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You thought flying was scary

Postby Henni » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:09 am

Cruise from hell ends in N.Y.

Pianist played 'Titanic' song as waves rocked cruise ship

STAFF AND NEWS SERVICE REPORTS

Debris and water litter the Norwegian Dawn, a liner battered by sea as it headed for New York.

Passengers Babak Pasdar (l.) and Tinne Loh of Hoboken hug at Newark Airport's baggage claim.

A cruise ship damaged by a freak seven-story wave passed through New York Harbor on Monday and docked at a Hudson River pier.

The Norwegian Dawn had docked in the Charleston, S.C., harbor for repairs and a Coast Guard inspection after running into rough weather Saturday while returning to New York from the Bahamas.

Some passengers got off the ship in Charleston. About 2,100 remained onboard when the 965-foot vessel left South Carolina early Sunday.

The ship docked at Pier 88 around 9:30 a.m. EDT, near New York’s Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum. Passengers were scheduled to disembark around 11 a.m. EDT.

The wave had sent furniture sailing through the air, knocked Jacuzzis overboard and forced some passengers to sleep in hallways in life jackets.

“The ship was hit by a freak wave that caused two windows to break in two different cabins,” Norwegian Cruise Line said in a statement. It said 62 cabins were flooded and four passengers had cuts and bruises. The wave reached as high as deck 10 on the ship, company spokeswoman Susan Robison said Sunday.

James Fraley, who was taking a honeymoon cruise with his wife, said they called their loved ones as the wave pounded the boat because they thought the ship was going down.

“It was pure hell. We’re talking 47-foot waves hitting the 10th floor, knocking Jacuzzis on the 12th floor overboard — people sleeping in hallways in life jackets,” Fraley told WCBD-TV in Charleston. “Just pure pandemonium.” Bill and Ellen Tesauro of Wayne, N.J., said they went to the ship’s casino when waves started slamming the vessel.

“We figured it would take our minds off this (and) that’s when the captain announced that drinks are free all night,” Bill Tesauro told the Daily News of New York. “But then there was another horrendous slap on the water.” The panicked couple decided to return to their suite.

“A desk went flying across the room,” Ellen Tesauro said. “And a glass table toppled down, with glasses and food on it.” Stacy Maryland of Hamilton, N.J., woke up to find shoes and magazines floating in a foot of water.

“I thought I heard water sloshing around, and then I woke up and saw it, and it was surreal,” she told the newspaper.

The cruise line said passengers whose cabins were flooded were flown home from Charleston and the safety of the ship “was in no way compromised by this incident.” Each passenger on the ship got a refund of half the trip’s cost and a voucher for half the price of a future cruise, Robison said.

The ship left New York on April 10 with 2,500 passengers aboard. Robison said about 300 passengers decided not to return by ship from Charleston. About 100 were flown back to New York and the rest made their own arrangements, Robison said.

“I rented a car and drove nine hours,” said Fraley, of Keansburg, N.J., who kissed his driveway when he got home. “No more time on the Titanic for me.”


Earlier story

Trip was hell on the high seas

BY NICOLE BODE, CARRIE MELAGO and JONATHAN LEMIRE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Passengers on an ill-fated cruise ship slammed by a 70-foot wave awoke with water rushing into their cabins, furniture crashing and glass shattering - and the luxury liner's pianist rode out the storm by playing the theme to "Titanic."

"The sea was scary as hell," said Ellen Tesauro, 47, of Wayne, N.J. "I thought, 'When this ship goes down, how can I save myself so I can go back to my kids?'"

As the battered Norwegian Dawn began to steam home to New York in calmer waters yesterday, the Coast Guard launched an investigation into whether the ship's captain sent a distress call during the rollicking storm.

At least four passengers were injured and 62 cabins were flooded during the hell on the high seas.

The first sign of danger for the 1,000-foot-long ship came soon after its departure from New York last Sunday when shaken travelers saw the powerful storm coming on CNN - and realized they would be standing helpless in its path.

But the sand and sun in Port Canaveral near Orlando, Miami and a small Caribbean island over the next three days calmed the fears of the 2,200 passengers - until the seas turned rough and the sky threatened Friday as the ship steamed to New York.

"We had no idea we'd have almost 48 hours of 40-foot swells," said a choked-up Kathleen Riccardi, 31, of Brooklyn. "I called my mother from the boat and told her I loved her because I wasn't sure I'd ever see her again," she said.

