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| 7/13 |
| 2006/2/3-7 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:41687 Activity:nil |
2/3 Titanic-size shipwreck, casualty-wise:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060203/ap_on_re_mi_ea/egypt_ship_sinks
\- hello you may wish to read: http://csua.org/u/evv
somewhat interesting discussion of estonia sinking. |
| 7/13 |
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| news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060203/ap_on_re_mi_ea/egypt_ship_sinks AP At Least 185 Killed in Egypt Ferry Mishap By MARIAM FAM, Associated Press Writer 7 minutes ago SAFAGA, Egypt - An Egyptian passenger ferry carrying nearly 1,500 people, mostly Egyptian workers returning from Saudi Arabia, sank in the Red Sea early Friday. Coast Guard vessels pulled some 185 bodies from the sea, and at least 263 survivors escaped on lifeboats, officials said. Four Egyptian rescue ships reached the scene Friday afternoon, about 10 hours after the 35-year-old ferry likely went down. As darkness descended Friday at the site, some 57 miles off the Egyptian port of Hurghada, there were fears the death toll could be extremely high. "The swift sinking of the ferry and the lack of sufficient lifeboats suggests there was some violation, but we cannot say until the investigation is complete," said presidential spokesman Suleiman Awad, quoted by the semiofficial news agency MENA. Any survivors still in the Red Sea could go into shock as temperatures fell in the already cold waters, which average in the upper 60s in February. Egyptian regulations require life jackets on the boat, but implementation of safety procedures are often lax. It was not known if the ship had enough life jackets and whether the passengers put them on when the ship sank. Egyptian officials initially turned down a British offer to divert a warship to the scene to help out and a US offer to send a P3-Orion maritime naval patrol aircraft to the area. The British craft, HMS Bulwark, headed toward from the southern Red Sea where it was operating, then turned around when the offer was rejected. But then Egypt reversed itself and asked for both the Orion and the Bulwark to be sent -- then finally decided to call off the Bulwark, deciding it was too far away to help, said Lt. In the end, the Orion -- which has the capability to search underwater from the air -- was sent, but the Bulwark was not, he said. Saudi ships were patrolling waters off their shore to hunt for survivors, but found none, a senior Saudi security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. The ship, "Al-Salaam Boccaccio 98," which was also carrying about 220 vehicles, left Thursday at 7:30 pm from the Saudi port of Dubah on a 120-mile trip to the Egyptian port of Safaga, south of Hurghada. It had been scheduled to arrive at Safaga at 3 am The vessel went down between midnight and 2 am, when authorities lost contact with it. About 1,400 passengers, along with a crew of 98, were on board, said Awad. The passengers included about 1,200 Egyptians, as well as 99 Saudis, three Syrians, two Sudanese, and a Canadian, officials said. Some of them were probably Muslim pilgrims who had overstayed their visas after last month's hajj pilgrimage to work in the kingdom. The agent for the ship in Saudi Arabia, Farid al-Douadi, said the vessel had the capacity for 2,500 passengers. The cause of the sinking was not immediately known, but there were high winds and a sandstorm overnight on Saudi Arabia's west coast. "It's a roll-on, roll-off ferry, and there is big question mark over the stability of this kind of ship," said David Osler of the London shipping paper Lloyds List. "It would only take a bit of water to get on board this ship and it would be all over. The percentage of this type of ferry involved in this type of disaster is huge." Osler said there was no indication of terrorism, adding that "bad weather is looking likely." Steve Todd, national secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers union in Britain, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that "you can never legislate for weather in any part of the world, unfortunately. One minute in the Red Sea can be quite flat, calm, and the next minute it can be really atrocious weather conditions." "I would imagine there was on board a fire or some sort of disaster that quickly happened and engulfed the ship and there wasn't time to send an SOS," Miles Cowsill, Editor of European Ferry Scene, told the BBC. Transport Minister Mohammed Lutfy Mansour told CNN that 263 survivors had been found so far. A police official at the operations control room in Safaga, where Mansour was directing rescue efforts, said 185 bodies were pulled from the sea. