinks below a certain depth. These are very common on pleasure craft where the boat can sink quickly and may sink before the crew has a change to prepare the raft.
There’s a place near me where Lego washes up regularly because a container full is floating around somewhere. There’s people who go there to get the Lego every so often so seabirds don’t eat it.
They found it cracked open in a cave didn’t they?
That was the Garfield phones
There’s a lot of containers out there that sailboats crash into as the containers are often just below the surface
Yeah the video I linked by Casual Navigation talks about it
Ive been told that some Navy forces use floating lost containers that have been reported as training exercises, they find it then use it as practice for live fire training to remove the navigation hazard.
