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| Costa Concordia By Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images |
Marine salvage law is complex, and perhaps a reader would like to comment. I decided, instead, to look at some previous salvage efforts. I found a great article in Wired Magazine in 2008 called "High tech cowboys of the deep seas: the race to save The Couger Ace."
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| The Cougar Ace Photo by U.S. Coast Guard |
Something went wrong during the procedure and the starboard ballast tanks failed to refill properly. The ship rolled, and just at the wrong time, a large swell hit and exaggerated the roll. The salvage operation was run by Titan Salvage, led by Rich Habib. The crew of such an operation has a wide range of skills--deep-sea diving, computer modeling, underwater welding, engine repair. A key person on this team is the naval architect capable of building digital 3-D ship models to plan and execute salvage procedures, an approach quite different from the Dutch pumping approaches.
Meanwhile, The Cougar Ace was drifting toward rocks on the shores of the Aleutian Islands and was taking on water. The danger was losing the ship, the cars, and 176,000 gallons of fuel in an area of rich wildlife and fishing grounds. The insurers felt that the ship was lost, but then executed a "Lloyd's Open Form agreement" with Titan: if they don't save the ship, they don't get paid. If they save the ship, the compensation is based on the value of the ship and cargo, and is a fortune.
The naval architect, Marty Johnson, took a fall and died during the salvage. The crew eventually built a digital model of the ship and developed a plan for shifting water between ballast tanks. You have to read the full (and long) report to get a feel for the difficulties of the operation. Bottom line is that although they righted the ship and saved all the cars, they had sat at a 60-degree angle for two weeks and Mazda couldn't be sure that there wouldn't be problems. Would the air bags function properly after such an event? Will the engines live out their warranty? After a year, 4,703 Mazdas were loaded one-by-one onto a converyor belt that removed them from the ship and dropped them into a "Texas Shredder," a 50' tall machine that smashed each car to small chunks.
4 comments:
The author is is in error as to how the vehicles on the Cougar Ace were handled once the ship was docked in Portland. The ship not only had Mazda's but also Iveco trucks. Each of the vehicles was towed off the ship. Mazda brought several engineers from Japan and every car was inspected. The discharge and inspection toook several months. When Mazda decided to scrap the vehicles they took incredibly extensive steps to insure that not one part from any car would ever be reused. The cars were unceremoniously picked with a front end loader equipped with a grapple and dumped into a trailer. They were then taken to a location where the removal of liquids and tires was monitored. From there they were taken to the grinder.
Cool! Thanks for the correction! SWK
I was involved in raising a sunken dredge in the Portland Harbor and the divers inflated lawn garbage bags and placed them into the voids of the vessel until the bouyancy returned enough to allow pumping of the water from the vessel and salvage could be perfomed. The same logic could be utilized in this situation and if hoses were placed at the low parts of the vessel, as the bags displaced the water, the water could be pumped in a manner to right the vessel. Of course, patching the torn hull would be done as well. This is an oportune case in as much as the hole in the hull is above water!
Dan Wear
washougal, Was
It is the modern day story of the titanic. I cant even imagine what was going on the occupants of the ships thoughts and fears.
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