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. But there was confusion among the casualty reports, with Mansour reporting only four bodies found. Hundreds of relatives of the passengers complained bitterly about lack of information as they waited in Safaga. Police ringed the dock area to prevent families and reporters from entering. to tell us what is going on," said Ahmed Abdul Hamid, a teacher from the southern Egyptian city of Assuit who was waiting for his cousin. "How can they put all these passengers in such an old ship that was not fit for sailing?" "Where are the lists of names," one man shouted, then finding none at the port entrance ran to look elsewhere. Well after nightfall, there were contradictory reports whether any survivors had been brought back to shore. A security official said 20 had been sent to a Safaga hospital, but police at the port's entrance told families none had been brought back. Tens of thousands of Egyptians work in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries -- many of them from impoverished families in southern Egypt who spend years abroad to earn money. They often travel by ship to and from Saudi Arabia across the Red Sea, a cheaper option than flying. The Saudi port of Dubah is a major transit point for them. Mamdouh al-Orabi, the manager of Al-Salaam Maritime Transport Company, which owns the ferry, said the company became concerned about the Al-Salaam 98 early Friday and informed another of its ships that was heading from Safaga to Dubah. The ship reported back that it sighted people on a lifeboat, and the company alerted Egyptian authorities, al-Orabi told Associated Press Television News. The Al-Salaam 98, registered in Panama, was built in 1971 and renovated in 1991, al-Orabi said. It had a maximum capacity of 2,500 passengers, the ship's Saudi agent, Farid al-Douadi, said. Osler of Lloyds List said that last June the ship passed a structural survey test conducted by the International Safety Management Code. A ship owned by the same company, also carrying pilgrims, collided with a cargo ship at the southern entrance to the Suez Canal in October, causing a stampede among passengers trying to escape the sinking ship. This is an aerial image from TV which shows people in a dinghy in the Red Sea, Friday, Feb. An Egyptian passenger ferry carrying nearly 1,500 people, mostly Egyptian workers returning from Saudi Arabia, sank in the Red Sea overnight. Coast Guard vessels pulled some 185 bodies from the sea, and at least 263 survivors escaped on lifeboats. Four Egyptian rescue ships reached the scene Friday afternoon, about 10 hours after the 35-year-old ferry, named 'Al-Salam Boccaccio 98', likely went down. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. |
| csua.org/u/evv -> www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007D9VDC/sr=1-1/qid=1138992676/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-8489376-3580127?%5Fencoding=UTF8 He then poses a powerful question: have the industrialized nations of the world given up control of the shipping industry to the demands of the free market? And if this free market is indeed the most efficient and profitable system, what price, socially, politically and environmentally will it extract from the human beings who use it? From the panic-stricken bridge of a sinking oil tanker to the filth-clogged beaches resulting from a destroyed ship in India, Langewiesche (American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center) vividly describes a global cabal of unscrupulous ship owners, well-intentioned but overmatched regulators, and poorly trained and poorly paid seamen who risk their lives every day to make this new global economy function. "It is not exactly a criminal industry," Langewiesche explains, "but it is an amoral and stubbornly anarchic one." A sobering account of the 1994 sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in the Baltic is the centerpiece of this book. Brutally handled, poorly maintained and perhaps fatally flawed in design, the ship capsized and sank in a raging gale, taking 852 unsuspecting people to a watery grave. Langewiesche painstakingly details the botched accident investigation-complete with bureaucratic incompetence, backpedaling elected officials and the persistent efforts of a German journalist with conspiracy on her mind. In the end, no conclusion was drawn, and the Estonia sits at the bottom of the Baltic, a silent monument to the cost of a free market gone awry. Equal parts incisive political harangue and lyrical reflection on the timelessness of the sea, this book brilliantly illuminates a system the world economy depends upon, but will not take responsibility for. Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Bookmarks Magazine Langewiesche, an Atlantic Monthly correspondent and author of American Ground (2003), turns an astute eye to a disturbing topic: the sea's pollution, piracy, and possible breeding ground for terrorism. His stories, written in lucid, gripping prose, reveal the tragic consequences of our failure to police the sea's terrible freedoms. Some critics feel that Langewiesche devotes too much time to the Estonia, which--though told in thrilling details culled from survivor testimonies--doesn't fit in with his larger regulatory theme. And we can breathe easy knowing that the US leads the world in ocean safety and environmental regulation. But it only examines two percent of all containers coming into port. Normally it would only have gotten three stars, for recycling three articles, only one of which was really of interest to me (on piracy), but the author is gifted, and his articulation of detail lifts the book to four stars and caused me to appreciate his final story on the poisonous deadly exportation of ship "break-up" by hand. It is a double-spaced book, stretched