Old News Items
Here is an interesting REVIEW by the Michigan State Police comparing a BMW police bike to two different Harley police bikes. An interesting read.This is probably old news to some of you, but San Jose BMW set another new LAND SPEED RECORD at Bonneville this past Labor Day Weekend. Look here also.
Here is a British website with 55 pictures of the container ship which was grounded in Lyme Bay, England.
The containers/boxes are being unloaded by Smit Tak, a salvage company.
She used to be a French owned and run ship. However after being piled onto a coral reef at full sea speed off Singapore a couple of years ago she was towed to Vietnam to be patched up and then she was bought by the present owners.
She was caught in a force 10 gale in the English Channel and cracked in the engine room. (surprise surprise) and they tried to get her into port. She started to founder however and the only choice was to park her on a reef in Lyme Bay which is relatively sheltered. Pity it is also a World Heritage site but these things happen.
She is not small...... 62000 tons and there are a lot of containers/boxes on her. It is estimated to take 5 months to clear them all. You will note the unequal length lifting strops (they look like about 120 tonne BS!) That is so that they can get the box out of the slot on the ship without jamming.
The small coastal tanker is unloading the bunkers and they seem to be doing well with that. The small slicks are just from the small engine room tanks and the Engine Room bilge.
In the last few pics, you can see them off loading the containers that are "leaning". Gutsy by the guys doing that. Since some containers have been lost, the "attachment" condition as they are trying to unload them is "suspect."
You will note in the last few pics that they were confronted with a single four high stack of 40 footers. It was too risky to climb on them so the last pics show that they just gas axed the lashings and let them fall where they fell. As I say...... those lads don't stuff around. If your crystal chandeliers were in there.......... claim on insurance and get some more. :-)
I suspect it will be similar for the containers that are "inside" the ship and now underwater.
Thanks to Ambassador Brian Curry for the information and text.
Allen Gigliotti has pointed us to a very controversial helmet review article in 
. Make sure to read the entire article.
Thanks to John Allen, of IBMWR, for pointing this out.