The storm hit Friday night, as tiles exploded out of the ceiling and vases and glasses shattered, sending terrified passengers scurrying for cover as the liner rocked side to side.

"We felt the whole front of the ship come up and it must have left the water because it slammed and hit the water," said Bill Tesauro, 56, Ellen's husband.

As the crew announced that drinks would be free until the Dawn cleared the storm, seasick passengers lurched through the hallways vainly trying to find stable ground.

Some travelers - who had paid from $800 to $26,000 for the week-long cruise - sought refuge in the casino only to be met with an overturned blackjack table, flying poker chips and soaked playing cards.

Others whose rooms were slammed by walls of water huddled under blankets in the atrium, where they stared at the ship's singing piano player who repeatedly performed the theme from "Titanic."

A petrified Dawn Lepore, 47, spent a sleepless night in her cabin listening to the wind howl when, at 6 a.m., she felt the roar of the rogue 70-foot wave that smashed windows as high as the ship's 10th floor.

"The glass was flying all over, what wasn't nailed down was on the ground," said Lepore, of Carteret, N.J. Her aunt Diane Nowicki, 69, of Somerville, N.C., awoke to see her slippers floating by in shin-high water.

"Drawers were opening and closing," said Nowicki.

The freak wave knocked out the electricity to the ninth-floor cabin Caterina Russo, 39, shared with her daughters. She staggered into the hallway and saw several passengers bloodied from flying glass.

"They looked like zombies," said Russo, of Wayne, N.J.

The wounded ship abandoned its journey to New York - it had been scheduled to arrive yesterday - and instead retired to the port of Charleston, S.C.

According to the Norwegian Cruise Lines, the veteran captain of the ship, Niklas Peterstam, had signaled to the Coast Guard that the ship had come under duress. But the Coast Guard said yesterday that it has no record of a distress call.

Petty Officer Bobby Nash of the Florida Coast Guard said the incident was under investigation.

Norwegian Cruise Lines spokeswoman Susan Robison said the ship was never in any danger. She confirmed the cruise canceled its normal stop in the Bahamas in order to arrive earlier in New York so it could load new equipment.

After undergoing repairs and a Coast Guard inspection, the ship steamed out of Charleston yesterday and was expected to arrive in New York today.

Passengers whose cabins were damaged were placed on a charter jet that returned to Newark at 2 a.m. yesterday. Others opted to drive home rather than stay on the boat.

"I rented a car and drove nine hours," said James Fraley, 31, of Keansburg, N.J, who kissed his driveway when he reached home. "No more time on the Titanic for me."

Terrified passengers were told, 'Drinks are free all night'

N.J. couple Bill and Ellen Tesauro ride out storm in safe reception area with hundreds of others.

Bill Tesauro and his wife, Ellen, of Wayne, N.J. - on their first vacation without their children - went to the casino when the rough waves started slamming the ship.

"We figured it would take our minds off this [and] that's when the captain announced that drinks are free all night," said Bill Tesauro, 56. "But then there was another horrendous slap on the water.

"At first we thought we'd ride it out but then we got panicky," said Bill Tesauro, who said he looked at the 40-foot sea swells and decided to return to their 10th-floor suite.

"A desk went flying across the room," said Ellen Tesauro, 47. "And a glass table toppled down, with glasses and food on it.

"It was wild," she said. "The ship was going side to side. What you saw, you can't even explain."

Slept away

Anne Decandia took her 17-year-old daughter, Danielle, on the cruise to celebrate the teen's graduation from Monroe Township (N.J.) High School. The two took different views of the storm.

"I was awake all night long, listening to the crashing," said Decandia, 47. "It was the absolutely scariest thing imaginable. You were actually lifted off your bed."

Danielle, however, slept through the storm and said, "It was fun." Mom said that was just "youth speaking."

'The sea turned on us'

A longtime cruise lover, Kathleen Riccardi of Brooklyn, was excited to travel with her husband and their 1-year-old daughter on the girl's first sea voyage - until the storm hit.

"It had been going so well and then the sea just turned on us," said Riccardi, 31, who works in a medical office. "The sky was as dark as night, and the 40-foot swells were unbelievably scary."

"When things started breaking, we saw people walking in the halls, covered in blood," she said.

With the storm intensifying as the night fell, Riccardi said she held her daughter close and thought of loved ones.

"I wasn't sure I was coming home," she said. "I feel lucky to be alive."

Wakened by water

Stacy Maryland of Hamilton, N.J., was on a family vacation with her husband and children, Marilena, 4, and Kyle, 13, when she got a wet wakeup call.

