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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's the only way to be sure.
.... 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.
And you can go on the ride where you pretend to be the captain who was thrown from the ship which lands in the water unharmed.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
"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?" I do like these hypothetical questions, but we never get to see if they actually work in real life, so I've stop thinking about them.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Then set it up as an artificial reef, and have businesses set up to get divers to it. Not sure the decontamination would pay off in the near term, but it'd be an interesting option.
Turn it into a water-cooled data center.
Plan A:
1) Pump all the fuel out of it.
2) If there is a hole in the down side of the hull patch it from the inside.
3) Patch any holes on the top side of the hull.
4) Get as many pumps as possible pulling water out of the thing. while you gradually inflate large air bags under it.
5) Ship pops back up, tug it anywhere you want.
Plan B:
Hundreds of millions of ping pong balls.
Right the ship, drain the fuel and leave it there. You only have to stop it from sinking, you don't need to make it seaworthy. There you have it, a top-notch hotel in a prime location with every facility you could possibly need.
Just try not to think of the people that died there. People die in hotels all the time, right?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Despite the actions of the captain the odds of surviving this incident were about 99.2%
If he had gone down with the ship I have to wonder if it could possibly get any better than a 99% survival rate.
Clearly the people involved in the evacuation, even without the management of a ships captain, were very capable.
While responsibility for the ship and the passengers remains on his shoulders of the captain I wonder if the idea of the captain going down with the ship has become a bit antiquated.
Considering the dramatic success of the apparently well trained and well drilled crew in getting the staggering majority of people off of the boat safely it seems to me that a captain urging them on is, at least in this case, a frivolity and a hearken back to a possibly bygone conception of the role of a captain of a vessel.
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.
Maybe it's worth money...
No sig today...
Debunker (pump out) the fuel from cruise ship to bunker barges. From there they can either:
1. Cut the vessel into easier to handle parts and load the still quite large size parts onto a vessel designed for carrying other vessels like the ones from Dockwise. The parts will then go to a scrap yard.
2. Attempt to float the vessel using buoyancy bags to where if could be either loaded on the Dockwise ship or onto a portable dry dock where it can be disassembled.
Seriously a year to remove the vessel? Accidents like these aren't a rare occurrence, there is a whole cottage industry that handle these situations.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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?
You're talking about repairing a massive gash underwater. Difficult. Once that's done, you have to float her off the rocks. Dangerous, and liable to more damage. Finally, you have to sort the list, which is not as easy as trimming the ballast tanks.
[FUCK BETA]
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."
(to the tune of "Drunken Sailor")
What do we do with a washed-up cruise ship, (x3)
Early in the morning?
Suck out the fuel 'til she rolls right over, (x3)
Early in the morning.
Lock up the captain with Big Bubba (x3)
Early in the morning.
Steal all the swag and give to the poor (x3)
Early in the morning.
(There's a few verses, make up some more of your own - it's a folk song after all.)
I am officially gone from
WHAT winter? It's in the Med.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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
you're forgetting that there's only so close that you can pack spheres together. so you would only need about 3/4 the number (pi/18^.5 * 1.5*10^9) - 1.1*10^9 balls, and you'd be left with 1/4 the water still in the ship
No matter what's planned the end result is a tiny boost to Italy's GDP - and they need it.
Is this the broken cruise ship fallacy?
sigs are hazardous to your health
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
I found some interesting pictures of the MV Tricolor. I tried to find a video of the cutting process in action but failed. Does anyone know how this "cheese wire" actually works?
This.
Everything has some kind of value - just a matter of how much it costs to pluck out of the ocean.
As I understand it, marine salvage companies are paid based on a percentage of earnings of the sale of what they recover.
