Costa Concordia Salvage Operation

[Craizie]

You could never get me on one of those things, being that I have slight germaphobia and an irrational fear of the ocean.

[Mike]

Its 2013. Please explain to me why I would want to board an overcrowded boat with small rooms and overpriced drinks to go float around in the ocean with 3000 other people who are crammed into the same small sardine can with me when I can do so many other things with the same amount of money and wont have to drown, get some strange illness from being crammed into the thing, and can see three or four times the number of places in the same amount of time?

Nope. Pass. Cruise ships are nothing but floating sewer containers chock full of petri dish filth.

You could never get me on one of those things, being that I have slight germaphobia and an irrational fear of the ocean.

All of the above.

[whitetrash]

Its 2013. Please explain to me why I would want to board an overcrowded boat with small rooms and overpriced drinks to go float around in the ocean with 3000 other people who are crammed into the same small sardine can with me when I can do so many other things with the same amount of money and wont have to drown, get some strange illness from being crammed into the thing, and can see three or four times the number of places in the same amount of time?

Eh when I went on one last year it wasn't that bad. Yeah the pool areas were packed but that was really it. The casino may have been, I only went in to watch the draft since that was the only bar showing it. That bar got packed for the draft. Other than that I didn't think it felt crowded anymore than a average resort.

[eastsidetorino]

That thing is going to make a bunch of razor blades

[Big A]

Having done a cruise to Cancun, Cozumel, and Belize, as well as staying at an all-inclusive on the same coastal area, I'd prefer the resort dollar for dollar. The only cruise would entertain doing now would be the one up to Alaska.

[46Tbird]

I love relaxing on a beach and watching all the fools jump off a cruise ship in a panic, trying to find "something fun to do, and quick!"

Sorry, but Wal-Marts of the Sea just aren't for me.

[tribaltalon]

You could never get me on one of those things, being that I have slight germaphobia and an irrational fear of the ocean.

LOL good thing you dont work offshore on an oil rig. My wife wants to take a cruise someday but I dont see the appeal since I spend more then half of my year on rigs

[01yz2nv]

I've done several, if its anywhere tropical I would rather go all inclusive. Only cruises that interest me now are the not so typical ones like Alaska, Hawaii, or New England/Canada.

[Strychnine]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=crippled-costa-concordia-upright

Crippled Costa Concordia Ship is Upright--Now What?

The salvage master rushed the final procedure to beat rough seas, but months of work remain before the wreck can be refloated and towed away

By Barbie Latza Nadeau



GIGLIO, Italy—The 114,000-tonne Costa Concordia cruise liner, which had been lying on its side off the coast of Giglio since January 2012, has been uprighted in an unprecedented salvage maneuver that engineers hope they will never have to repeat. Rotating the 290-meter-long ship up to vertical, performed by salvage firm JVC Titan-Micoperi, took 19 hours—almost twice as long at the experts who designed the plan predicted. The ship had to be painstakingly raised 65 degrees to reach center, and it took eight hours to complete the first 10 degrees, nudging the ship off the rocks on which it was impaled. As seen on time-lapse video, the second half of the “parbuckling” operation took far less time than the first half.

After the successful operation, Titan director Capt. Richard Habib told Scientific American that parbuckling was the last choice for a salvage this size. When asked if he thought the operation would set the standard in maritime operation—just moments after the giant vessel successfully came to rest on its platform bed—Habib said, “I hope not. It’s much easier to blow them up.”

No doubt, Habib meant that the risk of failure is far too high to make parbuckling a standard in salvage. According to Nick Sloane, the salvage master for the project, the many engineers had planned for every possible worst-case scenario—from the ship breaking apart under its own weight to the platforms built on the seafloor to hold it crushing or slipping away. But there was one situation for which no plan could be made: the weather. Sloane said weather “is what I was most worried about.”

In fact, the evening before the parbuckling, a torrential rainstorm with high winds caused rough seas, which delayed the positioning of the control tower, setting back the start time of the operation on Monday morning by three hours. And because strong seas were forecast for the day after the operation was to be finished, Sloane said they rushed the final pulling maneuvers to make the ship upright, working through the dark Monday night. It was better to risk going too fast than be caught in a storm when the ship was balancing at a precarious angle. “Keeping the ship in such a vulnerable position for so long was worrying,” he said after the parbuckling was complete. “We knew the weather was changing, so we had to make it work before sunrise.”

The seas on Tuesday were extremely rough, causing some concern that toxic substances inside the ship could be knocked out into the water and carried quickly in the wind. Constant tests of both the water and air quality proved that no contamination from the vessel, which holds an estimated 20,000 tons of filthy water laced with cleaning chemicals, paint thinners and rotting food, had escaped.

Now that the Concordia is upright, the next phase of the operation can begin. In the coming weeks engineers will make a detailed scan of the badly damaged side of the ship that had been caught on the rocks. The sponsons, or flotation boxes, that will eventually be attached to the so-called broken side of the ship will have to be fairly flexible and move with the sea, Sloane said, in stark contrast to the boxes on the undamaged side, which are rigid and fixed. Each one will be tailor-made to fit one part of the undulating broken side, shipped to the site and fitted, which will not be complete until next spring. Only then can the engineers refloat the ship, which is now sunken in 30 meters of water. The giant vessel will rise up 22 meters from its current position, in a procedure that should be at least as spectacular as the parbuckling was. Securing the ship’s underbelly will then take three more weeks, meaning it will finally be towed away sometime next summer.

[ELVIS]

im watching something about this on discovery now. i feel so dumb, i didnt realize this was the same ship with the drunk captain or whatever. they been working on this thing for like 2 years???

god bless.

[BradM]

So they're going to let it rot for another year before moving it?

[ceyko]

LOL good thing you dont work offshore on an oil rig. My wife wants to take a cruise someday but I dont see the appeal since I spend more then half of my year on rigs

I think that's like when I was in the Army doing field time... folks were saying how fun it is to camp. I thought they were retarded and never considered it.

Got out of the Army, went camping and it was awesome.

Rig vs Cruise totally different too.

[Frank]

KERA's Nova had a special on it comparing it to the Titanic in a lot of similarities of the events. They showed footage of a huge ribbon, and I mean ribbon, of crinkled steel swiped off the side of the hull by the rocks. Looked like the side of an old Spam can.