Super salvage operations to rival Concordia

[third eye]

LONG before the Costa Concordia capsized in Italy, salvagers fished out ships from the depths of the ocean with bold and innovative feats of engineering. Here are some of the most improbable salvage operations in maritime history:

SCAPA FLOW

At the end of World War I, Germany scuttled its High Seas Fleet to prevent it from falling into British hands. Stunned British sailors watched dozens of German warships sink at the Royal Navy's Scapa Flow base in Orkney, where they had been interned.

More than 30 ships were raised in the 1920s and '30s, including the 30,000-ton battle-cruiser Hindenburg. Cox refloated many ships by patching them up to make them air-tight and then pumping air into the wrecks so that they would surface.


PEARL HARBOR

Eighteen US warships were sunk or severely damaged in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Many of these were repaired after a massive salvage operation.

The capsized Oklahoma was righted and refloated with the same method used in Italy for the Costa Concordia. The Arizona and the Utah still rest where they sank and serve as memorials for the crew members entombed in their wreckage.

 

[third eye]

GEORGE M. HUMPHREY

Salvage expert John Roen pulled off a remarkable feat in 1944 when he raised the steel ore carrier George M. Humphrey, the largest boat to sink in the Great Lakes. Not only did he salvage and repair the ship - he recovered and sold 11,000 tons of ore it was carrying when it collided with another ship and sank to a depth of 23 meters in the Straits of Makinac.

THE VASA

The top-heavy crown jewel of the Swedish navy sank on its maiden voyage in 1628. More than three centuries later, the hull was raised from a depth of 32 meters in the Stockholm harbor, nearly intact.

Using steel cables drawn through tunnels in the seafloor, the wreck was pulled to the surface in a series of delicate lifts over two years. The Vasa is now housed in a museum in Stockholm where some 1 million visitors a year admire its intricate wooden sculptures.

 

[third eye]

K-129

In 1974, the CIA recovered parts of a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine in a clandestine salvage operation that it refused to confirm for more than 30 years.

K-129 was carrying three ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads when it sank in 1968, 2510 kilometers northwest of Hawaii with all hands lost. The CIA readied a salvage ship and winching system to lift the submarine from a staggering depth of 5 kilometers.

The mission was disguised as a deep-sea mining expedition.

KURSK

On August 12, 2000, the Russian submarine Kursk was rocked by explosions and sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea, killing all118 seamen aboard.

In an unprecedented effort that cost the Russian government about $65 million, salvagers lifted the 9,000-ton wreck to a transportation platform. It was then shipped to a dry dock in the Russian Arctic port of Murmansk.

 

[third eye]

Maybe someday we could raise the Sindurakshak as well.

 

[third eye]

More Details..

The Vasa

On her maiden voyage into the Stockholm archipelago on August 10, 1628, the Swedish warship Vasa was broadsided by a sudden gust of wind while still in sight of the shore. Despite the misgivings of the ship's designer, she had been built with an extra deck, added late in the constuction process at the order of King Gustavus Adolphus. The additional mass made her top-heavy, and especially susceptible to rolling. Off-balance and unable to resist the gust, she heeled to port, seawater flowing into the open cannon ports in her side. Within minutes, the magnificent warship was sitting under 30 meters of water, a victim of royal hubris. About 50 of her 150 crewmembers died in the disaster. Attempts to raise the vessel soon after the wreck succeeded only in righting her on the bottom and allowing the recovery of many of her cannons.

The remains of the Vasa are brought to the surface of Stockholm Harbor in 1961.

Incredibly, the location of the ship was forgotten until 1956, when a search by amateur archaeologist Anders Franzen ended in the retrieval of a core sample of black oak from her hull. The brackish water, lack of oxygen, and scarcity of wood-eating shipworms in the Baltic Sea had left the Vasa remarkably well preserved. She was in such good shape, in fact, that a committee formed by the Swedish Navy and the private company Neptunbolaget decided to raise her in one piece.

Divers dug six tunnels in the mud beneath the Vasa and threaded cables under her, a laborious and dangerous task that took almost a year. With the cables attached to pontoons, the vessel was lifted gradually from the bottom, beginning a nine-month trip to the surface. To help stabilize the hull, some 5000 oak pegs were driven where the iron nails had long since corroded away. Although the hull was not watertight, underwater pumps removed water faster than it was coming in, and the ship's natural buoyancy took over for the cable lifting system. After being on the bottom of the harbor for 333 years, in 1961 the upper decks met fresh air, and the Vasa floated once again.

