A bunch of Russian sailors could only curse like, well, sailors, as they watched a deck full of gas pipelines being swiped clean by a roll. The cargo had apparently not been fastened down properly at port, as this video attests.
The description of the video, which was published on YouTube last week, says the footage shows a night voyage to deliver pipelines from Arkhangelsk in northwestern Russia to a small port called Sabetta in the Yamal region.
WARNING, STRONG LANGUAGE - IN RUSSIAN, OBVIOUSLY.
The cargo in the video is wedged in by several beams – a quick fix for a problem the crew had noticed en route, according to exasperated comments.
“We’ve 12 hours to go. We should have slowed down to 6 knots and go like that and nothing would have happened,” one of the men says. “F**k! I hope those pipes hold. If they hold, that would be wonderful. Otherwise the office will go apesh*t.”
But, alas, the sailors’ attempt to remedy the situation fails spectacularly when the vessel encounters rougher water and rolls to starboard as the same commenter notes “that’s it; it’s f**ked up,” shortly before the wedges and straps fail and the pipes weighing thousands of tons plunge into the sea.
The sailors, apparently expecting the development, say it was “too bad about the cargo, but that’s how they fasten them in Russia” and then start cheering on the remaining pipes, which continue rolling back and forth across the desk, urging them to join their lost siblings faster.
The video was apparently shot on board the MV Valeri Vasiliev, a general cargo ship fitted for ice navigation that sails regularly to Sabetta, which is near a large oil and gas field where pipes are in high demand.