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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

It would save quite a few ocean going ships if this was more appreciated. Those once-in-a-thousand-year-rogue-waves are much more frequent than once in a thousand years.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/jul/26/uknews

But we're still designing ships as though they only happen once every thousand years because the cargo and the ship are insured and the crews are considered expendable.

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Because a few ships a year are expendable for the global economy.

Not worth it to try to make every ship less sinkable - e.g. it may decrease the number of annual losses by 50% at the cost of making an average ship 10% more expensive - obviously a bad trade. Some ships will still sink, because of stuff like human errors.

You know that ships have crew in it?

Yeah, and?

How much do you think the humankind is willing to pay to save a human live - a million dollars, a billion, a trillion?

A lot more than it does at the moment, certainly. That's no bad thing either, even if insurance premiums would go up (and construction quality would then improve to compensate and bring them somewhat back down, and finally fewer incidents would result in loss of life.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

The crew probably has a good idea of the risks

I'm not sure they do - are they oceanographers? These are very rare events; very few crewmembers have experienced such waves.

Also, even if they do, it doesn't stop them from being exploited.

If you have an idea of the risks involved, then certainly people who are embedded in sea-going culture do as well.

Occupational safety doesn't happen just because you think it should. Recognizing when financial incentives are insufficient is important to designing a realistic solution.

This trade-off is everywhere. As a society, we choose to have some people die due to speeding instead of making speed limits 15mph, which would absolutely make roads safer. Human life just doesn't trump all else - we factor in other things.

And a company would go broke trying to secure itself against every conceivably IT security threat, so IT security aims to keep breaches out of the headlines rather than eliminate them completely.

Your own skeletal system is a trade-off of different factors.

> Research at Imperial College, London, shows that far from being rare events, rogue waves can emerge frequently, and may be responsible for some of the 200 supertankers and container ships longer than 200m that have sunk in poor weather conditions in the past two decades.

The loss of ten ships a year seems incredible to me. Surely "weather", if it were to blame, could be avoided.

This amount of loss is steep. Is it being investigated? We should have ocean swell data beamed to satellite from every ship that capsizes.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1326758/number-of-oil-ta...: There were 8,883 oil tankers worldwide in 2021.

If those are all ocean-going, ten a year is about 1.1%. Depending on how expensive it would be to prevent this, that may not be bad for ship owners, but it is very bad for those seeking a career in working on those ships.

1.1% of what?

Of ocean-going oil tankers.

It's ~0.11% of those

Relative to what other transportation profession, though? Pilots, truck drivers, train operators? All of them have deadly accidents.

plus 5,589 containerships

https://www.statista.com/statistics/198227/forecast-for-glob...

although the parent comment mentioned "longer than 200m" but its difficult to find containership stats by length rather than by TEU.

ignoring that though it would be 0.07% lost per year or 1 out of every 1447.

probably not too surprising, since if you pick 1447 oil tankers/containerships and audit them consider what the worst looking one is going to look like after decades of salt damage and abuse and poor maintenance.

'Surely "weather", if it were to blame, could be avoided.'

AFAIK rogue waves are called 'rogue' due to their unpredictability.

Nomenclature aside, they're somewhat predictable in the sense that if the most dangerous rogue waves will typically happen in or near low preasure systems, and especially around strong currents, where you have wind-over-tide type nastiness.

So in the sense of trying not to die, avoid the Gulf and Agulhas currents, especially when a low blows through.

This coming from an amateur sailor. I believe freight shipping etc just plows through most weather systems in order to avoid delays.

There are also source of loss, nothing can be done against. One can not even predict them.

Ocean floor methanhydrate and a volcanic shift, results in tremendous bubble columns, which just open up a shaft that can carry nothing. Water begins to boil, ship falls in, breaks apart... End of story.

Surely the gas-producing seafloor distribution can also be studied and modeled.

How many incidents of this have there been? I've heard of the theory, but no actual losses attributed to it.