Costa Concordia to be Salvaged today

[LaCroix]

Apart from the cost of rebuilding half of the hull, and completely refurnishing everything inside, it would be hard to sell tickets for a boat that already sunk once.

[Kitsune]

Apart from the cost of rebuilding half of the hull, and completely refurnishing everything inside, it would be hard to sell tickets for a boat that already sunk once.

She was only about six years old. . . .
If she had rebuilt here, I assumed she would get transferred to another line and renamed to break the connection

[Irbis]

Apart from the cost of rebuilding half of the hull, and completely refurnishing everything inside, it would be hard to sell tickets for a boat that already sunk once.

Would rebuilding half of the hull be more expensive than rebuilding whole hull?

How would people know this pretty, freshly painted ship is the same one that was on news years ago? It's not like it's the only ship with such shape.

People refloated ships before in the past, and somehow no one objected to repeated use then, I believe.

[TimothyC]

Would rebuilding half of the hull be more expensive than rebuilding whole hull?

Significant parts of both sides of the ship were damaged. I remind you the the boulder that was stuck in the port hull. Also, if you're rebuilding around the parts of the ship that were not damaged, that is going to take a lot more engineering work than just having a new ship built. There isn't some factory line someplace where they turn out cruise ships in classes of a dozen or more - most ships are in classes of 4-8 ships spread out over several lines owned by a single company with lots of little changes between them.

How would people know this pretty, freshly painted ship is the same one that was on news years ago? It's not like it's the only ship with such shape.

People who cruise on a regular basis have their own communities online and you bet it would be picked up enough in both the news media and social media to make it not profitable to run the ship anymore.

[Kitsune]

Would rebuilding half of the hull be more expensive than rebuilding whole hull?.

Quite often the answer is yes.

People who cruise on a regular basis have their own communities online and you bet it would be picked up enough in both the news media and social media to make it not profitable to run the ship anymore.

If it was a smaller vessel, I could see the hull used for something more "Down on their heels" as far as lines
Just as huge as it is, I think only the major lines could operate it.

[folti78]

Also why not just cut her up for salvage?

Cutting her up in place, half-submerged, risks spilling crap into the sea that will be very bad for the local sea life. They still have booms in place to guard against things like fuel and oil leaks, but remember how huge the ship is. Just the on-board content of, say, hydraulic fluid or, I don't know, window-washing cleaner, represents a LOT of a given chemical. If they can get her upright and tow her off to a breaking yard where they can dismantle the ship in a controlled manner there will, in the end, be less dead fish and less clean up to do. As it is, there's quite a bit of crap already lying on the sea floor. I believe there's a plan to retrieve things like luggage and try to get personal items back to the owners though, of course, some of those items are probably ruined by 20 months in salt water.

She will but cut up for salvage, just not in that location.

So far, the operation is going according to plan. They're raising the Costa Concordia very slowly and carefully monitoring what's going on, but the video images clearly show a change in where the waterline meets the ship.

Also she landed on an unstable mud bank with the ever present danger to slip off it and into the deeper water next to it (a week or so after the disaster she moved a few centimeters, forcing the authorities to halt all operations on it for some time). It was practically a now or never operation, as the salvage crew claimed, that she would have slipped off certainly in the coming winter storm season.

[Thanas]

A bit of an update - the pumping has been done and the ship will be towed to the breakers tomorrow.

Pictures

[Isolder74]

Also in the case of the Oklahoma because they had cut numerous holes in the hull trying to rescue trapped sailors from inside. That made refloating it much harder because of all of the holes and not to mention the torpedo damage. She was upside down too making things even harder. Some engineers think that if the rescue efforts had been ignored they might have been able to have done her salvaging faster. It does make you wonder why they didn't salvage the wreck of the Utah as well.

Being next to Ford's Island helped too. Here is an image of the salvage operation half complete.

Link

Would rebuilding half of the hull be more expensive than rebuilding whole hull?

Usually, because of the way ships are built now every section of a ship is built in modules that to repair the damage would require cutting out those sections(which isn't really practical), building a new module and adding it back on. You can't just remove rivets and replace hull sections like they did with riveted hulls in the past. Given the extent of the damage would require replacing most of the underwater hull.

Just patching the hull really isn't good enough as the patch would stress the section of the hull, and add drag, enough to crack or damage it further in future. It's a lot like when you patch a pair of pants. The patch can cause future damage to the areas around it.

[Sea Skimmer]

They did try to salvage the Utah, the effort failed. When the attempt was made to parbuckle the hull it didn't rotate, instead it just slid along the bottom of the harbor until it was closer to shore. This was done sufficently to clear the channel and the mooring berth she had been occupying. So with the need to use manpower and equipment for other priorities work was abandon on her at that point. Oklahoma was blocking two major berths in a crowded harbor and just had to be rid of no matter what it took. Arizona was also supposed to have been raised in pieces, but this effort was abandon when it became apparent it could not be completed before the war would be over.

In the case of Costa Concordia they had the hulk wedged up against huge rocks, and spent a colossal amount of money building structures underwater to pivot her against and then catch the right as it righted so it didn't tumble over into deepwater. Building that is why this took so long. As a ship the Concordia is completely wrecked, her hull has undergone serious hogging damage to the point that breakup remains possible during this sea voyage. Repair is impossible for this sort of damage. The giant smashed in parts on the side, that damage could be fixed in isolation. Doubtful that it would be economical to do so though when added to the destruction of half the interior and all but one of the engine rooms by flooding.

[Simon_Jester]

As a footnote to what Skimmer said, assuming I'm not wrong...

Basically if you seriously mess up a ship's "backbone" so that the keel is buckled upward, down, or to the side, that ship is pretty well toast. It doesn't matter what else you do, you can't fix that without literally taking the whole ship apart into its component pieces and replacing many of them... at which point it is definitely cheaper to start from scratch.

Ships are about as sensitive to the consequences of spinal injuries as humans are, so to speak.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah after a point the steel actually stretches thousands of places it shouldn't in the longitudinal framing, but it still being held together. Costa Concordia was on her side for nearly two years, with her ends unsupported, a manner of loading never intended for service. And the ends flop in the current and tide, constantly after having been heavily stressed by the initial capsizing.

Even replacing the whole keel might be functionally possible on a ship, at least if the rest of the ship were intact, but with longitudinal framing most of the strength of the ship is in thousands of stringers spread completely around the hull, and the various strength decks which are buried under all that massive superstructure. So if you cut off the hull sides, you'd still need to fix deck plating inside the hull decks, and if you cut off the top you'd still need to replace the hull stringers and plates.

Lesser versions of this damage can be repaired externally and internally by stiffing, in an extreme case Japan rebuilt a number of its heavy cruisers with the entire hulls simply double plated over before i serious damage had taken place. Well except for the one that just had the entire bow fall off in a storm (this also happened to American cruisers) but they just built a whole new bow.

Really old ships before we had steel or longitudinal framing construction were badly length limited by this overall problem of excessive motion in the hull structure, my favorite being various designs which used and for and aft running rope to constantly keep the hull in a mild sagging condition instead of badly hogging otherwise. Its sort of like pretensioned concrete in concept, but with a rope and stout men to wind it now and then.