That was my first thought too. Shipping liquids is a solved problem. You baffle containers to limit shifting and slapping. Doing the same for dry bulk seems like a no-brainer? There must be a consideration I'm entirely missing.
Normalcy bias. Its the oldest killer in the world.
Dry goods are supposed to be dry... soak wheat in fresh or salt water for a couple weeks you may as well dump it in the ocean, its rotted (its brewing, technically). The problem is SOME dry goods (bauxite, etc) are not the driest to begin with and of course the usual leaks and accidents.
The crew knows exactly what to do if there's a storm or the engine stops or a fire breaks out, but dry goods are supposed to be dry, so when they aren't, the blind spot kills the crew. You could give up training for storms or fires to run liquefaction drills, but that'll kill more people on long term average, because storms are more common than weird cargo issues. Even if labor money is no object, brains can only hold so much at one time.
So, this thread is actually addressed in the article. The article is not about discovering this phenomena, but about why it's still happening. Just a bit of a poor title that doesn't quite summarise what the article's actually about.
From the article:
Yet despite our understanding of this phenomenon, and the guidelines in place to prevent it occurring, it is still causing ships to sink and taking their crew with them.
...
The International Maritime Organisation have codes governing how much moisture is allowed in solid bulk cargo in order to prevent liquefaction. So why does it still happen?
The technical answer is that the existing guidance on stowing and shipping solid bulk cargoes is too simplistic. Liquefaction potential depends not just on how much moisture is in a bulk cargo but also other material characteristics, such as the particle size distribution, the ratio of the volume of solid particles to water and the relative density of the cargo, as well as the method of loading and the motions of the vessel during the voyage.
Time. Training time is limited, nonfungible, and rivalrous. Adding material at one end sacrifices it at another, ssomething has to give: other parts of the curriculum, or prodctive time.
There's a similar problem, at scale, for civilisation as a whole. Given a lifespan of 85 years, and working span of 65, we spend 18 years on basic education. The managing/professional class need another 4-6 for undergraduate education, plus 2 for professional degrees, 6-12 for engineering and some medical specialties. We're drawing people into the workforce in their late 20s, early 30s, and hope to get 30-40 years contribution.
At the same time, technology, or practices, or standards, obsolete much that information in 10-15 years.
How many times do you, and can you, effectively retrain someone before their prior knowledge is an inescapable impediment, and there's no useful retraining benefit regardless. Confound further with the distiction between explicit (book-learned) and taxit (experiential) knowwledge. The first can be effectvely taught through technical reproduction: lectures, books, A/V, computer-distributed or aaided materials. The latter requires small-ratio master-student raatios for transmission. Skills lacking sufficient masters (or those effective at training) die out.
I am sure that is the main part of it, but there is probably a certain amount of complacency and ignorance in play.
I would guess that, for the vast majority of bulk-cargo voyages, there is no noticeable shifting, making it it easy to assume that it is not a risk. A captain who has never experienced the problem is probably less likely to stand up to the shipper (and the ship owner's management, which is an issue in itself) over whether a cargo is fit to ship.
The article linked by pasta shows that the problem has been recognized and regulated, for some cargoes, a while back (e.g. grain in 1982), but the lesson has not been generalized.
In case of a grain liquefaction emergency, you can simply toss in a few tribbles, and its consistency will quickly change from granular to fuzzy.
Also, the rock eating monsters of Janus VI work well against bauxite liquefaction, and M-113 salt vampire creatures are highly effective against salt liquefaction (but unfortunately there is only one surviving creature).
It's not quite the same problem - when the ship rocks, if a true liquid shifts to one side through the baffles, it'll shift back to center when the ship recovers.
If a sometimes liquid substance shifts to the side, it may become a solid again and stick there, and then it can happen again and keep building up until the ship can no longer recover.
I imagine introducing baffles would significantly complicate unloading, as right now the procedure is basically to lower bulldozers and other heavy machinery into the hold and use it to keep the cargo in few piles that can be easily grabbed by a crane.
Liquid transport doesn't have the same problem since you can just pump the cargo out.
It's costly and unnecessary if you can ensure that the cargo behaves as a solid. There's also the issue that once behaving as a liquid, it can then seize to do that, and remain in a slumped state.