"I thought I heard water sloshing around, and then I woke up, and saw it and it was surreal," said Maryland, 33, who awoke with a foot of water in her cabin, her family's shoes and magazines floating around.

"I just didn't want to see the water," she said, but she relented and walked midship to the Dazzle Lounge, where her family sat and stared out the giant windows.

"I was a nervous wreck, I thought that was it," she said, recalling how the crew wouldn't give them life jackets. "The boat felt like it was going to tip over."

Carrie Melago and Jonathan Lemire

Originally published on April 18, 2005
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Postby Henni » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:10 am

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Postby Henni » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:12 am

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Postby Henni » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:14 am

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Postby Henni » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:45 am

In one prominent rogue-wave encounter, Capt. Ronald Warwick, who followed in his father's footsteps to command the British ocean liner Queen Elizabeth II, was on the bridge at 4 a.m. on Sept. 11, 1995. Two hundred miles off Newfoundland, headed for New York, Warwick had been trying, without success, to dodge Hurricane Luis.

Minutes before, monstrous seas smashed windows in the Grand Salon, 72 feet off the water. Warwick had given the order confining passengers to quarters.

Suddenly, a huge wave loomed off the bow, huge even for a ship the size of the QE2, at nearly 1,000 feet long, more than 100 feet wide, carrying nearly 3,000 people.

Hundreds of miles from shore, the face of the wave was steep, like a breaking wall of water. Warwick later described that "it looked as though the ship was headed for the white cliffs of Dover."

Officers on the bridge estimated the wave at 92 feet, because they were eyeball to eyeball with the crest.

"(I)t broke with tremendous force over the bow. An incredible shudder went through the ship, followed a few minutes later by two smaller shudders," Warwick recalled in a 1996 article in Marine Observer.

The ship's bow dropped into a "hole" of a trough behind the first wave and was hit by a second wave of between 91 and 96 feet high that cleaned a mast right off the foredeck.

Warwick, his passengers and crew were lucky. No one was injured. It was a far different fate for the German container ship Munchen, which sank in the middle of the Atlantic in 1978 with no warning, no May Day.
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Postby Henni » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:45 am

Freak Wave - questions and answers
How often do freak waves occur?

No one knows for certain how often freak waves occur. Traditional theories of the ocean say the probability is once in every 10,000 years, but the latest data suggest that they take place more frequently. The satellite data from the German Aerospace Centre found over 10 waves in three weeks, but this is preliminary data not a statistically significant sample.

When do freak waves occur and why?

Freak waves occur in bad weather conditions when the average wave height is high and several big waves come together to create a monster. Technically this could happen when the wave size is small, but as the result is small no one notices. Waves can come together for four main reasons:

when wind pushes against a strong current (eg in South Africa)
when a shallow sea bottom focuses waves to one spot (eg in Norway)
by chance (hence the 1 in 10,000 year statistic)
when waves become unstable and start to self-focus

Scientists think the freak waves observed in the deep ocean are due to unstable waves self-focussing in bad weather conditions. It appears that there is a separate population of unstable waves in the ocean that can grow into freaks.

Are freak waves more likely in certain areas or situations?

Freak waves can occur in any ocean around the world, but there are certain areas where freak waves are more likely:

South Africa - freak waves occur off the east coast of South Africa when there is a strong wind blowing in the opposite direction to the strong Agulhas Current. (The South African Weather Service now gives freak wave warnings.)
Norway - the coast of Norway is another hotspot because the sea bottom can focus waves together to form monsters - in bad weather the shipping route is altered to avoid these areas.
Pacific - certain areas of the Pacific are also notorious for freak waves, when typhoons whip waves up to huge heights.

Can scientists predict freak waves?

At the moment the only place where freak waves can be predicted is South Africa. There is no way of knowing when or where a freak wave will hit anywhere else. Scientists at the UK Meteorological Office are working on the problem and think they might have a solution. If Al Osborne's non-linear Schrodinger theory is right, then freak waves should occur whenever there is a peak in the energy spectrum (ie when a lot of energy is crammed into waves of a specific wavelength). So the Met Office has been looking back at recorded cases of freak waves, like the 1995 Draupner wave, to see if the spectrum is peaked. So far the theory holds up and they hope to come up with a practical way to warn ships about freak waves in the next couple of years.

Are freak waves the same as tsunamis or tidal waves?

No. Tsunamis and tidal waves are extremely rare events caused when either an earthquake or landslide displaces a large volume of water creating a single large wave. Freak waves are occurring far more regularly and seem to be a fundamental property of the sea.

