ESA (the European one, not the Elbonian one) has some satellite data that validates sailors' reports of
ship-killing waves.

Mariners who survived similar encounters have had remarkable stories to tell. In February 1995 the cruiser liner Queen Elizabeth II met a 29-metre high rogue wave during a hurricane in the North Atlantic that Captain Ronald Warwick described as "a great wall of water… it looked as if we were going into the White Cliffs of Dover."

And within the week between February and March 2001 two hardened tourist cruisers – the Bremen and the Caledonian Star – had their bridge windows smashed by 30-metre rogue waves in the South Atlantic, the former ship left drifting without navigation or propulsion for a period of two hours...

..."The same phenomenon could have sunk many less lucky vessels: two large ships sink every week on average, but the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'..."

...The fact that rogue waves actually take place relatively frequently had major safety and economic implications, since current ships and offshore platforms are built to withstand maximum wave heights of only 15 metres.

(sigh) About every 6-9 months over the past decade someone comes up with 'new' proof that these waves exist.

You really have to wonder if it was simply the public affairs people believing their own hype or if the people associated with this project were stupid. Either way, the press release could use some severe rewriting to make it a little less sensationalistic and a lot more accurate.

First of all, who were all these "skeptical scientists" who thought that rogue waves only occurred once every 10,000 years? (Actually, what the story misses is that the computer models estimated that 100-foot plus waves were only supposed to happen only once every 10,000 years. But clearly those computer models were flawed.)

The story of the oiler USS Ramapo and its 112-foot tall wave (in 1933) is well known:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/watwav.html

The cruiser USS Pittsburgh lost a huge part of its bow in 1965 to a rogue wave. The article itself included two photos of huge waves, although not of the 100-foot tall variety. There was plenty of previous evidence that 70-foot rogue waves are not all that rare. And the fact that a US Navy vessel spotted one that was 112 feet strongly implies that the computer model predicting such waves only once in every 10K years was probably not working with good data. (How likely is it that the Ramapo spotted the only one in ten millennia?)

I also wonder about tying rogue waves to the large number of ships that are "lost" each year. The reality is that merchant shipping is an incredibly sleazy business and there is reason to believe that a lot of ships that are reported as "sunk" are in actuality either sold, stolen, scuttled or scrapped, usually in some underhanded manner. A lot of times a ship that is reported as "sunk" merely shows up in port with a new name painted on her stern. Lots of captains and crews get paid or forced to hand off their ships to pirates. So reliable statistics are probably not easy to come by.

There's also been quite a lot of fairly slipshod marine engineering in the last 30 years - even in military ships there's beenm some terrible cock ups in terms of hull stress calculations. The HMS Ocean is a good example of how things can go wrong. As, I suspect is the story of the SS Derbyshire - which sank with all hands in a storm in the Pacific, the evidence has always pointed to catstrophic hull failure with the ship going down in a few minutes.

The sailor's unions have been on about this for some time now.

This is one of the big issues for seasteading. I think any seastead absolutely has to be able to cope with 100 ft waves, which is going to end up being the primary design driver. It doesn't kill the concept, but it does constrain the designs enormously. Fortunately even fast waves can be detected considerably in advance, so the seastead may be able to use active measures to protect itself, such as rapid-deployment watertight shutters.