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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
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.
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...
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
A captain should not go down with his ship, but he and three other high ranking officers were in one of the first lifeboats that abandonned ship. Even if you cannot stay on the ship, because there is simply too dangerous or ineffective to stay, you still need to be in the vincinity, to coordinate the resque operation, together with the Coast Guard. The captain should know his ship and he should be able to give instructions to the coast guard and his crew to help the resque operation. This guy even ordered a meal at one of the restaurants on the ship after he drove his ship against the wall. Afterwards, he lied to the Coast Guard twice, they ordered him back to the ship, he told him he would do so, but instead ordered a taxi...
From what I've read, the videos that were published and the comments of many survivors, the crew was all but well organized. Maybe, because they also lacked some clear orders. They only started evacuating hours after the initial accident, probably even without a real evacuation order. They even didn't send any kind of emergency signal to the coast guard. The coast guard apparantly got informed by a scared passenger, not by the captain.
In fact, if the captain and the higher ranking officials would have called all passengers and crew on board to the higher decks and start evacuating the vessel within an hour or so after the innitial accident, nobody would have died and probably noone would even have been seriously injured.
The relatively high survival rate here is primarily due to the fact that the accident occured close to shore and the up-to-date emergency equipment on-board, combined by a few that actually took their responsibility. Because of the size of the ship and the dramatic looks of the wreck and the renewed interrest due to the 100th anniversary, it is often compared with the HMS Titanic. I guess if the same officers that commandeered this vessel would've commandeered the Titanic, nobody would have survived. Also, I guess that, if this same captain would have an iceberg collision at high sea, the death toll would be in the hundreds or more...
Back to the main topic. Like most people around here, I'm not a salvaging expert, but I guess that dissecting such a large vessel in it's current unstable position, will be extremely costly and very dangerous. Also, by cutting into it, you will probably expose more of its innards to the fragile ecosystem around it. The large damaged part in the bow seems to be exposed. So I guess, after you pumped out the fuel and god rid of all the loose stuff that's easily accessible, you could just temporarily seal it, either by welding something over it or by injecting some kind of foam into it and then refloat the wreck and tow it back to a shipyard.
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?
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.
German sailors drink beer, French sailors drink wine, British sailors drink rum, but Italian sailors should stick to port.
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!
This guy even ordered a meal at one of the restaurants on the ship after he drove his ship against the wall.
The cooks got suspicious when he ordered it to-go.
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.
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.
Everybody knows cruise ships lose half their value when you drive them off the lot.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.