Costa Concordia: Stricken ship set upright in Italy

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24121480

by k33l0r • 13 years ago

78 34 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

This is a great engineering hack especially the part about building a platform underwater for the ship to roll over and set upon. Impressive!

camus• 13 years ago

True, a sad story , but i'm impress that they have been able to do that. But the salvage is expected to cost more than a billion , and italian taxpayers will have to pick up the tab... the question is , was it worth ? what about just tearing down the ship and dispose of it ?

themckman2• 13 years ago

what about just tearing down the ship and dispose of it ?

That's exactly what they're planning to do once they clean it up enough to be towed away. They seem very worried about the surrounding ecosystem which is, my guess anyway, why they're not just doing it where it lies.

brohee• 13 years ago

The insurers are said to be picking up the tab, and the ship will be scrapped, but it had to be moved in a proper place first.

smoyer2• 13 years ago

The reports I've seen say that Costa (and Carnival) are paying the bills but their insurance company will be reimbursing them for much of the cost.

chiph2• 13 years ago

It contains a lot of toxic stuff -- left over fuel, oil, and especially rotting food. It's also sitting on top of an environmentally sensitive area. So cutting it up in place is not a good option.

In a way, this ship is Italy's Exxon Valdez¹. Irresponsible ship's captain crashes into a reef...

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez

dagw• 13 years ago

Italian taxpayers will have to pick up the tab

The stories I've seen claim that that salvage operation is covered by insurance, so Lloyds (and whoever Lloyds is re-insured with) is picking up the tab.

IlPeach2• 13 years ago

I heard Italians would have preferred the Concordia to be converted in a restaurant with Schettino as a waiter.

themckman2• 13 years ago

60 Minutes did a piece on the salvage effort a while ago. You can find the video here: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50137223n

cypherpunks01• 13 years ago

One of my favorite Wired articles ever was back in '08, "High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas"[1] which is about the Titan Salvage crew saving a massive sinking cargo vessel off the coast of Alaska. Titan Salvage is one of the lead teams on the Costa salvage operation today. It's a really thrilling read, with some great insight into the technical aspects of ship salvage.

[1] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_s...

cdjk• 13 years ago

I was thinking about that article too - I've read it a couple times, and it's always interesting.

Reading about things like this makes me question whether I should call myself a software engineer or programmer - somehow what I do doesn't seem in the same category of things these people do.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

There is a lot to be said for really big engineering projects :-). I found the cassions idea to be particulary cool although welding on a bunch of cassions on the damaged side seems like it will be quite challenging. Now that the "hard" part is done though, the rest should be pretty boring from an external perspective.

david_shaw• 13 years ago

One of my favorite Wired articles ever was back in '08, "High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas"[1]

I actually came to post about this, and was pleased to see your comment in the top spot. The writers of this article (and many other great reads) have since started their own magazine--called Epic Magazine--and feature this story as one of their primary attractors. Perhaps more relevant to the Hacker News crowd, they use a really neat display format for their amazing (but true) stories: http://epicmagazine.com/2013/08/deep-sea-cowboys/

Highly recommended.

krisoft• 13 years ago

I so love that article! On multiple occasions I have played with the thought of turning Titan Salvage into a physics based simulation game. Haven't got the right vibe yet tough.

smoyer2• 13 years ago

I read it too ... and that article also points out how dangerous it can be (one of the Titan workers died when he slipped on the wildly tilted deck).

Matti• 13 years ago

20 min interview with the "captain", recorded a month ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bodv2P19Vc

jgross206• 13 years ago

why "captain" in quotes?

scott_karana• 13 years ago

Because of his dubious actions in contrary to his rank, I imagine? :)

viggity• 13 years ago

why the hell would they do this at night?

IlPeach2• 13 years ago

I think it just took long enough and once started they couldn't just pause it overnight.

adambard• 13 years ago

For anyone that hasn't seen it, the Google Maps view of the situation is quite impressive: https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=costa+concordia&data=...

Costa Concordia: Stricken ship set upright in Italy

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