The jaw dropping effort to raise and right the sunken Costa Concordia is in full swing off the coast of Italy and we have live streaming video of the work below. This has nothing to do with race cars, header flames, pro touring, or off road trucks, but it does have everything to do with the amazing brilliance of human beings and our ability to engineer a solution (no matter how grand) to problems that seem impossible to solve. The work began yesterday and involves the use of many different pieces of equipment and theories on how this is all going to work. This is a salvage job, meaning that the “payoff” for the guys working to get this thing back to a floating position is the windfall they will receive selling the ship for scrap metal. Reportedly, the ship will take more than two YEARS to be cut up when it reaches its final destination….if it reaches its final destination.
The progress is slow and plodding, but as you’ll see, the ship is beginning to move in the correct direction. The “rust line” where the ship was below water is visible now as the plan seems to be working. There are massive sea cranes involved and hundreds of guys. Apparently the lead engineer was asked what the probability of the plan succeeding was and his response was 100%. We hope he is right but words like that have doomed more than a few smart guys throughout human history.
This is 100% BangShift approved bad assery on the grandest possible scale.
PRESS PLAY BELOW TO WATCH! SURE IT ISN’T THRILL A MINUTE STUFF, BUT WHEN YOU START TO GRASP THE SCOPE OF THIS JOB….WOW!
Here is another driver who wouldn’t lift.
I’d assumed they would have to remove it in chunks. Good luck to them.
From what I understand, they want the ship as whole as possible so it can be taken to a shipyard to be cut up and made into new Fiats.
Maybe all the Fiats that are made using that steel will have a curse on them. We might end up with 10,000 mini Christine’s running around the world.
Pre rusted metal
The thing is chock full of tons and tons of oil and rotting food — they want to make sure all that garbage doesn’t spill out so they’re trying to move it in one piece — in that shallow water in the Mediterranean it would be a large scale environmental disaster that would persist for years if it broke up.
In case the link not working; here’s an alternative:
http://nieuws.vtm.be/buitenland/60408-live-berging-costa-concordia
Reminds me of an article in Wired Magazine from last decade about the people who do that kind of work and when they went out into the Pacific off Alaska to salvage/right a car transporter ship full of Nissans coming from Japan.
Not easy work, they lost one guy just because he made a wrong step on the steeply angled deck and he fell/slid 60 feet into a steel bulkhead.
Can’t wait to see the time lapse on this one!
here you go:
http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/6345/Raising-the-Costa-Concordia.aspx
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale
a tale of a fateful trip,
that started from this tropic port,
aboard this massive ship.
The Captain was a cowardly man,
the Skipper brave and sure,
hundreds passengers set sail that day,
for a seven tour,
a seven hour tour!!!
Bahahaha!!!
imagine the amount of water inside the cylinders if the water got to that point
They probably stopped at 3 to have lunch then take a nap then wake up and its time for a coffee an some desert then maybbeee back to work,nah thats enough for today. Start again Thursday.
The local boat owners were taking tours around the ship for a fee last summer.
I think they’re trying to right it using cables and winches anchored to the shore, kind of how they righted the Oklahoma after Pearl Harbor. Got to be a hell of a pull though.
My guess is that they are pumping out each compartment one by one
By my count, there’s about $12Million worth of scrap metal, but they’ve already spent some $500Million on the salvage operation …
post it again when there tugging it off this takes to long.
I wonder how they’re going to get it somewhat floating again. Giant floats? just hoist it and drag it? lift it onto a barge?