How many ships have been sunk by freak waves?

No one knows how many ships have been hit or sunk by freak waves. A ship is lost at sea every week, but there is often surprisingly little detail as to why or what happened. Usually poor maintenance or human error is blamed, but it is likely that at least some of these losses may be related to freak waves.

Do ships need to be redesigned?

The risk from freak waves in uncertain. Ships are built assuming that in their 20 year lifespan there is no risk from freak waves. The new evidence suggests that the risk is higher than originally thought, but the data are far from conclusive. Until the risk is fully assessed, international maritime organisations and classification societies can't know what (if any) changes need to be made to ship specifications.

Should I be worried about going to sea?

If you weren't worried before, you shouldn't be worried now - according to Department of Transport statistics it's over ten times safer to travel by sea than it is to cross the road.
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Postby Henni » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:47 am

Tuesday, 12 November, 2002, 21:52 GMT
Science investigates freak waves

Mariners have told of freak waves for centuries

Freak waves up to 30 metres high (100 feet) that rise up from calm seas to destroy ships do exist, researchers argue.
For centuries sailors have blamed mysterious surges of water for unexplainable sinkings but the claims have always attracted plenty of scepticism.

However, there is now growing evidence, including satellite imagery, which suggests the massive waves may be more than just maritime myth.

New data on the phenomenon, featured by the BBC Science programme Horizon, have led to calls for improved ship designs that will withstand huge water surges.

The matter will be raised in the House of Commons in London, UK, on Thursday.

Click here to see the BBC Horizon programme web page on freak waves.

Walls of water

Every week, a ship sinks to the bottom of the sea, and often there seems no obvious explanation.

These disappearances are usually blamed on human error or the poor maintenance of a vessel.

But in many cases, sailors have their own theory: a single massive wave that appears out of the blue and sinks the ship with one blow.

Evidence presented by Horizon suggests a 43,000-tonne cargo ship, the Munchen - which sank with all hands in 1978 - was struck with huge force.

Several researchers who have studied the event now think a giant wave was responsible.

Although the official inquiry found that "something extraordinary" had destroyed the vessel, it concluded only that the Munchen's loss was a highly unusual event that had no implications for other forms of shipping.

Wave instability

Freak waves are not the same as tidal waves, or tsunamis, and they are not caused by earthquakes or landslides.

They are single, massive walls of water that rise up from apparently calm seas. Several theories compete to explain them.

Some scientists think that waves and winds heading straight into powerful ocean currents may cause a surge of water to rise up out of the deep.

Others believe that some waves can become unstable and start to suck in energy from nearby waves, growing quickly and to huge heights.

Commons question

Jim Gunson, the UK Met Office's expert on ocean waves, said: "Rogue waves in the past have been ignored and regarded as rare events.

"Now we are finally getting a handle on them and finding out how common they are."

Eddie O'Hara, MP, the chairman of the parliamentary committee on maritime safety, is to table a Commons motion into ship safety in freak weather.

He told the BBC: "Ships are going down all the time. If you read the maritime press, there is a boat going down at least once a month, with the loss of crew usually measured in dozens of lives."

Remodelling ships to include, for example, new hatch designs to withstand extraordinary waves could cost merchant fleet owners billions of dollars.
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Postby Henni » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:49 am

Monster ship-sinking rogue waves surprisingly common, satellites show
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by CAMERON WALKER
GERMANY (10 Aug 2004) -- In the recently released movie Riding Giants, big-wave surfers search the globe for the ultimate ride at legendary surf spots such as California's Mavericks. But at unnamed spots in the ocean, there are huge waves that can't be so easily caught.

Known as rogue, or freak, waves, these giants seem to spring up from the ocean floor. They are so large that they can overwhelm and sink even the sturdiest ships.

Now researchers have started using satellites to try to identify and track these unruly waves. And the results have been surprising. While rogue waves were once thought to be the stuff of sailing legend, satellite photos found ten huge waves welling up one three-week period.

"We thought we'd have difficulties finding so many large waves," said Wolfgang Rosenthal, a research scientist at Germany's GKSS research center. "But roughly two ships each week are affected."

Rosenthal and colleagues at GKSS have spent several years looking at 30,000 satellite images of the ocean surface taken by two European Space Agency satellites over a three-week period in 2001.

The satellite images were processed at the Cologne-based German Aerospace Center. This research was part of a European Union program called MaxWave, started in 2000 to document the occurrence of rogue waves.

