OT Sunken Ship Rescue - One of the most fascinating TV shows I've seen lately

I caught part of it. The X millions of tons of force to do things is hard to imagine.

I saw just a trifle on the news. Nova is a good program.

The Italians on that island may have hated the ship being there for 2 or

I saw it back in January and caught the last 30 minutes of it again last night. Yes, it was very interesting. I wish NOVA would do another show letting us see some of the salvaging they are doing in Genoa.

Lots of really interesting techniques going back to refloating of the USS Oklahoma after Pearl. It isn't easy righting a ship that's toppled over.

I had never seen them use another technique - filling huge bags that they pumped concrete into to support the superstructure. Also showed how another ship was cut into sections using an abrasive-coated rope saw between two crane platforms.

I didn't catch the cost of the Concordia operation, but my guess is that it was immense.

Especially since most of what they were doing hadn't been actually tried before in these circumstances. I saw one (might have been this one) and what struck me was how many times the people they interviewed said something along of the lines "Well, this SHOULD work." The divers were ones who had the brass balls. If something the engineers cooked up hadn't worked, basically the entire ship would have fallen on their heads.

If I remember correctly I *think* the cost was something like one and a half billion dollars.

Is that for steerage or Lido deck?

What are they doing in Genoa?

I was trying to read the newsgroup at the same time but this NOVA was so remarkably compelling I turned the PC off.

Another one I liked was the restoration of (I believe) the Acropolis where when taking apart the columns they found cedar centering blocks inside that had been hermetically sealed and still smelled pungently.

It will probably be on several more times this week. It's really worth a look to see what kind of rigging and work it took to right the ship. Lots of time-lapse video, too, showing how bloody long it took, too.

Oddly enough, I think it was a friend of the captain that wanted a better view of the coastline that caused him to go up on the rocks. What I didn't realize was how close the wreck WAS to the shore. I wouldn't have wanted to stare at that wreck for that long. I am sure they are glad it was taken away but I'll bet someone there missed not seeing it. This is Italy, after all, land of Gorgonzola cheese and something really icky called Casu Marzu.

It was towed to Genoa where they could dismantle the ship and sell the scrap metal and whatever else they could salvage.

Yes, my local PBS station is good about repeating their programs

You get dragged behind the ship in a dinghy for that rate. That's got to be a bill that makes you really flinch when you open up the day's mail. I suspect that a lot of captains have been given the very serious "once over" look since that incident because that's something you just don't want to have happen.

Something I read, but can't get my head around, is that a large ship (trawler-sized) sinks every four days somewhere in the world (lots of them in Greece, apparently for the insurance money).

The source was a newspaper article about lawlessness on the high seas. My wife and I joked about the fact that now even landlocked Bolivia is flagging ships. The country that flags a ship supposedly investigates crimes on the high seas.

(In the interest of accuracy I had to check and indeed, landlocked Bolivia DOES have a navy!)

no doubt that area now misses concordia.....

sure there view is better but seeing it may have attracted some visitors / tourists

and more importandly that 1.5billion or whatever the cost was was no doubt a boost to the local economy..

bet they are missing the bucks.

the divers probably ate out a lot, bought all sorts of stuff from local stores etc etc......

According to reports it was $1.5 billion to get righted and ready for removal to the scrapping yard. Don't know how much it took to get it there and torn apart.

I sit at the junction of three different PBS stations. It's six to eight times around here. You really have to work hard to miss something. (-:

I'm betting all that time soaking underwater reduced the overall salvage value a bit.

Holy cow! A reminder to keep your ships off the rocks. Or sink them deep in the ocean where no one cares. (-:

It's on Youtube, 24 hours every day.