

Costa Concordia: Stricken ship set upright in Italy - k33l0r
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24121480

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cypherpunks01
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...](http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_seacowboys?currentPage=all)

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david_shaw
_> 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/](http://epicmagazine.com/2013/08/deep-sea-cowboys/)

Highly recommended.

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

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camus
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 ?

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chiph
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez)

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kbenson
Okay, I'm curious, why is rotting food is toxic?

Edit: Okay, so it's a _cruise_ ship, and I can see that amount of rotting (or
otherwise) food possibly causing problems on a reef. I was thinking it was the
cargo ship that capsized that was referenced in the wired article linked in
another comment, which I had read about before. Still interested in specifics
of what rotting food may do to an environment if anyone knows though.

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pavel_lishin
I figured it would just bring a whole lot of crabs, lobsters, and fishy
bottom-feeders who would make short work of it, get fat, and breed a little
more than usual.

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chiph
Aside from possible toxicity to the animals (like how onions are toxic to
cats), I think the enormous quantity is a big problem. The crabs, etc. just
couldn't eat enough of it, fast enough, to prevent the sea becoming nasty.

I suspect also that the rotting food would consume oxygen in the area, and
that would kill some sea life.

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themckman
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](http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50137223n)

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

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jgross206
why "captain" in quotes?

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

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adambard
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=...](https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=costa+concordia&data=!1m4!1m3!1d4103!2d10.919649!3d42.3634487!2m1!1e3!4m11!1m10!4m8!1m3!1d26081603!2d-95.677068!3d37.0625!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!17b1&fid=7)

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viggity
why the hell would they do this at night?

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

