Huge Container Ship Fails To Slow Down And Moves Towards Ground In Hong Kong

10 years ago
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Ship transportation has come a long way since the Titanic. It is now more stable and faster than ever, it can carry more and more weight but we still seem to be afraid of it, and it’s not without a solid reason. No matter how safe we claim ships to be, they are still slaves to the majestic force of the oceans. The dark blue waters are still as unpredictable as ever and it takes a lot of expertise to try and curb them a bit.

Raw footage from an incident which occurred near a football field in China shows the moment when a 633-foot German container ship, named Hansa Constitution, headed toward land after failing to slow down. The captain reportedly followed emergency procedure and dropped the anchor to slow down the vessel, although it still made contact with the sea wall in front of the Stanley Ho Sports Centre in Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong. Apparently heavy rains and severe winds created rough sailing conditions on what is considered one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. No injuries were reported following the incident. The extent of the damage to the ship is unclear.

A spokeswoman for the Hamburg-based Hansa Treuhand Gruppe, Julia Eble, said the speculation is the accident may have been caused due to loss of power on board the vessel. They have sailed from Yokohama in japan and were navigating the East Lamma Channel on their way to the Chinese port city of Shenzhen.

On the other hand, Hong King’s Marine Department confirmed to local media that there was a reported mechanical malfunction aboard the Hansa Constitution when the vessel was some distance away from shore. They have also issues an advisory of extreme caution, warning of restricted visibility less than two nautical miles off shore.

Apparently traveling by boat isn’t all that safe even in shallow waters. It is a rare occurrence, but there have been other reports of similar accidents. It takes a lot of experience to be able to maneuver a ship, especially one that size, around the shallow docking waters. But don’t let this accident dissuade you in traveling the seas. If the captain pays attention to the signs the sea is giving them, you’ll be able to see and experience many beautiful sights that you’ll only previously seen in photographs, and that is totally worth the risk.

You would think that those things should be relatively easy to maneuver, if you know what you are doing. But it just so happens that sometimes even a big boat can float out of control. A cruise ship crashed into a dock at Coxen Hole on Honduras’s Roatan Island on Tuesday, April 10. In the video shared on social media the MSC Armonia can be seen ploughing into and demolish a metal jetty at the Caribbean holiday resort.

To witnesses on shore, at first glance it looked like just another cruise ship docking at the Port Coxen Hole on the island of Roatan in Honduras. It soon became perfectly clear that cruise ship was coming in way too fast and that either one or both forward anchors were deployed in an evidently desperate attempt to check the 65,000-ton vessel's momentum. Just a few short moments later the MSC Armonia crashed, tearing a section out of the dock and briefly running aground on the beach behind.

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