Crew trapped on Baltimore ship, seven weeks after bridge collapse | Hacker News Reader

Crew trapped on Baltimore ship, seven weeks after bridge collapse

bbc.com

21 pointsperihelions16 comments

>"the crew has been left largely without communication with the outside world for "a couple of weeks" after their mobile phones were confiscated by the FBI as part of the investigation."

This was a bit surprising that FBI confiscated employees personal devices. Do they have the authority to do that?

How do we know that they don't have a warrant. Seems pretty straightforward to apply and get a warrant for phones that may have been part of the commissioning of a crime

"The crew, made up of 20 Indians and a Sri Lankan national, has been unable to disembark because of visa restrictions, a lack of required shore passes and parallel ongoing investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and FBI."

Visa restrictions. <smh>

Yeah, papers and bureaucracy as an excuse for inhumane treatment...

Why not just "detain" them in some nice hotel rooms, rules are made by humans and humans can adjust them. But hey, who wants to bother doing that for some lowly workers from third world countries...

It's bullshit. If the situation becomes unbearable or unsafe to maintain humans on the ship, they ought to be escorted to controlled access lodging on-shore or elsewhere, and offered transportation back home. Trapping people on a ship is inhumane and tantamount to slavery.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_transportation#Transport...

It's a bit more nuanced than that. If I work for an airline and I quit my job while in flight it's definitely not false imprisonment that they don't land immediately and I'm definitely not a slave. It is sad what has happened to these Mariners but if they had been on their normal journey it would have been multiple days or weeks without the ability to go on shore. Likewise if they quit their jobs while enroute it is not slavery to not immediately travel to the nearest port.

Slavery entails loss of many civil rights, not just being restricted in movement.

You're arguing semantics and discarding reasonableness with an analogy that doesn't work because the inconvenience of a flight is far different than being kept on a ship indefinitely. If any of them were to quit, how exactly do you rationalize keeping people confined on a ship against their will?

It's really not. You can't force your employer to change what they were doing just because you exercise your rights. They aren't forcing you to work (also none of these guys quit), not doing what you want is not slavery. It's a disservice to actual slaves to say it is. These are actual mariners. They know they have a duty above employment and what being a mariner entails, being stuck on ships, being delayed, not being able to contact family sometimes. It's literally part of the job.

There is mention of having crew at the ready, so I was willing to give a teensy bit of benefit of doubt. But then I read that they gave them temporary phones with SIMs, but no data. No data? Really? Major accident like this, millions or maybe billions of dollars lost, but $DEITY forbid that we spend $1000/month (20 * what, $50 for unlimited data?) on keeping the crew happy.

Not to minimize the experience, but don't the crew regularly "get trapped" on the boat weeks at a time without cellphone data? As in every time they do an ocean crossing.

I was reading an article here recently about the boats that fix the cables on the sea floor, they detailed that very situation and talked about how some ships are opting to add starlink but it's still very ship dependent.

Sure, and they've been cut off for almost double the time of the planned journey for no good reason.

Also when doing their regular jobs they’re not under investigation. For all their families know they may be sitting in a prison right now.

Further, it’s very likely that the crew are experiencing significant trauma themselves. Both the experience of being through what must have been a frightening experience as well as feelings of guilt because of what happened.

Or even cheaper, a portable WiFi access point with a SIM card on it.

What would happen if somebody brought data sims onto the boat and gave them to the crew?

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