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A chain cuts through a capsized cargo ship filled with cars
- BuildTheRobots 6y agoHope this interests someone else, the size of the engineering seems impressive. I've had to cut down the title slightly to make it fit the HN character limit; hopefully it's still readable.
- zilebune 6y agoThis is great, thanks for sharing. It makes me think that as engineers eager to fix problems or building stuff we sometimes go for the solution we are most used to from past experiences (eg. use a huge saw to cut through) instead of thinking of the simplest & most cost-effective (eg. use a chain instead).
- rement 6y agoSometimes brute force is good enough.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Dahoon 6y agoThank you. The quality on HN is falling fast. Quality content like this is awesome.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- WJW 6y agoI find it pretty fascinating that even though the scale is absolutely enormous, the whole thing can be described in only one or two sentences. "Build a very large crane on a barge, then slice the ship into pieces and transport each section somewhere else". Kinda like S3 is "a very large static file host", it is technically true but the scale involved makes everything a lot more involved.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoWhat astounds me is that the "cutting chain" appears to be just a normal chain, albeit a very large one. I would have thought they would have made something that cuts it more like a giant chainsaw.
- Sharlin 6y agoAt these scales, and being able to use the hull's weight against itself, that chain is plenty "sharp" just by itself, I guess (sharpness being the ability to concentrate force on a comparatively small surface area). Adding teeth to the chain would probably not be worth it and/or they would just dull or break soon anyway.
- zilebune 6y agoAlso using an alternative line an abrasive cable would not make sense either. If friction causes it to tear it would need complete replacing, which would be plenty $$$. Instead, with a chain they just replace a couple of broken links and back on track. Which is apparently what they've done: > Unfortunately, the chain actually broke during the cutting operation. “Approximately 25 hours into the cut, the cutting chain broke,” St. Simons Incident Response writes on its website. Luckily, there were no injuries and there was no damage to the equipment. The team simply fixed the chain’s broken link, inspected the other links for signs of fatigue, and continued on.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoI'm guessing that another advantage of chain instead of cable is what happens if it breaks. IIUC, it's much less dangerous to be around a breaking chain than a snapping cable.
- rags2riches 6y agoA chain is never harder to repair than its weakest link, I guess.
- sandworm101 6y ago>>> Adding teeth to the chain would probably not be worth it When the Kursk was raised they first cut it in half using an abrasive chain/cable. In that instance it was pressed down from above the structure. "A cutting chain made of abrasive covered bushes on a thick steel wire was pulled back and forth across the hull by the cylinders. Vertical forces were supplied by the controllable vertical position of the suction piles." https://www.maritimejournal.com/news101/tugs,-towing-and-salvage/commercial_development_for_kursk_cutting_system https://www.maritimejournal.com/news101/tugs,-towing-and-sal...
- rob74 6y agoReally fascinating! And I can only imagine the infernal noise this process produces, with a gigantic "chainsaw" and a whole ship as a resonance chamber...
- jandrese 6y agoRemember that the chain moves very slowly—-7 feet per minute.
- kortex 6y agoTalking "feeds and speeds", 7 feet per minute (1.4"/s) as a feed rate would obviously be crazy fast, so I presume this is the "speed", the linear reciprocating speed of the chain. It's less "cutting" and more "crunching" its way through. Sheer brute force plastic deformation.
- njarboe 6y agoWith diamonds embedded in the chain to prevent it from wearing out as fast.
- thatguy0900 6y agoI wonder how much money they expect to make doing this.
- briancp 6y agoI was in St. Simons a few months ago, and was able to see this ship first hand. It’s enormous, sitting on its side in what looks like just a few feet of water. It’s close to the shore, maybe a thousand or 1500 feet out. A temporary information placard had been put on the fishing pier explaining what it was. At the time it was all in one piece, but you could see them attaching the lifting equipment along the length, and it was clear it was going to be cut into pieces. It must take an enormous amount of work to build an internal framework that can support the cut section being lifted from the side. I’m not surprised it’s taking so long so salvage.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>It must take an enormous amount of work to build an internal framework that can support the cut section being lifted from the side. I’m not surprised it’s taking so long so salvage. Ships have to be able to withstand substantial side forces (in both tension and compression) as part of torsional loading in normal operation. There's no internal framework needed. Even if there was that would require a stupid amount of effort compared to just adding more lifting points. It's stupid easy to figure out lifting solution in this case because this is a new enough ship that CAD models exist. If the owner doesn't have the CAD files you pay whoever you need to to get them (you just need a low detail model of the hull and bulkheads, not the high detail models that include plumbing and whatnot, those would be needlessly expensive), then import the models and then run numbers until you get numbers you like (e.g. section sizes the crane guys won't complain about and a safety factor corporate won't complain about). Then you tell the intern to use the CAD models to whip up a set of matching plates for lifting. If they have extra time on their hands maybe they'll make some random feature dong-shaped. Then you forward that attachment to the sales guy at the steel supplier you usually use. All this stuff is routine business for the parties involved.
