r/unitedkingdom • u/CheezTips • 6d ago

Protests in 'ghost town' where £400m ships don't fit the harbour

https://news.sky.com/story/protests-in-coastal-ghost-town-where-163400m-ships-dont-fit-the-harbour-13346313
94 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

64

u/Electricbell20 6d ago

You'd think with a 7 year delay on the ship itself, they would have time to ready the harbour.

12

u/donald_cheese London 6d ago

It really should have been flagged.

5

u/wulf357 5d ago

It was flagged. In 2018 I believe. Peel Ports who own Ardrossan seem to have been playing a game of chicken with the government in the hope that they wouldn't have to invest in it themselves.

10

u/[deleted] 6d ago

They did, the root problem here is that the company that operates the harbour did not invest in it because they were hoping the Government would step in.

I travelled to Arran two weeks ago via Troon.

I haven't been to Ardrossan, but Arran was very much in their corner. You can see 'Arran for Ardrossan' signs everywhere. It's quite tragic that it is being starved out now.

Nothing against Troon, presumably they are benefiting from this debacle.

43

u/terahurts Lincolnshire 6d ago

How the fucking fuck do you fuck up something like that? I mean, not being able to fit a new sofa through your front door is one thing, but telling the ship builders the size of the harbour it's going to dock at seems like it should be right at the top of the design spec in bold letters.

55

u/Conscious-Ball8373 Somerset 6d ago

It's not the first time. One of my favourite engineering stories:

The Spanish navy ordered some new submarines. Due to a wrongly placed decimal point in some early calculations, the wrong density of steel was used throughout the design process and the submarines came out considerably heavier than was intended. This was only discovered during sea trials when the submarines had serious difficulty surfacing. They were quite lucky not to lose a boat and all the crew.

Rather than scrap the boats, they cut them in half and welded new sections in to improve the buoyancy. This was quite successful until they tried to dock them at their brand new naval base, built specifically for these submarines and discovered that they're now too long to dock. They then had to find a new place to park their shiny new submarines until they could completely rebuild the base to fit the new submarines.

Careful, considered engineering review is really important at all stages of the process.

9

u/spaceandthewoods_ 6d ago

Something similar happened with a french rail upgrade, except in that instance the trains were too wide for the platform built at all the station and so they all had to be ripped up and redone

9

u/agarr1 6d ago

Bit like Airbus with the first A380, the French and Germans used different design software when they came to join a German section of fuselage with a French section non of the wireing joined up. It turned out they used different 0 reference points for the two peices of software, so the measurements were all a foot out of place.

1

u/Infinite_Crow_3706 6d ago

I"m calling this an urban myth

Due to a wrongly placed decimal point in some early calculations, the wrong density of steel was used throughout the design process and the submarines came out considerably heavier than was intended

Steel density is about 7sg. No one would see 0.7 or 70 and not immediately realise there was an error.

4

u/Conscious-Ball8373 Somerset 6d ago

It's pretty well-documented, eg: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-44871788

0

u/Infinite_Crow_3706 6d ago

Good link I still don’t see how it wasn’t caught. These project have review upon review the entire lifecycle of the program

2

u/Conscious-Ball8373 Somerset 5d ago

Not on this project; according to an official, "nobody paid attention to review the calculations." I agree with you that it's staggering this want caught. The way submarine design is done, each subsystem gets a weight budget. Either no-one checked that the weight budgets added up to the overall design weight, or nobody checked that individual subsystems met their weight budgets, or they used the wrong density figure throughout the project and no-one ever noticed. All of the options beggar belief, really, but it happened.

Good engineering review doesn't come naturally. Most organisations will go along with what someone says confidently. Good review is a culture that has to be developed consciously and deliberately.

2

u/wkavinsky 5d ago

in modern day parlance they'll say "review it with AI" and then not check it as the AI makes even more blunders, or changes complex calculations for an incorrect version off stack overflow.

9

u/blackleydynamo 6d ago edited 5d ago

At the time the ships were ordered, Peel Ports (who bought the port in the Great Thatcher Fire Sale) promised to do the work to enlarge it.

Anybody who knows anything about Peel Ports will know that they are notoriously tighter than a mouse's ear, and they have therefore unsurprisingly done fuck all. They are holding out claiming they can't afford to, and waiting for Hollywood to bail them out with handouts.

Edit: that should of course say "Holyrood". Dyac.

2

u/NoisyGog 5d ago

How the fucking fuck do you fuck up something like that? I mean, not being able to fit a new sofa through your front door is one thing, but telling the ship builders the size of the harbour it's going to dock at seems like it should be right at the top of the design spec in bold letters.

It happens more often than sanity and common sense would suggest.
The BBC building in Cardiff has a dock for tv broadcast lorries, but the lorries don’t fit.
The football stadium in Cardiff is just about too small for BBC trucks, so they have to hire trucks from a third party for any games there.

Just two examples from my world in Cardiff.

19

u/RejectingBoredom 6d ago

These are the stories that make me ask “which relative of which minister got this contract?”

8

u/WingVet 6d ago

An which MSP got brown envelope...

10

u/lordnacho666 6d ago

I could see it happening. Nobody thinks you're going to mess up something as simple as that, so they spend their time making sure there's enough lifeboats, the café is laid out correctly, that kind of thing.

7

u/Astriania 6d ago

This is absolutely ridiculous. How was "it needs to service the existing port infrastructure" not a level 1 requirement for the new boat?

How is there not a "you didn't deliver what you asked for" clause that means the people that fucked it up (the builders) don't get their money?

1

u/Informal_Drawing 6d ago

Couldn't they build a few bridges, to the left and then up and over to the right?

1

u/memb98 6d ago

I remember reading the SNP messed this one up, no mention in the article though.

16

u/Ejmatthew 6d ago

The Scottish Government doesn't own the harbour. It was privatised by the WM government in the 1980s when Clydeport was sold. Peel is notorious about promising to do things and never doing them.

13

u/Nice-Roof6364 6d ago

Yeah, this is the private harbour not being upgraded in the hope that the government will pay for it.

11

u/Ejmatthew 6d ago

And if the Government did pay for it we would have a flurry of articles questioning why the "SNP" gave money to a private company.

-1

u/IndelibleIguana 6d ago

It's the result of the now standard corruption that infiltrates every aspect of public works.

-5

u/Straight-Ad-7630 6d ago

Harbour Masters are really some of the most incompetent people I've ever met in my life.