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What To Do With a 1,000 Foot Wrecked Cruise Ship?
Hugh Pickens writes "What do you do with a 1,000-foot wreck that's full of fuel and half-submerged on a rocky ledge in the middle of an Italian marine sanctuary? Remove it. Very carefully. Stuck on a rocky shoal off the Tuscan island of Giglio, leaving the wreck where it is probably isn't an option but removing a massive ship that's run hard aground and incurred major damage to the hull involves logistical and environmental issues that are just as large. First there's the fuel. A half a million gallons of fuel could wreak havoc on the marine ecosystem — the ship is smack in the middle of the Pelagos Sanctuary for Mediterranean Marine Mammals. Engineers may need to go in from the side using a special drill to cut through the fuel tanks in a process called hot tapping. 'You fasten a flange with a valve on it, you drill through, access the tank, pull the drill back out, close the valve, and then attach a pumping apparatus to that,' says Tim Beaver, president of the American Salvage Association. 'It's a difficult task, but it's doable.' Then if it's determined that the Costa Concordia can be saved, engineers could try to refloat the ship and tug it back to dry dock for refurbishing. The job will likely require 'a combination of barges equipped with winches and cranes' to pull the cruise liner off its side then once the Concordia is off the rocks, 'they are going to have to fight to keep it afloat, just like you would a battle-damaged ship.' Another alternative is to cut the vessel into smaller, manageable parts using a giant cutting wire coated with a material as hard as diamonds called a cheese wire in a method was used to dismember the 55,000-ton Norwegian-flagged MV Tricolor. Regardless of how the Concordia is removed, it's going to be a difficult, expensive and drawn-out process. 'I don't see it taking much less than a year, and I think it could take longer,' says Bob Umbdenstock, director of planning at Resolve Marine Group."
.... it may not advance the salvage process any but hey it can't hurt. This guy was the anti-Sully by all accounts. I wouldn't abandon passengers in my automobile after an accident; this guy is responsible for thousands of souls and abandons them to save his own ass. Pathetic.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The problem with that is there are other toxic substances aboard a ship besides fuel. It took two years (never mind the time spent procuring approval from various interested agencies) to prepare the USS Oriskany as an artificial reef. It was done while she was in port, not lying on her side half submerged while subject to tidal and wave influences. A modern cruise ship probably has less toxic substances aboard than a warship built in the 1940s (the Essex class carriers used asbestos as fire insulation and PCBs in their electrical cabling) but she still isn't safe for disposal in a marine sanctuary.
The owners may well want to salvage her for a possible return to service too. Not sure if that's feasible with the damage she absorbed (any marine engineers who care to weigh in?) but the owners doubtless want to recover their $400 million investment.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Rather, it's up to the insurance company; just like an auto-wreck, they're the ones who determine its ability to be salvaged.
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2012/01/19/231831.htm
Apparently there's worry that it will end up costing over US$1bn before everything is said and done.
There are crewmembers quoted in the press as stating that if the evacuation had been ordered immediately, the survival rate would have been 100%.
The evac didn't even start until more than an hour after the collision. The bridge had been notified by the commander of the engine room that there was a 160 foot long hole in the side and that the ship could not be saved, but chose to tell passengers that it was an electrical problem and they should return to their cabins. Then the captain makes it worse by ordering a turn after taking on water, which then sloshes, tipping the boat and hindering lifeboat launch.
They pretty much did the exact opposite of everything they should have done.
Couldn't they just avoid it?:
http://www.amazon.com/Avoid-Huge-Ships-John-Trimmer/dp/0870334336/
I know this is not the place to ask... but lately (say the last month) I have been given moderator points 4 times, is this normal? I like rewarding people for their comments but seems strange to be given the points soo often.
This is used in the pipeline industry when you need to put a new port or hole on a pipeline but don't want to shut it down.
Here is a little video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJoImbxSMFE
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Clearly the people involved in the evacuation, even without the management of a ships captain, were very capable.
<sarcasm>Yes, this sounds like a completely capable crew.</sarcasm> Read: BBC News
Maybe it's worth money...
No sig today...
Not really. Ship is full of fuel being half-submerged is asking for an environmental disaster. You could potentially just avoid it if it were fully submerged (not at risk of being damaged by surface waves and weather). You'd still want to get fuel out even if it was fully submerged though.
I couldn't resist:
ping-pong ball diameter: 40mm (radius: 20mm or 0.02 metres) .0000335103216m^3
ping-pong ball volume: 4/3*pi*(0.02 metres)^3 =
Costa Concordia displacement: 51387 tonnes (various sources give different numbers, but it's on that order, and obviously this is its displacement in a normal situation, which this isn't)
One tonne of water is 1m^3 of volume (I love the metric system), thus the displacement is also about 51387m^3 (although if you want to get technical we're displacing seawater that has a different density from pure water, so the numbers would be a little different). That means you need about:
51387m^3/ .0000335103216m^3 = 1 533 467 825 ping pong balls
"Only" 1.5 billion ping pong balls, and that's floating the thing at its normal displacement. Anyone know how many ping pong balls are manufactured globally per year?
