Salvage of MV BENITA

Salvage of MV BENITA
Evangelos Moschovakis

Comment from Sea8686:

As a master mariner with over 20 years exp at Sea, this is something I would never want to exp. in my life. There was some medical issue with some crew and the fight onboard led to damage to the engine/electrical controls while the vessel was on a SW course of Mauritius towards Atlantic Ocean. Resultant was thst all engine power was lost and vessel drifted towards the island and aground. 94 Miles off aftsr her salvage she sunk to 4400m to the bed of Indian Ocean. The Salvage Video is exceptional, the hard work that goes into this is remarkable esp removal of fuel oil fm Engine room and working machinery and bunker tanks. Kudos to the salvors.

Mauritius has appeared here before.

Megavalanche

アマチュアとプロの違い [The difference between amateurs and professionals]
やくちゅ [Yakuchu]

What is this? Someone's daily commute? No, it's the Megavalanche, a giant downhill bicycle race held annually in France and half a world away on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. I think this video was taken in France. Réunion has a mountain that reaches 10,000 feet, but it's in the tropics, so not much chance of snow.

Réunion has appeared here before.

Indian Ocean

De Havilland Canada Twin Otter

Cool picture of a cool airplane on the beach in The Maldives. We've been there before. The flight log shows it operating out of Male Int'l, so let's take a look:

Two populated islands in the Malé Atoll
Male / Velana International Airport

Okay, there's the jetport, but where do the seaplanes dock?

Maldives Seaplane Docks

That's a bunch of seaplanes.

Maldives Seaplane Terminal

Might be the biggest seaplane operation in the world. They have docks for 55 seaplanes.

Where are The Maldives? Middle of the Indian Ocean, that's where:

The Maldives & Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean

For Patrick O'Brian fans, Mauritius and Reunion are in the lower left corner.

It's hard to get a handle on the scale of The Maldives. There's a zillion tiny islands spread over a zillion square miles of ocean. This political map gives an overview:

Atolls of The Maldives
Roughly 500 miles top to bottom

Note that an Atoll is not the same as an island. The two islands shown above are part of the Kaafu administrative area / Malé Atoll:

Malé Atoll
The placemark is on the airport

Bonus: I'm poking around looking at The Maldives and Tam turns me onto this BBC report about Diego Garcia. It explains why we don't hear much about the place. The report has several pictures, but nothing recent.

Update 3 days later:  Why is the UK handing the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius? - Aljazeera

                                  Chagos Archipelago - Wikipedia

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A post I started back in July 2014 but never published:

A Malaysian airliner got shot down in the Ukraine this morning, which reminds us that there is a new conspiracy theory circulating that the Malaysian airliner that disappeared a couple months ago was diverted to Diego Garcia by the CIA. Irba tells us that Diego Garcia is basically a ring of skinny islands around a big lagoon, and the lagoon is fresh water. That seems improbable, so I do a little checking.
    Diego Garcia gets a hundred inches of rain a year, which is a boat load. Oregon, the rainiest place in the USA onlty gets about thirty some inches. Diego Garcia is a coral atoll, and as such is very porous so rain water soaks right in. Since it is going into this porous rock, there isn't a lot of mixing going on, so it basically collects on top of the salt water that has soaked in from the ocean. This fresh water can be extracted via shallow wells and as long as you don't take too much out of any one spot you can get all the water you need. I mean a hundred inches of rain a year is a stink load of rain.

Cocos Islands

Submarine Cable Map

An animated map of all the submarine cables encircling our globe. This screenshot doesn't capture the pulsing flow of data that the original shows, but it's easy enough to insert in this blog. Embedding the original is beyond my reach today.

I'm looking at this map and I discover something curious. In this view we have Australia at the bottom right and Arabia at the upper left. The white line connecting the two is the Oman-Australia Cable (OAC). Okay, fine, but what's that branch that takes off from the middle of that line heading northeast to the middle of the ocean? What's out there? Some secret military installation? A mad scientist's lair? Nothing so interesting, just the Cocos Islands, another obscure island I had never heard of.

It got it's start in the undersea cable business early:

The islands were annexed by the British Empire in 1857. . . . In 1901 a telegraph cable station was established on Direction Island. Undersea cables went to Rodrigues, Mauritius, Batavia, Java and Fremantle, Western Australia. In 1910 a wireless station was established to communicate with passing ships. The cable station ceased operation in 1966. . . . The Oman Australia Cable, scheduled for 2021, will feature a branch to the Cocos Islands. -Wikipedia

There was a bit of excitement during WW1 during the Battle of Cocos, probably because it was a bit of a communications hub for the British Empire in the Indian Ocean. WW2 was much quieter.

Via Detroit Steve

Previous submarine cable post here. Links to other submarine cable maps here and here.

Pic of the Day

Sigiriy, Sri Lanka

2,500 years ago King Kasyapa built a palace on top of this rock.

Water, Water

Island Malé and capital city of Maldives

There's a bit of a water crisis in the Maldives (or is it just Maldives? My conditioning prevents me from leaving out the the.) The population outstripped the islands' ability to provide fresh water some time ago, so they are dependent on desalination plants. A fire in an electrical control panel in a relatively large desalination plant in the capital city/island of Malé has shut it down.

