Monthly Archive for March, 2008

New York in Dubai

Published by Sean 2 years, 5 months ago in Architecture

Architect Rem Koolhaas' concept in Dubai by Office for Metropolitan Architecture

Designed for one of the biggest devel­op­ers in the United Arab Emi­rates, Nakheel, Mr. Koolhaas’s mas­ter plan for the pro­posed 1.5-billion-square-foot Water­front City in Dubai would sim­u­late the den­sity of Man­hat­tan on an arti­fi­cial island just off the Per­sian Gulf. A mix of non­de­script tow­ers and occa­sional bold archi­tec­tural state­ments, it would estab­lish Dubai as a cen­ter of urban exper­i­men­ta­tion as well as one of the world’s fastest grow­ing metropolises.

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TSB Report on BC Ferries Queen of the North Released

Published by Sean 2 years, 5 months ago in News

Queen of the North Sinking - Photo courtesy of Graham Clarke/Vancouver Board of Trade

The TSB report on the sink­ing of the Queen of the North has been released.

On the night of March 22, 2006 the BC Fer­ries’ pas­sen­ger ship sank off Gil Island in north­west­ern B.C. while trav­el­ing south towards Port Hardy. Spec­u­la­tion had been placed on fourth offi­cer Karl Lil­gert and quar­ter­mas­ter Karen Bricker, the two offi­cers who were in the bridge room with the lights dimmed at the time of the col­li­sion. The ship took less then an hour to sink, and of the 101 peo­ple on board, two are pre­sumed dead as a result of the incident.

Almost two years later, the Trans­porta­tion Safety Board report has been released. It has con­cluded that:

… Karl Lil­gert, the senior offi­cer on the bridge, failed to order a course cor­rec­tion and that the quar­ter­mas­ter, Karen Bricker, never made any course cor­rec­tions because they might have been dis­tracted by three fac­tors in the min­utes before the crash:

  • They were engaged in per­sonal discussion.
  • There was a squall mak­ing nav­i­ga­tion difficult.
  • They had lost track of fish­ing ves­sels in the area on the ship’s radar.

The Trans­porta­tion Safety Board report also found that a num­ber of basic prin­ci­ples of safe nav­i­ga­tion were not observed by the bridge team, including:

  • Reduc­ing speed when the ves­sel encoun­tered an area of reduced visibility.
  • Fail­ing to call senior offi­cers to the bridge when a squall hit the vessel.
  • Fail­ing to main­tain an effec­tive lookout.
  • Fail­ing to locate and iden­tify nav­i­ga­tion lights (on nearby islands).

While the report details the pro­ce­dures not fol­lowed by the two crew mem­bers on the bridge that night, it still does not explain why the crew failed to steer the ship away from Gil Island on March 22, 2006.

My orig­i­nal post on the issue is located here. Pho­tos of the inci­dent can be seen here. A detailed his­tory of the ship and it’s demise can be found at wikipedia. See below for more links and information.

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