- mcguire 6y agoUntil the intern decides that running a nut up 30 feet of threaded rod is silly, uses two rods, and you have the Hyatt-Regency. :-)
- xmodem 6y agoShit like this makes me feel a lot less guilty about my own environmental impact of getting a new phone every 1-2 years and a new laptop every 3.
- bagacrap 6y agoif you buy cars manufactured overseas, then in a sense you contributed to this too
- yohannparis 6y agoThose were cars made in the USA (Georgia) and shipped to USA (Maryland). It's just a more economical way that by land.
- 0xffff2 6y agoWikipedia claims that they were on their way to the Middle East.
- falcolas 6y agoSure, somewhere around 1/1000000 of a contribution. One ship grounded out of how many successful trips? One car out of how many shipped per trip? Plus, the cost for cleanup for this kind of disaster is built into the price of each car/phone in the form of shipping costs, which include insurance costs. So while they contributed to the damage, they also contributed to the cleanup.
- xmodem 6y agoAs someone not able to see well enough to get a drivers license, I do not. But I take your point.
- tmhrtly 6y agoDoes anyone know who pays for this process? I would imagine the owner of the ship, but I imagine there's a non-zero likelihood that something like this could bankrupt them. In that case... is there mandatory insurance or similar?
- gnu8 6y agoThe insurers of the ship and/or cargo would be paying to salvage whatever value they can extract from the wreck, to reduce their losses. You’re right about the non-zero chance of insurmountable loss, which is why the owner of the ship and the owner of the cargo would both have a shitload of insurance. Read about Lloyd’s and the shipping insurance business. People have been doing this for hundreds of years.
- nradov 6y agoThis salvage operation is far more expensive than the scrap value of the ship and cargo.
- gnu8 6y agoDefinitely, but it’s the difference between losing $100 million or $99 million. They’ve already sustained the loss, the only thing to do now is try and offset it.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y agoBut less expensive than the fines they'd eventually accumulate leaving it there.
- bluGill 6y agoThere are also fines for polluting the water. It wouldn't surprise me if the harbor authority was also levying a daily fine for blocking access to the port.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
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- foobarian 6y agoI can't help but cringe at all the motor oil and other fluids leeching out of the ruined cars that were on board.
- dmd 6y agoThere were about 4000 cars on board. If each car has 10 quarts of oil, that's 10000 gallons or about 32 tonnes. Oil tanker spills are typically in the range of tens to hundreds of thousands of tonnes of oil. So, don't waste cycles worrying about it; it's a rounding error in the general scheme of things.
- patja 6y ago10 quarts? I don't think the v8 in my first car even took that much. Aren't most vehicles more like 5 or 6 quarts?
- dmd 6y agoI always overestimate in estimates like this so people don't quibble with them saying I'm underestimating.
- foobarian 6y agoI'm not going to lose sleep over it. It's just a trained response to how sensitive we are about it in the local area. Motor oil spills are a big deal because they are more than just a fraction of the crude oil - they contain various toxic additives including heavy metals and can affect the local watershed. I realize it's still likely a drop in the proverbial bucket. :(
- q-base 6y agoInteresting to see whether this will work for the "last" part. I can understand why it works while cutting off smaller parts of a longer ship, but at some point I would expect the ship not to be heavy enough. At that point I would expect it to be lifted and turned by the chain instead. But they probably already thought about that and I just missed it in my rapid skimming of the article.
- jandrese 6y agoThey are leaving the power plant for last (cutting nose to stern) so the remaining part will always be the heaviest.
