Cleaning the Ship's Cargo Hold (2019) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Cleaning the Ship's Cargo Hold (2019) [video]

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There's a story at the end [0] where he talks about a country whose ports ask for $5000 bribes to pass cleaning inspections. Comments in the video suggest it's Argentina, and I found a this [1] article supporting that theory.

I was half expecting it to be my own, honestly.

[0]: https://youtu.be/is4cqxLM-N4?t=397

[1]: https://www.bsr.org/en/our-insights/case-study-view/maritime...

Ah, I wasn't expecting Pakistan, since I don't think they have much bulk exports - I guessed Brazil (grain exporter). Argentina makes sense too though!

As per the comments below the video, the consensus seem to be Argentina. Other suggestions include, Nigeria, Venezuela, etc. Someone even suggested the US.

On the chemical tankers, we often check empty compartments for cleanliness before certifying suitable to load sensitive industrial chemicals.

Especially after they imported some of those nasty food grade commodities.

This requires more than just standard laboratory methods.

Turns out I am one of the pioneers of this.

Haven't chemically sampled compartment walls myself in years, but it's dark down there with only small access openings in the deck overhead, climbing down a very tall vertical ladder with your gear then back up with your samples. You need a safe, reliable industrial operator with explosion-proof equipment, and very judicious sampling approach.

For decades I've heard that cleaning and testing delays are easily overcome in many parts of the world where the presure to expedite the movement takes form in ways which would be considered irregular in my port.

My friend has a business descaling ships with his own device. The device consists of a "pressure washer" "robot" that sticks to the side of the ship with combination of magnets and suction.

The motor+pump for "pressure washer" is about the size of minivan and resides on it own trailer. The "pressure washer" (if you made it a single nozzle) will cut through an inch of steel. The magnets are arranged in a pattern called a Halbach Array that concentrate the magnet force on one side of the array.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbach_array

Halbach array AKA fridge magnet.

I don’t believe this is true at all. Educate me though, I’m wrong a lot. :-)

You're not wrong, I'm just saying they're synonymous. https://www.hsmagnets.com/blog/halbach-array/

Ah, thanks!

"Halbach arrays now have many applications and are used in a range of systems of varying complexity. One of the simplest applications of Halbach arrays is in refrigerator magnets. In this case the one-sided flux properties are exploited in order to boost the holding power of the magnet. Variable arrays of magnetics rods can also be combined to create simple locking systems. If the magnetizations of the rods are arranged so the field is maximised above the plane and minimised below it, the flux confinement can be flipped by rotating each rod 90 o."

And yes, I was wrong.

As we say in my household: "You were right. I was wrong. You are the superior being."

One of the guys I know who works for customs. Once we were sitting in family setting a guy started saying well you guys can afford these lavish parties because of bribe income in customs job and his wife was like "those rich men make too much money, if we take a part of it, it doesn't affect much".

But little did she know that big guys in export import business can afford to pay bribes but it over the time results in small guys finding it hard to compete.

The guys who paid bribes usually got the value of goods lowered so ended up effectively paying less import duties compared to the guy who were not asked any bribe because they were too small.

We have a joke about customs workers:

A group of customs workers discuss a birthday present for one of them. One suggests, a car. Nah, too small, say the others. Another one, an apartment. Nah, too small... What about letting him work one shift alone? Now easy there, tiger.

Thanks for this channel. Whiling away the hours at my high-tech, well-paid but fundamentally pretty unromantic desk job, I often indulge my inner boy's fantasies about running away to sea. Here's another sea-cargo-themed channel I have watched almost every video from: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGpdSarF_FdCygiA1tOl6Cg

Those multi-day time lapse videos are mesmerizing.

Have you though about joining your country’s naval reserve?

Well, that would be all that, plus military life and military pace of operations. Think twice, and go for it, if that's for you.

I know exactly how you feel, I'm right there with ya!

You might enjoy some of the clips from recent days in Stockholm, where a massive cargo ship just delivered a bridge from China: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tRF88r8JNI4

To really appreciate the scale, here's a flyover picture: https://www.instagram.com/p/B9ogNmzACKV/

The ship left yesterday, but public service television is still streaming live from the area, and you can see the previous days there too with the ship arriving, unloading the bridge etc: https://www.svtplay.se/guldbron

Sadly I can't find an english version of the site, but it should hopefully be easy enough to navigate anyway.

I've really enjoyed streaming this channel the past few days, it's had a nice calming effect for me in the middle of all the covid19 chaos.

awesome channel! You might be also interested in this https://www.flexport.com/careers/jobs/?department=Engineerin...

;)

It's too bad the thumbnails of those videos instantly scream clickbait to me. I'll try watching a few though.