With this and other studies, researchers want to develop a wave map covering more than a decade of observations of the world's oceans. The map could be used to forecast the likelihood of the giant waves' appearance.

While forecasting rogue waves can be very complex, the goal of the global satellite measurement project is to improve forecasting by looking at the differences between wave models and actual observations, said Wolfgang Lengert, ERS mission manager for the European Space Agency.

Sinking Ships

During the last two decades, more than 200 supertankers—ships over 200 meters (656 feet) long—have sunk beneath the waves. Rogue waves are thought to be the cause for many of these disasters, perhaps by flooding the main hold of these giant container ships.

In a single week in winter 2001, two tourist ships were hit by rogue waves in the South Atlantic. The Bremen and the Caledonian Star had their bridge windows smashed by the errant wall of water reaching 30 meters (98 feet) high.

"For tourist ships, they like to have these large windows so that people can look out," said Susanne Lehner, a mathematician at the University of Miami in Florida who studies wave dynamics.

For the Bremen, water pouring in the smashed windows damaged the ship's instruments and power, setting it adrift for two hours while the crew worked to restart the engines.

"The same phenomenon could have sunk many less lucky vessels: two large ships sink every week on average," said Rosenthal in an ESA press release. "But the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather.'"

In 1978, when the 43,000-ton cargo ship Mûnchen went down with all hands during an Atlantic crossing, all that remained was a battered lifeboat. Now researchers suspect the sinking likely happened after the ship was hit with a rogue wave.

Offshore oil rigs also get hit by rogue waves. Radar reports from the North Sea's Gorm oil field show 466 rogue-wave encounters in the last 12 years.


Researchers have some clues to what causes these monster waves. Rogue waves seem to be clumped near a strong current—such as the Gulf Stream off the North American east coast and the Agulhas Current off South Africa. The current, Lehner said, can act like a lens, focusing wave energy so that small waves combine into larger ones.

But sometimes rogue waves appear out of the deep blue sea, in parts of the ocean without major currents—and scientists aren't quite sure why.

The giant waves sometimes appear in areas of extended storms or converging weather fronts. Waves coming in from different systems could build up into big waves, Lehner said. Looking at more satellite data could help researchers learn even more about how and where the waves form.

These days oil rigs and ships are built to withstand waves of 15 meters (49 feet). Learning more about rogue waves, the researchers said, could help ship designers bolster the seaworthiness of their crafts.

Following the Waves

To track rogue waves, researchers looked at data from the European Space Agency's archives of images shot from the satellites. The satellites' radar makes images of ten-by-five-kilometer (six-by-three-mile) patches of the sea surface every 200 kilometers (120 miles).

With the consecutive images, scientists get a bird's-eye view of the ocean's dynamics. "You can really 'fly' around the globe," Lehner said. "People have never looked at the sea surface in this way before."

Lehner and other researchers then broke down the images into elements of wave energy and wave direction, called ocean-wave spectra, which can be used by weather stations for forecasting.

In the process the researchers spotted more than ten rogue waves during the three-week period. Each wave swelled to 25 meters or more (82 feet) in height. By comparison, big wave surfers—who chase monster waves around the globe —haven't documented surfing waves over 70 feet (21 meters) high. One of the biggest waves ever surfed was Mike Parsons's 66-foot (20-meter) wave off California's remote Cortes Bank.

Now Lehner and Rosenthal are starting a new project, called WaveAtlas, which will pore through two years of satellite images to create a larger-scale understanding of where and when rogue waves happen throughout the seasons and the years.

Rosenthal, an experienced sailor, may also head out to sea to take measurements at the surface. But he hopes to avoid any errant giants. "I'm glad I've never seen a rogue wave," he said.

SOURCE - National Geographic
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Postby Henni » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:51 am

Rense.com

Deadly 100' Rogue Waves
Destroy World's Giant Ships
Scientists Baffled Giant Walls Of Water
Robin McKie and Mark Townsend
The Observer - UK
11-11-2

They are the stuff of legend and maritime myth: giant waves, taller than tower-blocks, that rise out of calm seas and destroy everything in their paths.

For years scientists and marine experts have dismissed such stories as superstition. Walls of water do not rise out of the blue, they said. But now research has revealed that 'killer waves' do exist and regularly devastate ships around the world. They defy all scientific understanding and no craft is capable of withstanding their impact.

'Rogue waves in the past have been ignored and regarded as rare events,' said Jim Gunson, the Met Office's expert on ocean waves. 'Now we are finally getting a handle on them and finding out how common they are.'

