The Flood and BBC Houston

With one day left in what is turning out to be a stellar running week, I thought I would provide some much promised pictures of my continued adventures in the Philippines. If you haven't been following the weather in the Pacific over the past couple of weeks or so, you will have missed that the island of Luzon in the Philippines (where Manila is located) was recently hit by two typhoons. The first one was a direct hit across the island and dumped a to ton of rain. Meanwhile in Mindanao, it didn't rain a drop the same day the storm was passing through. I luckily wasn't in Manila, but these pictures were sent to me from the Embassy.

A few weeks prior to the typhoons, I was actually on the island of Luzon in Subic where in addition to running outside with my GPS for the first time, I also did some work. The BBC Houston came into port, and I was tasked with unloading or discharging its cargo. Definitely a cool experience for me because as an Air Force guy, I don't spend my time around ships. This was my first time to be on a port and download a ship. Thankfully there were a lot of qualified people who knew what they were doing, and kept the operation moving very smoothly. Here the BBC Houston is being pushed by the tugs so it can dock next to the pier.

Shortly after it was tied to the pier, we started offloading the cargo with the ships cranes. This is a picture of the deck where our cargo was stored for the ocean voyage that had to be offloaded.
The Stevedores in the yellow shirts and hard hats were responsible for hooking up the cargo to the crane and unhooking it once it was safely on the pier. Our crew seemed fairly professional and knew what they were doing. They were actually wearing hard hats and closed-toe shoes unlike another crew also on the pier who were wearing basketball jerseys and flip flops (a potential liability you really don't want to mess with).

Most of the cargo came off without difficulty, but the primary reason for the ship operation and the most challenging aspect of the ship's discharge were the two boats that had to be lifted out of the ship and placed on the dock. Each weighed more than 60 tons and was more than 85 feet long. It was a slow and very meticulous process. We started lifting the first boat when it was still light outside, but by the time it had appeared over the ship, it was dark.

The shot abovand below were actually taken with my camera phone. For whatever reason its flash was working better resulting in better pictures than the ones from the point and shoot camera I had been using all day. Below is another shot of the boat, this time being turned 90 degrees so it could fit between the ship's cranes and be placed on the pier.
All in all a fun and exciting first time experience. Again, thankfully there were enough experts there to make sure the operation happened smoothly, safely, and without serious incident. It made for a long day, but it was definitely worth while. The weather was perfect the entire day which made me thankful the ship didn't try to come in last week with the typhoon creating havoc on Luzon.