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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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.