BOW WAVE 50

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Wavy Line	sam@wavyline.com
(c)2000 WavyLine.com	Issue No 50 30 Oct 00
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
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In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. Post Office Locator
3. Toujours Metric Tonnes
4. Asia Conferences
5. Bermuda Lab
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

The news in the UK is full of reports of the emergency rail repairs being undertaken around the country in the wake of a bad accident at Hadfield. This has led to a slow down of services all around the country which is destined to last for some time. Observers of Railtrack will watch how well the information game is played in the run up to Christmas. Rail commuters in the UK have been known to turn nasty to governments at election time.

The railtrack website at present carries a rather a pathetic general warning which states:

"The timetable is subject to short-term alterations which may not be reflected here".

See the site at:

http://www.railtrack.co.uk

nowadays, practitioners of the art of handling
sudden crises know that the first leg of a successful strategy often is to set up a web site to give those affected as much information and help as is possible in the circumstances.

Our guess is that if Railtrack bungles this side of the task, more sites run by vigilante commuters will arise such as Tubehell,the user site for London's at times overstretched underground system whose motto is "We are not sardines, we are human beings".

http://www.tubehell.com/

2. Post Office Locator

In addition to the plans for digital signatures for its customers and a new internet parcel drop off plan, the Post Office in the UK holds one of the keys to the rural future insofar as it has 95 per cent of the population in the country living within one mile of one of its branches

Readers in the UK who need to know the location of their nearest branch need look no further than this rather good site.

http://www.postoffice-counters.co.uk/

3. Toujours Metric Tonnes

People whose contact with the specialised world of oil and oil pollution is not exactly day-to-day will
appreciate the notes below

The general press has the habit of describing oil spills in a variety of ways e.g. litres, US gallons or barrels), but the maritime industry always uses metric tonnes to measure this kind of cargo.

So many readers of Bow Wave when asked to say something meaningful about an oil spill will always tend to want to examine the figures in tonnes.

Figures given in barrels are difficult to convert. The type of crude will affect volumes. But there are close to seven barrels in a tonne. Suezmax tankers (140-150,000 DWT) are million-barrel ships. VLCCs are two-million barrel ships.

Barrels: 6.5 - 7.0 = 1 tonne
US gallons: 300 = 1 tonne
Imp gallons: 250 = 1 tonne
Litres: 1135 = 1 tonne

Since it is impossible to measure oil spills exactly, writers in the maritime press will always round up or down
to the nearest tonne.

The "Exxon Valdez" involved 11M US gallons, i.e. 37,000 tonnes.

The world's worst spill, "Castillo de Bellver" (August 6, 1983) was 260,000 tonnes. The two "Atlantic Empress" spills (July/Aug 1979 totalled 280,000 tonnes.

(Thanks to style guru Patrick Neylan-Francis)

4. Asia Conferences

Eva Low has written in with notices of two of the more unusual conferences run by the IBC Asia Group.

The first, which arises out of the need for more and more port infrastructure in the near future, is on Inland Water Transport and Dredging and is organised by the specialists over at UN-ESCAP (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) This event will be held at the United Nations Conference Centre, Bangkok,Thailand on 13-14 November.

The second is the 1st Asian Forum on Marine Surveying to be held on 23 - 24 November 2000 at the Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel in Hong Kong. There was such a Conference in Barcelona this year which was well received by all concerned. Here's hoping that Mike Wall and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University enjoy just as much success with this meeting.

IBC Asia's site is at:

http://www.ibc-asia.com/

5. Bermuda Lab

Each week when we send out Bow Wave we receive in return some 20 or 30 automatic messages which usually say John Doe is out of the office, contact the ever helpful Belinda Backup in cases of urgent need. If you contact Bow Wave Reader Dave Fox of the Bermuda Insurance Institute, he e-mails you back a MS Word file which also invites you to visit the Bermuda Insurance Market Site wherin the resident industry is hailed as "The Insurance Laboratory to the World".

Insurance white coats can visit the site at:

http://www.bermuda-insurance.org/

6. And Finally...

Rail enthusiasts and those with a taste for the hidden places of old London town may be interested in the little known site for Rail Mail, the dedicated underground railway in London given over to the carriage of letters and parcels between the major sorting offices across the city. This well designed effort has pictures, sound files and history enough to launch a few of its visitors into newbie train spotters and transport historians.

See the site at:

http://www.karslake.co.uk/mailrail/index.html

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