Birthday party on ship may have led to oil spill in Mauritius | Hacker News Reader

Birthday party on ship may have led to oil spill in Mauritius

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84 pointsilamont34 comments

As terrible as this is, I think a more sympathetic headline would be, "Mauritius oil spill occurred when tanker captain sought telephone and internet signal, so that the crew members could communicate with their families."

Then add the following, and it's even more understandable:

> Some observers say the missteps could be linked to the stress that ship crews are under in the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 shutdowns. It has become challenging for shipping operators to make crew changes, leading many seafarers to be stranded at sea, away from their families for long periods.

No less terrible. Definitely still the wrong move, but I can understand it a lot better than the original headline, which sounds truly shocking on its own.

Well there are things called satellite phones...

"Laissez-les appeler avec un téléphone satellite" - Marie Antoinette

No, that’s no excuse. It would be like a cargo airliner dipping low to get signal (before in flight internet was available) for whatever reason. You don’t endanger the crew and ship, etc., out of convenience to you. It’s extremely irresponsible.

> You don’t endanger the crew and ship, etc., out of convenience to you

The captain did it for the crew, not himself.

I never said it was a valid excuse. In fact, I literally said it was still wrong.

Having said that, your comparison would only be apt if airliners stayed in the air for months at a time.

Dipping low enough to get signal isn't abnormally dangerous, it's just expensive in terms of time and fuel, just like the captain's decision.

Taken together with the other claims in the report - ignoring multiple communications attempts from the Mauritian Coast Guard, and improperly configuring/using their electronic navigational systems, it's not clear why a more charitable reading than incompetence and dereliction of duty in a licensed mariner would be merited.

"Incompetence and dereliction of duty" are cop-outs, in the case that there are underlying causes.

If, say, reduced staffing and increasing demand leads to worsened worker conditions, and that in turn affects their ability to do their work, or impairs their judgment, then it's crucial to uncover those issues.

I'm sure the shipping companies etc. would love to run with the explanation that the workers caused this by being stupid, and nothing else, though.

Unless you have personally unexpectedly spent six months on a tanker, cut off from contact with family and friends, knowing that there's a pandemic which could be affecting any of them, I think a charitable reading is the appropriate one.

Some people have harder lives than you, and when not set up for success, make bad choices.

I think the personal attack is why you’re being downvoted, but fwiw, I agree with the first part. From being in Afghanistan, I have first hand experience of some of the shenanigans some people will go through to make a phone call.

He's being down-voted because it's a personal attack that could apply to 99% of people here and people just gotta defend the tribe.

If it had been the lines of "clearly you've never worked for a business that wrote software" or some other thing that applies to some small minority here nobody would have thought twice about it.

I think it is bizarre and unreasonable to attribute the root cause of failure to the birthday party itself. It detracts from the real causes which you mention.

You can have a birthday party safely. You can seek internet safely.

Incompetence and dereliction of duty are the faults and headlining with the birthday bit obscures this.

That's not a headline that's a paragraph.

Not Wi-Fi, but mobile phone/data. From the article:

“[T]he change of course is produced by indications of the captain of the boat, who gave instructions to approach about 5 miles away from the coast of Mauritius, looking for a telephone and internet signal, so that the crew members could communicate with their families,” the AMP said.

The WiFi claim kept getting repeated even when it made no sense. WiFi doesn’t have the signal strength for miles of distance. Not to mention that if the ship were close enough to shore such that WiFi could reach, it wouldn’t be so much of a shore, but a very deep cliff.

What about Cellular data from LTE towers etc? They can reach miles and unlikely there is any out at sea. Probably all using their phones as hotspots rather than trying to connect to a Free Starbucks Router.

Yes. Those can reach. My comment was saying that the claim it was for WiFi didn’t make sense, although, I figured at the time they meant cellular data.

It does. I had one when I lived on a sailboat. I’ve been able to get consumer grade routers to broadcast 3km with line of sight, ddwrt, and no physical modifications. Somewhere like an ocean (or a desert) you won’t have much, if any, interference.

How many bits per year was your throughput?

In the case of the router, it was going through a 1mbps satellite uplink, so it didn’t need to be fast (though it was still fast, at -50db IIRC, it’s the SNR that matters). In the case of the directional antenna on a boat, I got regular speeds just tons of dropped packets. I have no idea how far I was from the routers, but I couldn’t see the houses.

All but certainly someone nontechnical referred to mobile data as "wifi", and press ran with quote-accuracy over factual-accuracy.

"Wifi" is becoming generic for wireless data access, much as kleenex, xerox, dixie cups, champagne, asprin, dremel, jet ski, google, ping pong, rollerblade, onseie, etc., etc.

The stupid reason: the celebration of the birthday of one of the crew members.

Like that gender-reveal party...

If this was for a gender-reveal party I would have lost it.

Starlink for the rescue.

Not sure why you got downvoted. As a sailor, I'm a huge fan of any service that can get more bandwidth to the oceans. Those who have not been to sea for their employment cannot imagine how lonesome it can be.

I downvoted because it wasn't a substantive comment.

Starlink is indeed an interesting technical solution to the problem of connecting sailors to their families. I've only been on short cruises, and I found those to be incredibly isolating. The experience was completely unlike camping, for example. At least there, you're under your own power, and returning to civilization is a matter of walking back in the direction from which you came. At sea, on a big ship, you are stuck in the middle of nowhere, powerless to go anywhere, an empty expanse of fathomless water in every direction. I found the experience simultaneously intense and depressing, and I can't imagine how sailors manage it even in the digital age.

SpaceX is currently seeking permission to test Starlink on their own marine vessels:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/itl1tk/spacex_ask...

Is Starlink going to cover oceans where there are just a few boats?

Not currently since it's single hop bounces from ground to sat to ground. Eventually though they want to mesh the satellites with a laser network which will allow peering between satellites. Once that is done they will be able to cover the entire globe.

It depends on how far you are. With the current system at least 1 Satellite needs to be close enough to a ground station. So that means from your boat up to the sky, and from there to land.

It has also been suggested that at strategic locations you could have swimming ground stations in order to cover a pretty large area.

Eventually however it will cover everything as the satellites will communicate directly between each other with lasers.

Where "close enough" means that you would need to be within about one-and-a-half-thousand kilometres of a ground station (using words not numbers because it's a bit hand-wavy).

Or good old short-wave radio. Much lower bandwidth, of course, but good enough for a short message, with a delay for delivery, like an SMS.

If there's one constant in the entire world, it would be dumb accidents

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