I have been excited about learning to dive, especially when I saw that the USS Spiegel Grove, LSD-32 was going to be sunk off Key Largo as a snorkle-able artificial reef! Wow! A ship I had been on, that I could DIVE on! It was scheduled to be slowly sunk with explosives today, but something went wrong.
Now it is upside down, keel high, and sticking up out of the water. Florida has had more than it’s share of national ridicule, but when will this insanity stop?
Hey, at least your road crews didn’t sink a bridge! Talk about embarassing the region. I can’t find a web link, but in 1990, crews left hatches open on the concrete pontoons supporting part of the Interstate 90 floating bridge across Lake Washington. The pontoons were already being used to store runoff from the construction project, so they had a lot of water in them and some of the pumps were disabled. Then a storm started and filled them the rest of the way.
So Seattleites can feel your pain, Bill.
On the bright side, you now know folks OVERQUALIFIED for Governor, Sec. of State, Election Commission.
Which part do you figure they couldn’t measure:
water depth?
height of ship?
Hey Kids! “Dive” a wreck WITHOUT getting wet! FL leads the way!
Florida diving- heard it’s generally pretty good for diving within the US. The reefs offer beauty and the caves a challenge. As an anecdote, my father got certified in Florida. During his stay, someone died diving a local cave. This was what ended up inspiring him to open his own diver training facility in here in Texas (the “Blue Lagoon”). Good luck with your diving exploits.
And, to stay on topic- I find the unsinking rather comical.
Actually, I have an answer for you:
This is risky as hell. Should the water shift in one direction too fast, it can easily cause the ship to roll uncontrollably. This behavior has in fact sunk an number of ferries when progressive flooding has placed large quantities of water on their cargo decks, and in exactly the same manner: An unxepected roll, followed by capsize as the load of water slams into the side of the vessel, forcing it the rest of the way over.
Damn. Hit ‘submit’ vice ‘preview’.
Technically, what happens is that as the water shifts, it moves the center of gravity off from above the center of bouyancy. Should the center of gravity move far enough, the two competing forces, Bouyancy in one direction and gravity in the other, act to rotate the ship around the common center of the two forces, causing the ship to roll uncontrollably. If there are no open hatches, and the superstructure has sufficient volume, the ship just falls over and lies on it’s side. If, as was probably the case this time, there are open hatches, you get progressive flooding and the roll accellerates until the ship rolls all the way over or sinks.
In a dry state, this is very hard to do. In a heavily flooded ship, this can happen quite easily.
happyheathen, if you go to the story, there is a picture where you will see that it is not sitting level on the bottom. There is still air in the hull, so one end of the keel is sticking up. Had it gone down properly, it would be fully underwater.
This sounds like something Carl Hiassen would write about. 
Yup, this is called the the Free Water Effect, and it is sometimes better to have a completely flooded hold than a halfway flooded one, but MY GAWD, that is BASIC seamanship stuff! You THINK someone woulda thought of that!
And Daoloth, Central Florida is pocked with freshwater caves through the limestone which holds the dirt and tourists up. I am NOT talking about that kind of cave diving, only open water stuff.
There is an Urban Legend in Saskatoon about the architects/engineers responsible for the new University Library building (built in the 70’s, I think) - the top floor sits empty, because they forgot to factor in the weight of THE BOOKS into the structure. Oops.
It’s a very popular one. I’ve heard it about a bunch of schools. http://www.snopes2.com/college/halls/sinking.htm
I heard a sound byte about this boat being the biggest, but I haven’t seen this development on TV yet… I wonder if they got video?
All that preparation to be sunk by removing all the bad stuff and now it’s sitting on the bottom with new dangerous stuff like welders tanks. I wonder if the explosives were onboard yet?
Well, there you go. I suspected as much. (Suppose I could have looked it up myself :D)
Hey Bill, if you ever decide to go bungee jumping, don’t let these guys measure the cord, OK?
[sub]picturing a 150 foot bungee drop with 165 feet of cord… [/sub]
Once again, the problem is not that the water wasn’t deep enough for the ship, it’s that the ship is not fully on the bottom. There is still air in the hull, so one end is sticking up out of the water. Look at the picture. Had it gone down properly, it would be completely underwater, but the water isn’t deep enough for it to stand on end. It’s a lot longer than it is tall.
Not that I’m objecting to cracking jokes about the screwup, but at least get it right.