Raising the Vasa was only half the battle, however, the years underwater had left the ship in a chemically fragile state, subject to rapid decomposition in the open air. In addition, the water-impregnated timbers were in danger of shrinking to one-fourth of their volume as they dried out.

Image of the Vasa

Efforts to preserve the Vasa continue in her new home, the Vasa museum.

Archeologists immediately began working to preserve the ship. Polyethylene glycol (PEG), a compound which had been used to preserve smaller Viking ships, was to displace the water in the oak timbers of the Vasa. No object of such great size had ever been stabilized in this way, however, and special methods had to be developed to apply the PEG. Between 1962 and 1965, the ship was sprayed down manually once a day with the preservative, a process that took 25 man-hours to complete each time. Eventually, an automated system was developed to take over this task.

Humidity and temperature are carefully maintained around the vessel at her current home in the Vasa Museum to prevent shrinking and swelling of the centuries-old timber. Condensation must be guarded against, as moisture on the surface of the wood could leach out the PEG preservative, and lighting is kept low to halt photo-degradation. Despite these precautions, the Vasa faces a new threat in the form of sulfuric acid, created when sulfur trapped in the ship's timbers during her many years on the ocean bottom combines with oxygen in the air. The acid attacks and breaks down wood, and chemists at Stockholm University are currently working on a solution to this serious problem. Constant vigilance will be required to preserve the Vasa for future generations.

 

[T-123456]

Italians arent very good at this,the dutch would have welded all the holes,pumped all the water out and voila the ship would have risen to the surface without the risk of an overturn.
It would have been cost effective and faster.

 

[T-123456]

oops,double post.

 

[third eye]

More Details of K 129.. Parts of this are scary !

The Glomar Explorer

In 1968, a flurry of coded communications alerted the U.S. Navy to the loss of a Soviet Golf-class submarine, an older diesel vessel that had sunk in 17,000 feet of water about 750 miles northwest of Hawaii. U.S. Intelligence reports soon revealed that an explosion had occurred, probably while the sub was at the surface, but that it was mostly intact - and that it still carried nuclear missiles on board. A few years later the wealthy eccentric Howard Hughes constructed the Glomar Explorer, an enormous barge built for the ostensible purpose of mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor. Although manganese nodules are real, the mining venture was actually an elaborate hoax.

The Glomar Explorer
The Glomar Explorer, built to retrieve a Soviet Golf-class submarine that was lost in 1968.

In reality, the Glomar Explorer was built as part of an audacious CIA effort to retrieve the Golf. Codenamed "Project Jennifer," the plan was to use a giant claw dangling on the end of a three-mile-long tether to grasp the submarine and raise it into a "moon pool" - a large area open to the sea - built inside the Glomar Explorer. The submarine would then be searched for Soviet codebooks, communications gear, and nuclear warheads.

The retrieval, begun in 1974, did not go smoothly. Trouble began when the claw (nicknamed "Clementine" by the crew) had been lowered almost within reach of the wreck of the Golf. While tantalizingly close to the submarine, the operators lost control, and the claw collided violently with the seabed. Inspection by remote camera showed no visible damage to the claw assembly, however, so the engineers decided to continue with the operation. The claw was lowered the final few feet, and found purchase around the hull of the wreck. The slow, methodical process of bringing the Golf to the surface began, and the success of the salvage effort was apparently in sight, despite the earlier mistake.

Hours later, when the submarine was about two miles below the surface, disaster struck. The impact of Clementine with the ocean bottom had seriously weakened the claw assembly. Three of the five tines that carried the load in the claw suddenly broke off, leaving most of the 5000-ton Golf unsupported. Unable to take the strain, the submarine tore apart under its own weight, most of it plunging back into the depths - but not before spilling a missile from an open missile bay.

Tense moments passed onboard the Glomar Explorer, as the crew steeled themselves for the nuclear explosion that many expected when the lost warhead smashed into the ocean floor. The explosion never came. Only a small part of the forward section of the submarine that remained in the grasp of the claw could be brought to the surface. This section contained little of interest to the CIA, but found among the wreckage were the remains of six Soviet sailors. They were given a solemn burial at sea by the crew of the Glomar Explorer, the ceremony performed in Russian.