These mammoth events are not tidal waves or tsunamis, however. Nor are they caused by earthquakes or landslides. They are single, massive walls of water that rise up - for no known reason - and destroy dozens of ships and oil rigs every year.

The story of the super-tanker M¸nchen is a classic example. She was one of the biggest ships ever built - the length of two-and-a-half football pitches - and unsinkable, it was claimed.

But on 7 December, 1978, the pride of the German merchant navy, en route to America, disappeared off the face of the earth. Despite the biggest search in the history of shipping, all that was found of the M¸nchen and her 26 crew was a lifeboat that had suffered an incredible battering.

'Something extraordinary' had destroyed the ship, concluded an official inquiry, which dismissed the Munchen's sinking as a highly unusual event that had no implications for other forms of shipping.

Now scientists believe this calm assurance may be dangerously misguided. The destruction of the Munchen was anything but uncommon, as a BBC2 edition of Horizon, Freak Waves, will point out on Thursday.
'Ships are going down all the time,' said MP Eddie O'Hara, chairman of the parliamentary committee on maritime safety. 'If you read the maritime press there is a boat going down at least once a month, with the loss of crew usually measured in dozens of lives.'

In the past, bad maintenance or poor seamanship were blamed. Now scientists suspect the truth may be far more bizarre.

It is now known that the Queen Mary was hit by a 75ft wall of water while carrying 15,000 troops in December 1942. 'The ship came within an ace of capsizing, but it was all hushed up at the time,' O'Hara told The Observer.

And only two years ago the British superliner Oriana was struck by a 70ft wave that smashed windows and sent water cascading through the ship, swamping six of its 10 decks. A month later eight men were killed when a freak wave struck the Anorient trawler 87 miles west of Loop Head in Co Clare, and two Britons taking part in the world's toughest yacht race last March were seriously injured after a 50ft wave swept over their vessel 70 miles off the Australian coast.

These giant waves cannot be predicted by standard meteorology. Waves - even in the worst of storms - should not reach much more than 40ft. The fact that walls of water up to 100ft are being observed regularly suggests that something is worryingly wrong with meteorology theory.

Waves are normally caused by high winds whipping over the sea surface, but the origin of the freak waves baffles scientists. One theory suggests that waves and winds heading straight into powerful ocean currents may cause these huge walls of water to rise up out of the deep. Another suggests that, under certain conditions, waves can become unstable and start to suck in energy from neighbouring waves and so grow massively and rapidly.

Researchers are still arguing over these ideas, but what is indisputable is the fact that the design of modern ships is inadequate for dealing with the freak waves.

The point will be emphasised this week when O'Hara tables a Commons motion expressing concern over ship safety in freak weather. Hatches need redesigning, he says, while the resistance of windows to the impact of freak waves has to be considerably improved.

Massive improvements - that could cost merchant fleet owners billions of pounds - may have to be carried out on ships if they are to survive the freak waves. 'Ship design is simply not good enough,' said Douglas Faulkner, a Royal Navy ship designer and chairman of naval architecture at Glasgow University. 'Although you can never legislate for everything, you can make the best attempt possible to reduce the risk. The issue of unusual waves is something we really can't ignore.'
http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story ... 47,00.html
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Tumbleweed
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Postby Tumbleweed » Wed Sep 12, 2007 10:22 am

Hennie,

Nou maak jy nie net jouself onnodig bang nie :shock:

Anyway, we have more than rogue 'waves' here to contend with.
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Morph
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Postby Morph » Wed Sep 12, 2007 10:40 am

^?^
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Tailspin
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Postby Tailspin » Wed Sep 12, 2007 1:06 pm

Yip Morph

You said it bru.
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Henni
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Postby Henni » Wed Sep 12, 2007 1:49 pm

Delta VV wrote:Nou maak jy nie net jouself onnodig bang nie :shock:
Glo my, ek het baie respek vir die see. As jy in ons omgewing droog maak, val jy grond toe en sneuwel gewoonlik eers as jy onder kom - in hierdie omgewing word daar gedurende jou val nog aan jou gekou ook! :lol: En deur dit alles sukkel jy ook nog ietwat om asem te haal in die proses!

Het dit nogal insiggewend gevind en daarom hierdie draad - min mense weet hiervan. Meeste van ons wat van vlieg hou, hou gewoonlik ook van allerhande ander interessanthede, selfs die wat jan alleman gewoonlik nie aanstaan nie...

Henni
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