Malé is about halfway up the eastern chain of islands. At this scale it occupies one pixel on your screen. The 'British Indian Ocean Territory' down at the bottom center is just a fancy name for Diego Garcia, a hot spot on every sailor's tour of duty. And look! There's Arthur C. Clarke's house, 15 pixels South of Sri.

My paraphrase of the Wikipedia article on the place gives us the basics:

Maldives is an island nation in the Indian Ocean, consisting of a double chain of twenty-six atolls, oriented north-south. The chain starts about 250 miles southwest of the Southern tip of India and extends 500 miles south. Most of the atolls are composed of a ring of small islands. There are roughly 1200 islands, only 200 of which are populated. The total population is something greater than 300,000.  With an average ground level elevation of 5 feet above sea level, it is the planet's lowest country. It is also the country with the lowest natural highest point in the world at 8 feet.

Highest point is 8 feet?!?! How is it that this place still exists? I would have thought that everything would have been swept away the last time a typhoon blew through. Obviously I'm missing something, but it's going to have to wait for another day. I've got enough on my plate right now.

The Maldives cover about 35,000 square miles of ocean. If it was land it would be about the same size as Indiana, South Carolina or Maine. Put all the islands together and the actual land area would only be 115 square miles, which is slightly smaller than Larry Ellison's Pineapple Island.

My first hearing of this crisis left me wondering WTF? An electrical fire shut down the water? What kind of desalination plant do they have? I mean any boy scout knows you can get enough fresh water to survive with a sheet of plastic by rigging up a solar still. Works even in the Sahara (maybe. I'm not going to bet on that.) Wikipedia disabuses me of that notion:

Solar Stills

In the direct method, a solar collector is coupled with a distilling mechanism and the process is carried out in one simple cycle. . . . Water production by direct method solar distillation is proportional to the area of the solar surface and incidence angle and has an average estimated value of 3-4L/m²/d. Because of this proportionality and the relatively high cost of property and material for construction direct method distillation tends to favor plants with production capacities less than 200m³/d. - Wikipedia

200m³ (200 cubic meters) is about 50,000 gallons. Okay, land is kind of at a premium in Malé (see picture at top), and while 50,000 gallons a day might enable the population (roughly 100,000 people) to survive in a temperate climate, Malé is on the equator. I think you might want a bit more.

Still, with water being necessary and scarce, you'd think they'd want some kind of backup plan that didn't require electricity. Like maybe a water tower and a battery of hand operated pumps. I dunno though, maybe anything that sticks up would get blown away in the next typhoon. Or maybe pumps are too sophisticated. Maybe what they need is a water tower with a set of stairs so people can curry buckets up of water to the top. After all, the electricity isn't doing any magic, all it's doing is running the pumps. Electric pumps might be more economical from a business perspective, but if you are running out of drinking water and it's a hundred degrees outside I think you might be persuaded to man the pump for a bit, especially if that is the only way to get a drink.


India and China have been shipping water there by the ton, but Malé needs at least a thousand tons a day (a cubic meter weighs a ton). Saudi Arabia and India have pledged a chunk of money to get the water supply fixed. It's a chunk, but it's only a fraction of what they need. Being the geeky kind of guy I am, I'm wondering why the electrician didn't just go in and replace the burnt up wires, but then I realized that even if that got it going, what they really want is a reliable machine that doesn't require any fiddling. Their big business is tourism, not engineering. Besides, it's kind of like a military campaign, or a movie production - everything has to be shipped in from somewhere else, including all the support staff and supplies for the people who are doing actual work. Kind of like a pyramid scheme. You only need one guy to turn on the switch on the new plant, but getting the new plant there and installed, well, that's going to take a small army, and as we all know, armies are expensive.

Sun.MV has a live blog on the Malé water crisis. It's kind of a cool format. What we haven't heard is anything from Hitachi, who built and run the Malé's desalination plan, though I might be the only person on the planet who knows this (puffy mcpuffery speaking).

On the plus side, I found a very cool back room tour of the Hyatt in Malé, and an English company that is building Seawater Greenhouses in Arabia.

Pic of the Day

DIEGO GARCIA, British Indian Ocean Territory, April 16, 2014. Ohio-class guided-missile submarine USS Georgia. U.S. Navy photo by Hank Gettys.

Something about the color in this picture does not look quite right. I don't know whether someone has mucked with it or whether that's just the way things look in Diego Garcia. Maybe being down on the equator, a thousand miles away from any other land, does something to the light.

Ocean Shield

April 9, 2014. Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion flies past Australian Defense vessel Ocean Shield on a mission to drop sonar buoys to assist in the acoustic search of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. The ship searching for the missing Malaysian jet has detected two more underwater signals that may be emanating from the aircraft's black boxes. (Photo by Australian Defense Force)

Ship builders are building some funny looking ships these days. This one was originally ordered by a Norwegian company that is in the offshore oil and gas business. Before it was launched it was sold to the Australian Navy. The visor over the bow is a helipad.