-l.

Cheers,
Tom

-l.

We were at the Snug Harbor center two weeks ago - the terminals are all full of signs for the coming renovations.

I agree - this lodged in my head as Something That Does Not Happen.

sigh.

-l.

How awful this all is.

One of the -- frustrations? -- of riding the SI ferry is the tedium of those last minutes as the beast *slowly* lines up oozes into the slot and gets tied down.

So, yes, this is damn odd.

Whenever a friend or co-worker talks about visiting NYC, I *always* recommend a ride on the ferry. Cheap (free if you don't count the subway to get there), easy to get to, and a really great trip.

I still wouldn't hesitate to recommend the trip.

The big SRN4 hovercraft were retired about five years ago, another triumph of British extreme engineering on a shoe-string -- sort of like Concorde -- that couldn't compete on cost with the Channel railway service (for speed) or the conventional ferries (for price). Those things were enormous -- bigger than a 747, much bigger than the USMC's big troop-carrying hovercraft. We're talking a hovercraft that could carry 400 passengers and 120 cars, ducking and weaving through the tankers and freighters in the world's busiest shipping lane (the English channel) so fast that they'd have earned a speeding ticket if they'd tried it on the motorway. They cut the journey from the hour-plus of the conventional ferries to 20-30 minutes, and it was a special experience, like a flight on an early airliner. I was a passenger on one once, and I still remember the moment when the pilot began feeding air into the skirts, and the big, wide room I was sitting in -- like the lounge on a passenger ferry, except for the seatbelts -- just went up like a lift, ten feet, twenty feet, then slowly began to turn and drift sideways and sort of fell across the concrete apron and into the sea, accelerating smoothly.

But I digress ...

The hovercraft service mostly ran without a hitch for twenty, thirty years -- except this one time. A hovercraft was coming into the harbour in a gale at the same time as a big RoRo ferry. Normally they'd slow down before entering harbour, but a combination of gusting wind and turbulence around the harbour mole (which acted as a windbreak) ensured it was still making about forty miles per hour. It struck the sea wall a glancing blow that ripped about twenty feet of metal out of the starboard hull, including the wall of one passenger lounge. I can still remember the shock when I saw it on TV that evening. I'd been sitting right there, either on that ship or its' sister, a couple of years earlier ...

Ferries aren't supposed to do that.

Jane

I've experienced a few inelegant dockings in my day, and have heard of some that caused injuries, but I'll say what everyone else has - this just does not happen. I'm totally in shock.

I don't know what the NTSB is going to find, and I hope the captain survives and finds some comfort in aiding the investigation.

Giuliani said that when that airliner crashed right after takeoff from JFK, not all that long after 9/11, his unbidden first thought was "Oh God, not Rockaway again." It's a small long-settled neighborhood, and there were a lot of members of the FDNY living there. He'd already been to a lot of funerals in Rockaway that year, and he didn't want to have to deal with any more.

Bad stuff can happen anywhere. It's just one of those things.

Much talk in the news last night about the high winds and chop on the harbor possibly contributing to the accident--and it was indeed blustery yesterday, with tree limbs coming down all over the place and people hanging onto each other while walking (especially smaller people).

Further news reports this morning are saying things like "the captain passed out a few moments before the accident" and the co-captain attempted to take control and steer the boat into the dock. An attorney representing the captain stated that his client neglected to take his blood pressure medication yesterday and that this may have caused him to pass out, but how he can be sure of this I am not sure, since the captain is still reportedly in critical condition.

Despite September 11th, plane crashes, and other disasters, it still feels strange to me to see steel and other _strong_ materials twisted like pipecleaners.

Thankfully only a few people fell or jumped into the water (58 degrees yesterday) and were quickly rescued. The reports of amputations were horrible.

Small mercy: it was not rush hour.

I rode the ferry for a lark a couple of months ago; nice view, nice breeze after a hot day, and a routine ride with no indication of how tricky it probably was to reach zero speed forward and sideways at contact despite any currents around the tips of the islands. This morning's Boston Globe says another ferry pilot was in the wheelhouse but didn't realize quickly enough that the captain was unconscious; I wonder if that will be substantiated and if so how long the captain had been on duty.

Clearly, a lot of commuters -- many of whom were sitting only a few feet away from the windows -- weren't watching. Take that as an index of how appallingly unexpected this was.