No, the captain turned to port and sloshed the water that the ship had already taken on. That's why it rolled to starboard. It had been listing to port prior to the turn.
Commonly used for pipeline repair, it can involve welding a pipe flange to a full, even pressurised line or container of flammable liquid or gas. The trick is not to blow through the wall. The product cools the container side of the weldment. A cutter head is attached then connected to your equipment of choice. Mechanical connection of hot tap flanges is also done.
http://gs-press.com.au/images/news_articles/cache/FurmaniteHotTapGraphic-0x600.jpg
http://www.professionalmariner.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=46E64A4C77774A5684F286CF18FCD2F8&nm=Archives&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=5762266029234C438FDE435B61BEFE08
It can even be done on BURNING railroad tank cars to offload product. WaPo link in this thread no workee but the others are good. Check the procedure in the .pdf
http://weldingweb.com/showthread.php?t=59857
Example equipment:
http://easy-tapper.com/
Flooding to "float" petroleum for recovery:
http://recyclingships.blogspot.com/2011/11/grounding-off-coast-of-tauranga-last_12.html
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
possibly bygone conception of the role of a captain of a vessel.
It's not a bygone conception; when you take charge of passengers (be you the pilot of an airline, the captain of a ship or the driver of an automobile) you are assuming responsibility for their lives. You don't abandon your post during a crisis until every last one of them is safe. I could not look at myself in the mirror if I left a passenger in my car to die and I'm not in responsible for four thousand souls.
Clearly the people involved in the evacuation, even without the management of a ships captain, were very capable.
Actually they weren't. The ship never sent an SOS -- the Italian Coast Guard only knew of the disaster because the ship was close enough to shore for passengers to use their cell phones. Read this op-ed; he summarizes it far more eloquently than I can.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The ship will roll wherever the water goes. It's called the free surface effect; if a ship has a hole on its port side but something is causing the entering water to slosh and collect on the starboard side, the ship will roll onto its starboard side because that's where all the weight is. (In fact I would guess it's more probable for a ship to roll onto the unholed side, just because while water can enter the holed side, it can also exit the holed side and not weigh that side down. The unholed side, though, prevents water that's sloshing over there from exiting, allowing a roll to that side to begin, which then acts as a positive feedback loop until the ship turns on its side).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
As with someone else making some comment about "90 meters deep after a storm," I don't think that's possible. I don't think you can sink this ship - it's already as sunk as it can get, at least in this spot. I get the distinct impression from the pictures that it's already sitting on the bottom, and the fact that the bottom is so shallow is part of the current problem. If the bottom had been deeper, say had the ship been taking another route, none of this would have happened.
To "finish sinking the ship" you first have to move it to deeper water, and if you can move it at all, you may as well move it to drydock. Then you can either repair or salvage. Either way, you've first got the fuel problem.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I did some rough calculations and it would take about 8 Billion Ping Pong Balls to fill it assuming there are no airtight compartments left. On Amazon you can get them for $11 per gross so that about $600 million in Ping Pong Balls.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It's not normal to award points to an AC. If you had posted while logged in, you could have gotten credit for being moderated down for off topic, thus losing some credit. Works for me. I don't like to judge people. Ridiculing them is much more fun and adds to the liveliness of the board.
A salvage expert (former CEO of the leading company in that field Smit Tak) says it can't be done in the following Dutch newspaper article (google translated):
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fm.trouw.nl%2Farticle%2F15%2F3126744%2FIn-stukken-zagen-dat-is-enige-optie.html&act=url
It's on an underwater mountainside hung up on a rock protrusion. The bow and stern are slumping, but the center is maintaining height. It's back is likely broken.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It actually isn't that easy to combust fuel. For example, pour a bunch of diesel into a tin pan and throw a match in, and... the match goes out. I would imagine doubly-so for bunker oil. And then there's the question of the fuel tanks having inadequate air supply.
Carnival's estimated financial impact factors in recovery and repairing of the ship rather than scrapping it, currently.
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
Nope. It went down because the co-pilot stalled it.
Yes, there was icing on the pitot tube, which caused the left and right airspeed indicators to disagree. The computers dropped out of normal law into alternate law.
The pilots activated anti-ice, which then cleared up the tubes, and the airspeed indicators all returned to normal. At that point, all indicators were correct.
Then the copilot freaked out and pulled back on the stick. Because the plane was in alternate law, it did not have stall prevention. The airspeed dropped to as low as 68 knots. The pilot, relief pilot, and co-pilot (who were all in the cockpit at the time) ignored all the stall warnings that the system was throwing out. They stalled a properly functioning aircraft into the ocean.