Breaking in Half
The crew escaped, and for the next 10 days, the two halves of the ship drifted apart in the Arabian Ocean, each laden with containers.
Broken in Half
On 27th June, the rear half sank with all its cargo, in 4km of water.
The aft sinks
Meanwhile the front half began to be towed (backwards) towards Oman.
The fore under tow
Since 6th July, the front section has been on fire.
The fore on fire
The salvage company/coastguard estimate that approximately 90% of the front half’s cargo has already been burnt. Further, because of the possible presence of dangerous chemicals among the cargo, along with large quantities of oil within the hull, they fear the risk of explosion.
Exercise
Estimate the probability that our stuff is:
- at the bottom of the ocean
- on fire
- unharmed
Extension
Assuming that our stuff has survived so far, estimate the probability that it is:
- going to blow up
- going to sink
- going to reach us safe and sound
Update: did you guess right?
The fore half continued burning until its balance was so out of kilter that it sank. It didn’t explode.
The End of the MOL Comfort, 10th July 2013
Simple City 
truly you’re viewing this whole episode as only a mathematician would! 😉
Just sum up the following four potential scenarios:
Probability of Fire (“F”)
Probability that cargo is Unharmed (“U”)
Probability of Chemical damage (“C”)
Probability of sinking (“K”)
Call the sum of all four, representing 100% probability “You”. I’ll let you do the workings out.
Cheers Larry. Sorry about the highly likely loss of goods.
B
The exercise made me smile, the extension made me spit up tea. Hoping for the the very slim chance that your stuff arrived safe and sound.
Banjo has a good starting point here.
We also need R (“an external factor which means the other risk factors are correlated”), E (“the likelyhood that you will get compo”), and D (“the dollars you will get in compo”).
So we have (U*R*F*U*C*K*E*D)/(U)
Thanks fellas – very helpful. Can’t disagree with your conclusion though…
I just got an email to tell me some rare, only-available-in-Japan motorbike parts I ordered were also on that ship. It’s kind of weird to think just how much gets lost when this sort of thing happens – how many containers were carrying luxury cars and so on.
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@James – yes indeed. I ran into my cousin the other day, who is an engineer, and it turned out that he – or rather his company – also lost things on the boat, specifically one of these high precision lathes: http://www.citizenmachinery.co.uk/gn3200.asp