There are robots for that now.[1] They're not intelligent, just mobile pressure washing nozzles that can climb steel with magnets. So, instead of a fire hose from far away, you get a pressure washer up close to the surface. Seems to be used more on dirty holds, where you need more pressure to blast the gunk off.

[1] https://youtu.be/C4PQKSaHT6I [2] https://youtu.be/R2lmDWU2BXU

This is pretty cool, but actually looks even more tedius than manually hosing.

It does. It looks like it's for dirty holds where manual hosing from a distance isn't enough. Somebody or something needs to get a pressure nozzle up close and personal to the dirt. On a vertical surface in a moving ship, that's better done by a robot that can use magnets to climb steel.

So where does all this dirty water go?

In the sea, of course. We all know the solution to pollution is dilution, and that the oceans are infinite so they can take infinite amounts of it before we have a problem.

So ... What country do we think he's talking about at the end of the video, which is extorting all cargo ships at port?

The YouTube comments suggest it's Argentina. They also suggested Google'ing "Argentina Cargo Hold Bribe".

Pretty much any poor country. In all of South Asia all enforcement officers (of any level of enforcement on any thing) above a certain seniority will be wealthy well beyond their income.

Maybe a more ideal strategy would be to have the ship carry progressively dirtier and dirtier loads, so that the cleaning can be postponed to the last cycle to get it back to "clean". Instead of having to wash and alternate clean-dirty-clean-dirty.

I am not so sure they get to pick, but in any case, labor to scrub metal boxes is extremely cheap compared to the contents/freight charges.

Even if your cargo is "dirty" that doesn't necessarily mean you're okay with impurities (i.e. waste from whatever happened to be in the holds last). It's just dirty because it tends to leave more residue behind and that residue might be harder to clean off. Someone hauling coal or silver or something isn't going to be any happier having corn husks mixed in with their material than the recipient of a big load of corn would be to discover there's silver mixed in.

I was wondering about the heavy machines, such as excavators, being used to offload the food. What about oil and hydraulic leaks into the food? Feels somewhat unsanitary but is there something mitigating that?

It looks like they don't use those types of machinery to unload food. The shot showing some kind of grain being loaded was using a chute and not a bucket or excavator. I assume they use a vacuum system to unload food as it is cleaner and faster.

Though, it is wild to think that the grain in your bread was sitting in a cargo hold which previously could have been filled with coal or scrap metal covered in greases, oils, heavy metals, paints, fluids, etc. I hope they really do clean the hell out of them.

Ever changed the oil in a car, then cleaned up and made dinner later with the same set of hands?

We're really good at cleaning things.

You wear shop gloves I assume?

Eh, well, Handymax bulk ships (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handymax) are 200m long with 5 holds, so that's ~40m long holds, ~30m wide, and at a guess 20m deep. Contaminants picked up around the sides are likely below tolerable levels. (Heck, your bakery is probably schlepping around flour on conveyor belts exposed to greases, oils, etc. Ain't none of this stuff sterile.)

Learned about Argentina too!

Anyone know why these types of ships don’t use the standard 20/40ft containers like regular cargo ships?

I don't know if this is the reason but it'd take a lot longer to fill and stack then unstack and empty 200 containers than it does to fill one cavernous space.

Then you still have to clean those containers just like they are cleaning the ship.

I was thinking filling it would be faster, but unloading the sand they way they did, scoop by scoop, seemed like it’d be slower.

Also, I was thinking that if they used containers they wouldn’t need to clean the ship (or at least not to food grade) since each cargo would be in its own compartment.

The shipping industry offers a transportation service to its customers. In the bulk area, not leaving your customers to clean hundreds of containers is part of the service.

Containers can’t hold liquids/powders/flowing things. They are only strong on the frame, not the side panels. This is also why you can’t bury them.

You could load pallet-sized tubs and fill a container that way, but the overhead would be killer. I imagine for bulk it’s much faster/easier to treat it as an effective liquid/particulate than trying to containerize it. Plus, you’d increase the cleaning surface area exponentially if you had to clean each pallet-tub, plus transport all the tubs and sidewalls for no revenue.

For one thing, containers, the space between them, and the extra space inside them would take up a not-insignificant amount of space. They're great when you are dealing with a lot of smallish shipments, but if you're loading full of bauxite, gravel, or garbanzo beans, they're inefficient.

The crane scoop thingy at about 1m11s looks to be about the size of a 20ft cargo container. Some ships and many ports have conveyor-belt doo-dads to unload bulk cargo.

[Edit] These are "regular cargo ships". Container ships are the new kid on the block, dating from after the 1950s, IIRC.

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