Based on the photos, can they ever get this ship back upright? Maybe lots of tugboats? Its grounded on a sandbar and can’t sink.
What would be the procedure for recovering the ship? I’m assuming they won’t wait a 100 years for it to rust away.
Maybe that aircraft carrier in Kansas can tow it away.
The question isn’t whether they can do it – they can – but whether the cost of doing it is justified. Consider the battleships at Pearl Harbor. Every single one was damaged or sunk by bombs and torpedoes, and all but the Arizona were eventually afloat again.
The cargo ship MS Rocknes overturned completely, had a hole cut in the bottom and sank, and ended up being repaired and put back in to service.
From a machine translated page, it looks like it was towed upside-down to a dock, where it was righted.
I imagine the damage on a passenger ship is of a substantially different type, but I wouldn’t rule it out yet.
If you can find a drydock big enough and close enough. gross displacement 112000 tons per http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/shipdetails.aspx?mmsi=247158500. The hole is exposed, so it is conceivable to patch it enough to get it to the builders shipyard in Genoa. Have to schedule the space. Once the hull is watertight, buoyancy bags and pumps should float it.
That link says the ship was built in 2006. Not quite six years old. It should be worth fixing.
I wonder. It got that way by hitting a sand bar? Jeez, maybe its a total piece of shit. Maybe it went aground so hard they can’t pull it loose without chopping it up.
And then there’s the imponderables. Would people want to book cruises on a ship that already sank once? Be interesting if there’s any history on that.
Earlier today I asked a retired U. S. Navy Captain this question. His response was a follows:
“First step will be to patch the holes in the bottom then ballast/balance it so it can be towed to deep enough water to be slooooooooowly righted by a combo of removing high weight and ballasting. Or, the insurer may decide it’s not worth repairing so my salvage and scrap it!”
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It had a rock the size of a house wedged in the hole. Not a sand bar.
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They will change the name.
Even if scrap, they have to move it soon. Its too near a harbor entrance. Compare BBC News pix and Google Earth. It is clear that the ship did a 180 degree turn coming in, which explains the change from a port list to a starboard list.
Aside: I saw one of its sister ships in Croatia last September, the Costa Favolosa. It was freaking enormous.
Aside #2: Jesus H. Christ. Google translate turns “meters” into “feet”. My translation of the La Reppublica article says the hole is “70 feet” long. Who the hell thought that was a good idea?!
Pics of the Costa Favolosa:[ul][]Costa Favolosa at anchor[]Costa Favolosa with our hotel in the foreground[]Passengers being ferried to and from Dubrovnik[]Costa Favolosa heading out to sea[*]Bonus picture of Dubrovnik[/ul]
If I understood my old-salt WWII and life-long sailor grandfather correctly, sailors consider it to be very, very bad luck to re-christen a ship. The only acceptable circumstance is if it has been sunk and then raised and put back into service.
I do wonder what they will do with it, if it’s deemed repairable.
I must say, I don’t think the ship is particularly classy-looking. It looks like an apartment building with a bow stuck on it. Of course, that doesn’t justify crashing it into rocks. What’s the story on why exactly it crashed? Was the captain drunk? Was he incompetent? Or was it a sheer accident? Since the man was arrested for manslaughter, I’m assuming he has to be at least partially at fault.
From what I can glean from La Reppublica, it hit a shoal that the captain said wasn’t on any chart. This is being greeted with skepticism by other experts who say that the ship was “on autopilot” and also that it was human error: For the CEO of SNAV [a rival cruise firm], Commander Raphael Aniello, “Ships with volumes as large as ten buildings can not navigate to within three hundred metres of the coast. And it is unlikely that the shoal was not indicated in nautical maps - as argued by the commander of the Costa Concordia - the maps are very up to date.”
Wouldn’t speed be a factor for such a huge hole? The reports sounds like that rock opened the hull like a can opener.
It’s not that unusual for ships to run aground without this kind of damage.
I agree, all of these new mega cruise ships are the ugliest things ever to sail on the seas. It’s like taking a barge and putting a 1960s Holiday Inn on top and call it a ship.
Based on what I have read, this was pretty clearly human error.
The deployment of the lifeboats was disorganized with officers and crew giving conflicting orders to the passengers. Also, they did that ‘women and children first’ thing which tears up families.
The jury’s still out according to the Beeb. It was off course “by 3-4 nautical miles”, but the primary fault may still be mechanical, although the situation is unforgivable in terms of commanding the vessel.
There seem to be conflicting versions, although they generally seem to agree in that someone was not following standard protocols for such an event.
One thing’s for sure. No Celine Dion in the music library or playlists of the refurbushed vessel.