"Inelegant" is exactly the right word for the ferryboats' less successful docking maneuvers. I figured the occasional jarring thumps were the reason for the signs that say to stay off the stairs when the boat is coming into the dock. But unless you disregarded them and lost your footing coming down the stairs, at worst you might get knocked a little off balance, maybe have to take a half-step to right yourself. And that was only if you were standing out on the porch of the Legion or the JFK, mere feet from where the ferry made contact with the pilings.

The ferry is serene. You don't even have to worry about getting robbed or mugged, because if the crew knows there's been a crime onboard, they'll sit just off the docks and wait until the perpetrator is caught.

This is all just so wrong.

Our ferry people are watching the New York accident very carefully...as they said this morning, ferry people everywhere look carefully at things like this, to learn and (they hope) prevent duplication.

Under the topic Great Trivia Facts of Admiralty Law, mugging someone on the Staten Island Ferry could count as piracy on the high seas.

Not all that different. Here's a map of what happened, courtesy of the New York Times.

I rode the ferry nearly every day for 10 years....weird doesn't even begin to touch it.

The Sealth belongs to the Issaquah class, which as I understand it, were built so poorly that the ferry system's chief engineer declared them to be unsafe and further said that passengers should not be near the front of those vessels when they were docking. (Those problems have since been addressed and were not an ussue, to my knowledge, in the Colman Dock incident.)

Also, the Elwha is rather notorious for running into things, and has plowed into the docks in Anacortes and Orcas Island. Somewhat fortunately, the Orcas Island dock was scheduled for demolition at the time.

What really jarred me about the Andrew J. Barberi incident was the coverage I heard on the radio about the lack of response by the ferry's crew. It sounded like they were somewhat ill-prepared to deal with the emergency, which seems rather bizarre.

I was thinking of the "dead-man switch" on railroad engines, that shut off the engine if the engineer lets go, and wondering if the ferries have those. (Heck, even my lawnmower has one!) But I suppose with the inertia/foreward momentum, the ferry would keep going, and if it were close enough to the dock, unless the other pilot in the cabin realized what was happening and took the controls in time, something like this could still happen.

This is more complicated in the case of a ship in that there aren't any brakes. Even with the throttle at zero, the ship can still coast or be moved by currents.

1. There's a nineteenth-century law that limits liability for any marine accident to the current value of the ship in question. If the ship has been badly damaged, that comes down to the price of that much scrap steel. However, if negligence is proven, there's no liability cap.
2. In the 1980s, the Manhattan and Staten Island district attorneys agreed that jurisdiction for any crime committed on the ferry would depend on the direction of travel. In this case, since the boat crashed while traveling to Staten Island, if there is a criminal case, it will be brought on Staten Island.

Damn. I really need to blog this now that I'm back. Is there any new word on this?

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 33 + 34 + 35 + 36

The total is 666.

I talked about "The Number of the Beast" and asked if that meant that all gambling casinos were satanic.

One of the thankfully rational students said "No, it just means that, like you taught us, 666 is a Triangular Number."

*
* *
* * *
* * * *
* * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *

etc.

1 = 1
1+2 = 3
1+2+3 = 6
1+2+3+4 = 10
1+2+3+4+5 = 15
1+2+3+4+5+6 = 21
1+2+3+4+5+6+7 = 28
1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8 = 36

etc.

The other recreational use of triangular numbers is 10. The 10 pins in bowling, you know.

No Egyptian mummy curses or dudes with horns and tails and a whiff of sulfur.

That math paper that came to me in a dream on the cusp of 2 January/3 January involved Triangular Numbers.

Oh, and the other time Satanic stuff came up recently was when my friend Steve Lamb on the Altadena Town Concil was sued for $2,000,000 by a former Los Angeles City Councilman and California State Assemblyman who'd been jailed for a conviction on racketeering and money laundering. Steve had accidently sent a half-finished email about said racketeer ex-politico, summarizing the charges of child abuse laid against the racketeer by his daughter in a divorce trial, and that the racketeer was reported to have done the abuse in a satanic ceremony.

The crook sued for defamation, saying that the email hurt his reputation.

This sad case has been to the State Appeals Court and was not accepted for review by the state Supreme Court.

So, whether ferry captains are hurt by satanist cults or not, your First Amendment Rights can be trampled on if you ever accuse someone of lothsome reputation of being satanist.

*sigh*