An expidition cruise ship is sinking near Antarctica. This ship, the Explorer, is almost identical to the Clipper Adventurer, which I was on 3 years ago in Antarctica.

After striking an iceberg, water is coming in through a hole the size of a fist, according to news reports. This has got me wondering. Are there simple ways to prevent such a small hole from causing such a majestic ship from sinking?

When I was on the Clipper Adventurer, I marveled at the water-tight doors. They can obviously isolate the damaged section. And unlike Titanic, which was gashed across several sections, a fist-sized hole implies only one section was breached.

Why isn't it possible to stock airbags in all underwater sections? In the event of a breach, the people get evacuated from that section, the section gets sealed off and the airbags get deployed, filling large amounts of the empty space leaving less room for water.

Or perhaps, since it seems like it will take about a day for the ship to sink, divers can plug the hole. With the pressure of the water moving into the ship, it seems all you would have to do is place a large blanket over the hole and the pressure would hold it in place until a more permanant solution could be devised.

My ideas are too simple. There's got to be a good reason measures like this are not taken.

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Many modern large ships use means such as compartmentation and multiple hulls. But although air is cheap, pumps to push it around are expensive, and watertight airbags strong enough to withstand even moderate water pressue are probably also fairly pricey, especially if they are large enough to fill a ship's compartment. The weight and bulk of bags, pumps or compresssed-gas tanks would also cut into available cargo space.

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Water pressure depends only on the depth and density of the water. At 28 feet, water pressure is about 27psi, only about double the atmospheric pressure at sea level. The Explorer of the Seas has a draft of about 28 feet. That means that even a hole at the very bottom would experience a pressure of only about 27psi. Halfway up the side, it would only be about 21psi. That can be produced with a high pressure blower. The main problem with airbags would be withstanding punctures from sharp objects.

I have seen rescue units lifting entire automobiles, even trucks, with airbags and a blower.

One of the problems with the Titanic is that their watertight compartments did not go all the way up. When the water filled the forward compartments, the bow settled, and the water simply ran over the top of the other compartments, one at a time, until the entire ship filled.

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Are the people on the Explorer okay?

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The ship has been abandoned, and all passengers and crew have been rescued. “The Little Red Ship” has been a favorite of a lot of people.

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This is a good thing.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

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From the pic, it's smaller than I thought it was. The airbag idea would maybe be workable on a very large ship, but it wouldn't scale down very well.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I've only read that it is sinking, not that it has sank yet.

Evacuation was probably easy compared to a non-expidition ship. When I was on the almost-identical Clipper Adventurer, we would abandon ship twice a day, as all the passengers borded zodiacs for excursions to the various islands. It only took about 35 minutes to empty the ship of passengers in a non-emergency. (of course this didn't count the crew and staff).

I'm grateful everyone is ok. But having travelled on one of these majestic ships, I can't help but feel sad that the ship will be lost.

As far as the airbag idea, they're very small when they're not inflated. And they can be strong too. Think of the Mars rovers. When the airbags inflated, it was nearly 2 stories tall, and it bounced for nearly 1 kilometer over the sharp Martian rocks. Having multiple airbags in each compartment would provide redundancy incase some were damaged. If every spare nook (and there's lots of them) contained an airbag assembly, I imagine the inflated bags would displace enough volume to keep the ship from sinking.

Here's some pictures from my trip to Antarctica abord the nearly-identical Clipper Adventurer: http://www.orbitsimulator.com/Antarctica/1024page1.html

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And they would probably cost more than the ship itself. It took NASA money to make the Mars Rover landing bags.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I'm not suggesting using identical airbags as the Mars rovers. I only mention them because they're the best example to show that airbags can inflate to a large size from a small unit, and be strong. Anything is expensive per unit if your cost of designing it is spread over only 2 units. Realistically, I would expect mass-production a generic shoe-box sized airbag that could be bolted anywhere there was an extra quarter cubic foot, rather than all the engineering costs being spent on producing a single airbag system. With redundancy, failure in an individual unit is an option NASA didn't have.

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A shoebox-sized unit would need to include both compressed gas container and a sufficiently sturdy waterproof bag. Unless I miss my guess, it wouldn't be able to inflate enough to make much difference in volume in a flooding ship. And it may not match the multimillion dollar price tag of the famous landing bags, but it still wouldn't be cheap.

Does anyone know the standards for compressed-gas tanks-- how much volume they can hold and production price?

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Scuba tanks are about 15 liters of 3000psi. That's a few thousand liters of 1 bar air.

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I was a little surprised to see that the life-boats were open, rather than the closed variety which can roll 360 degrees without shipping water.
If the ship had got into trouble during a storm in the Drake Passage, things might have been very unpleasant indeed.

Grant Hutchison

Nevermind the bags; why isn't compartmentization saving the ship from such a small hole?

That surprised me too. When I first saw the picture, I thought it was the same ship I was on, only repainted and renamed. But there were enough subtle differences, including the lifeboats that convinced me otherwise. Here's a pic of the Clipper, with the enclosed lifeboats

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Because according to its last Lloyds inspection, they didn't work - In fact it seems it failed about five other catagories. So what it is doing down there, God only knows. Also being built in 69' It suffers from other issues

That's scary. When I was on the ship, I felt safe. The enclosed life boats, and the water tight doors (I think they even had warning lights). I just assumed they worked. Now I wonder.

We even bashed a lot of ice intentionally. The ship was made to break through ice. I thought of it as unsinkable. (I guess that's bad luck). The news reports say the crew was claiming it wasn't an iceberg, but submerged ice. WTF?! What is submerged ice? The Clipper had an open bridge policy. Their radar was awesome. You could spot small iceberge beyond the horizon, and then use binoculars to watch them pop above the horizon.

When we crossed the Drake, the crew was referring to it as Drake's Lake. They said it was often glass-smooth this time of year, but had some horror stories of 100 foot swells to tell too. Grant's right. I wouldn't want to face those swells in a glorified row boat.

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