a bit, and not a research book per se. The author does a superb job of describing the vast expanse of the ungovernable ocean, three quarters of the globes surface, carrying 40,000 wandering merchant ships on any given day, and completely beyond the reach of sovereign states. The author does a fine job of demonstrating how most regulations and documentation are a complete facade, to the point of being both authentic, and irrelevant. The author's second big point for me came early on as he explored the utility of the large ocean to both pirates and terrorists seeking to rest within its bosom, and I am quite convinced, based on this book, that one of the next several 9-11's will be a large merchant ship exploding toxically in a close in port situation--on page 43 he describes a French munitions ship colliding with a Norwegian freighter in Halifax. "Witnesses say that the sky erupted in a cubic mile of flame, and for the blink of an eye the harbor bottom went dry. More than 1,630 buildings were completely destroyed, another 12,000 were damaged, and more than 1,900 people died." There is no question but that the maritime industry is much more threatening to Western ports than is the aviation industry in the aftermath of 9-11, and we appear to be substituting paperwork instead of profound changes in how we track ships--instead of another secret satellite, for example, we should redirect funds to a maritime security satellite, and demand that ships have both transponders and an easy to understand chain of ownership. There is no question that we are caught in a trap: on the one hand, a major maritime disaster will make 9-11 look like a tea party; on the other the costs--in all forms--of actually securing the oceans is formidable. Having previously written about the urgent need for a 450-ship Navy that includes brown water and deep water intercept ships (at the Defense Daily site, under Reports, GONAVY), I secure the fourth star for the author, despite my disappointment over the middle of the book, by giving him credit for doing a tremendous job of defining the challenges that we face in the combination of a vast sea and ruthless individual stateless terrorists, pirates, and crime gangs collaborating without regard to any sovereign state. I do have to say, as a reader of Atlantic Monthly, I am getting a little tired of finding their stuff recycled into books without any warning as to the origin. Certainly I am happy to buy Jim Fallows and Robert Kaplan, to name just two that I admire, but it may be that books which consist of articles thrown together, without any additional research or cohesive elements added (such as a bibliography or index), should come with a warning. I for one will be more alert to this prospect in the future. Having said that, I will end with the third reason I went up to four stars: the third and final story, on the poisonous manner in which we export our dead ships to be taken apart by hand in South Asia, with hundreds of deaths and truly gruesome working conditions for all concerned, is not one of the stories I have seen in article form before, it is a very valuable story, and for this unanticipated benefit, I put the book down a happy reader, well satisfied with the over-all afternoon. I came to this book as a person who spent over a dozen years in the ocean shipping industry. I left the industry to go to law school and have now spent a dozen years as an admiralty attorney handling many of the issues that the author discusses in his book. For me, this is a fascinating look at a subject with which I am intimately familiar. Langewiesche's gloomy, albeit accurate, portrayal of life at sea for the low-end' portion of the ocean shipping industry is marked by excellent research and even better writing. It unfolds dramatically and keeps the reader's attention. Langewiesche's portrayal of the passenger ferry Estonia is heartbreaking. At one point, Langewiesche discusses the horror of the loss of 852 lives on the Estonia, notes the worldwide outpouring of grief (particularly in Northern Europe) but then pauses to mention that ferry accidents such as this are a routine way of life in the third world (in Asia and Africa in particular) and yet these accidents barely attract our attention. The terse, matter-of-fact fashion in which Langewiesche imparts this information has a greater impact than it would have if set out in a dogmatic fashion. Last, Langewiesche turns his eye to the ship breaking business in India. Vessels that have reached the end of their useful life (and as set out in the book a ship owner's definition of useful life is far longer than may be prudent for safe operation) are run onto beaches in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan where they are dismantled in a manner that endangers everyone involved. Life for these ship breakers is nasty, brutal and short. Langewiesche's portrayal is so well written that one can almost smell the befouled air that lingers over the work area. The author also sets out the political confrontation between the ship breakers and Greenpeace. It is an excellent overview of the conflict that arises between first-world political activists and third world throngs struggling to make a life for their families. First, in discussing the sinking of the oil tanker Pr... |