Searchers say there are likely to be hundreds, if not thousands, of disease-ridden rats on board with no source of food except each other.
Based on signals from distress beacons thought to have been set off accidentally and an unconfirmed satellite image, it is believed the Soviet vessel could hit the West coast of Ireland, Scotland or the far southern tip of England.
Belgian-based searcher Pim de Rhoodes said: 'She is floating around there somewhere. There will be a lot of rats and they eat each other.'
See? We've got ObamaCare. Other people have diseased cannibal rats. The grass is always greener on the other side of the ghost ship.
The graphic at the link helps, but here's what apparently happened. The 4,250-ton Lyubov Orlova was at one time a Russian cruise ship that catered to elites who liked to take cruises to polar regions. When it was abandoned over a financial dispute, it was impounded in Newfoundland, and was supposed to be towed to the Dominican Republic to be sold for scrap. But it ended up sitting at the dock in Newfoundland for two years - thus attracting the massive rat infestation - and when the Canadians attempted to tow it to the Dominican Republic, the Lyubov Orlova broke free and was set adrift on the Atlantic Ocean.
That was in 2012. The ship was assumed lost at sea until March 2013 when a distress beacon was picked up from the mid-Atlantic. Obviously the rats didn't send a distress signal, but that sort of thing can be triggered by inadvertant events like a life raft falling off. Then, a few weeks later, a satellite spotted a blip off the coast of Scotland that was big enough to be a ship - but no ship was ever spotted.
The rats who would still be alive aboard the ship would have no source of food, except each other.
Yeah. I know.
So if the Lyubov Orlova crashes onto a beach somewhere, you have to assume the starving rats - desperate to get some food - would invade whatever piece of land they're on pretty quickly and start looking for anything they can find to eat. That, uh, doesn't sound like a pretty thing.
That begs the question: Is there any precedent for how one would handle a sudden, massive rodent invasion such as this? Assuming you knew the ship was coming and had time to get set up, what would you do? Set thousands of traps? Deploy an army of cats? Maybe they could try to blow up the ship while it's still far enough out to sea that the rats who survive the explosion would drown before they ever had a chance to swim to shore. Of course, then you'd have thousands of dead rats floating around for God knows how long.
Quite a problem, this one. I still think I'd trade ObamaCare for it.