le bateau ivre, port of call: Mogadishu
I wrote about this piece about brewing beer in southern Sudan, and incidentally creating a power station and a water works and a tiny industrial working class.
Well, SAB-Miller did a scenario-planning exercise about this sort of thing and came up with some truly odd answers. In the worst-case scenario:
a market with limited access to water and high energy costs, where people would migrate from areas of water shortage or turbulent weather
their proposed solution involved installing a brewery aboard a ship, so it could sail to wherever the thirsty masses had pitched up. Interestingly, as the story was released through the Grauniad’s “Guardian Professional” advertorial division, this is also something SABMiller management was willing to pay good money to tell us about. Time was when big business wanted to keep its apocalyptic fantasies secret.
(Tagged “uncategorized”, but should probably be under “uncategorizable”.)
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World of Harrowell
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Alternate Seat of TYR 
November 16, 2010 at 12:19 pm
It’s a great image. I imagine them turning up at disaster sites not more than 24-48 hours after, and anchoring offshore alongside the LHDs.
November 16, 2010 at 12:20 pm
allow SABMiller to move with water sources, with people, with crops, or even away from severe weather, natural disasters or political instability
China Air Transport did this with their entire ground operation – all the maintenance, etc was built into an old LST, which was sailed from place to place as more and more of the country fell to the Communists. It ended up in HK.