The technique for raising the ship is interesting, the reason it needs raising was fascinating.
Update: Engineers working on the shipwreck have declared the vessel upright after a 19-hour operation, reports the Associated Press.
Parbuckling is one of those terms like top kill, containment vessel or China Syndrome that you don’t learn until an oil rig blows up or a nuclear reactor goes down or something else goes terribly wrong. In this case the terribly wrong thing was the grounding and capsizing of the Costa Concordia, the 114,000-ton, 1,000-ft. long (304 m) cruise ship that foundered off the coast of Giglio, Italy in January 2012. Of the 4,200 passengers on board, 32 died; the bodies of two of them have never been recovered and are presumed to be on-board still.
Since the day of the accident, the ship has been laying sickly on its side, freakishly huge and half-submerged in the waters off Giglio, awaiting the day it could at last be raised and…
View original post 614 more words