Here we have a problem, a foundered ship. If the owner declares bankruptcy and walks away then who is responsible for clearing this wreck? Corporations create new corporations to do their business operations. The child corporations constantly send profits up to the parents, while carefully retaining all liabilities. They maintain just enough assets to keep the credit lines open. The moment something goes wrong, the child corporation sends any remaining assets back to the parent. It does not declare bankruptcy promptly. It waits for the claw back period to elapse, and allow enough time for the parent corporations to shuffle money further afar so that it can't be clawed back from the parent corp or even the grandparent corp either.
Such business practices are actually the most logical and rational thing to do in a free market. They will argue if they do not do that, their competitor would do it and undercut them. It is a tangible ship wrecked off a beautiful island this time. But in countless instances it is pollution created by mining or industrial chemicals are as stranded as this wreck. But somehow the public falls for extreme arguments like, "Eliminate EPA".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I know, I know, at first blush, it sounds insane - Nuclear Reactors in a *passenger* vessel? Wouldn't that be a worse environmental disaster in a shipwreck?
But, there's a guy named Rod Adams who started a company (which he had to shutdown a few years ago because of lack of investor confidence) who proposed using small, nitrogen cooled pebble bed reactors in cargo and cruise ships.
Pebble Beds actually have several advantages over anything else I've ever heard of for maritime propulsion:
* They are melt-down proof. They simply can't melt down.
* They are very, very unlikely to set on fire (they are made from a special grade of graphite which needs to reach insanely high temperatures to set on fire - temperatures which the pebbles physically *cannot achieve* from fission.
*The fuel "pebbles" have further containment - the fuel itself is contained in many small 'particles' embedded within the graphite sphere, where the uranium fuel itself is encased in fireproof silicon carbide, inside the graphite.
Worst case scenario: The ship loses some or all pebbles in the water. Water is a great radiation shield - a few meters of water will stop all radiation. So, in essences, you have some fairly hot (temperature-wise) "pool balls" on the seabed, heating up some of the nearby water a few degrees. The actual radioactive material is so contained it will not leak out into the surrounding water.
Much, *much* better than the petroleum fuels currently used in cargo and cruise ships. Plus, the ship would only need to be refueled once every few years, and the fuel would be a lot cheaper than the many millions of tons of petroleum fuel these ships currently consume over time.
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.
the heat of the fire will warp and break any watertight joints and bulkheads, and the thing will sink while burning, still full of fuel. that has happened to hundreds of steel ships.
German sailors drink beer, French sailors drink wine, British sailors drink rum, but Italian sailors should stick to port.
You could always just pump it out and leave it there like they did with the MS World Discoverer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Discoverer
Air France Flight 447 is believed to have gone down due to icing on the pitot tubes. Auto-pilot would not have helped when the computer was getting the same faulty airspeed readings as the human pilots. Computer geeks have a term for this: Garbage in, garbage out.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Nope. Won't work. Ever heard of the fire triangle? You can't just throw a match at some cold diesel fuel, and expect it to burn. Especially when it's in an enclosed space. If you got lucky enough to actually get a blaze, the smoke will smother the fire in short order. You need fuel, oxygen, and an ignition source. The fuel you have, the oxygen you don't have, and the ignition source is going to be tough, because oil isn't really very flammable.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Can't they just burn it?
The following come to mind:
Plus it's sitting in the middle of a Marine Sanctuary.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
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!
Quite correct. Bunker C (type 6 fuel oil) is a thick black sludge similar in consistency to molasses and must be preheated above 200 degrees F before it becomes combustible.
If you're going to have to pull it out and preheat it prior to burning, may as well load it on another ship and do something useful with it.
What do you do with a sunken cruise ship?
What do you do with a sunken cruise ship?
Earlye in the morning!
Waaaay haaay and up she rises
Waaaay haaay and up she rises
Waaaay haaay and up she rises
Earlye in the morning!
Everybody knows cruise ships lose half their value when you drive them off the lot.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
Note to everyone, still probably not a good idea to try this-- the diesel in the pan may not be flammable, but any vapors that it gives off would be.
Internet discussions are all fun and games until someone burns their eyebrows off.