- q-base 6y agoThanks!
- tsjq 6y agoYes. The article mentions sections 3 to 6 aren't strong enough, so a drydock will be used instead of the chainsaw cutting.
- q-base 6y agoThanks for the clarification.
- TheWoolRug 6y agoWould recommend the Smit Salvage YouTube channel for those interested in seeing more examples: https://www.youtube.com/c/SmitSalvageTowage https://www.youtube.com/c/SmitSalvageTowage
- londons_explore 6y agoWhy not just refloat the ship? Floats and weights in the right places, together with the tide going up and down ought to be able to turn it over. It wouldn't be too expensive either because all work could be done above the waterline at low tide. When it's the right way up, industrial diesel powered pumps could pump it out enough to float and reuse. Perhaps there were political reasons? (ie. if the ship is refloated, the original owner would own it, whereas if its scrapped the port authority can take the collected 'litter' as payment for the work)
- francis_t_catte 6y agoThe key to the salvage effort not involving refloating is probably related to the loose tangled masses of vehicles it's carrying; the ones that already caused the ship to fall over.
- WJW 6y agoI don't think the original owner would own it outright, at the very least there is the Law of Salvage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage) where the port authority (or whoever else refloated it) would be entitled to "a reward commensurate with the value of the property salved." Also, from the first image in the picture you can see that the cargo has shifted and is now all on the side of the ship . Modern cargo vessels don't have that much excess stability, so chances are that it would not stay upright even if it were completely pumped full of air.
- dd82 6y agohttps://www.rivieramm.com/news-content-hub/news-content-hub/capsized-car-carrier-golden-ray-to-be-dismantled-in-situ-56486 https://www.rivieramm.com/news-content-hub/news-content-hub/... Refloating was already tried a few times and failed >PCTC Golden Ray was partially capsized in St. Simons Sound, Georgia, when the pilot deliberately grounded the 20,000-dwt ship in response to a fire on board on 8 September. It was sailing out with 4,200 vehicles on board and was grounded on a soft seabed. >Attempts to refloat the vessel have so far failed and the US Unified Command handling the salvage has decided to disassemble the ship in situ. It believes attempting to right and refloat this ship would not be technically feasible.
- effingwewt 6y agoThis looked really cool, but I kept getting distracted by the sheer amount of blank ad spots (tysm UBO!), they were constant. Literally every picture in the 'article' was paired with an ad. How tf is anyone supposed to concentrate on what they are reading with constant interruptions? Even with the ads just being blank spots it drove me so nuts I added jalopnik.com to my blacklist.
- macintux 6y agoThe new owners of the media company have been...liberal with their sale of advertising space. Jalopnik has long been an interesting site, but the ownership is making it very difficult to continue as a reader.
- vmh1928 6y agoAll those cars are headed for Craigslist. "great condition, 2020 pickup, only 30 miles on the odo. salvage title."
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoSlight water damage.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- daniellarusso 6y agoOnly slight joke. I did see they are building a temporary recycling center for when they remove the vehicles. Those are all probably 2019 or 2020 models, so the salvaged parts could be worth some decent money.
- dredmorbius 6y agoDestruction as part of the salvage process to avoid just this situation has been done, though I'm not certain this is standard practice. Mazda in 2008: It all started about two years ago, when a ship carrying 4,703 shiny new Mazdas nearly sank in the Pacific.... The mishap created a dilemma: What to do with the cars? They had remained safely strapped down throughout the ordeal -- but no one knew for sure what damage, if any, might be caused by dangling cars at such a steep angle for so long.... The Japanese car maker, controlled by Ford Motor Corp. , easily could have found takers for the vehicles ... [but] Mazda turned everyone away. It worried about getting sued someday if, say, an air-bag failed to fire properly due to overexposure to salty sea air.... So it decided to destroy approximately $100 million worth of factory-new automobiles. https://archive.fo/5Peq8 https://archive.fo/5Peq8 (WSJ)
- tsjq 6y agoWow! How did that chain do the cutting without any sharp things?
- Pfhreak 6y agoSharp is relative. A weed eaters string isn't sharp, but it cuts through plants. A baseball bat would be sharp if used on a six foot stick of butter. The ridges and valleys on a chain effectively are the teeth of a saw.
- chairmanwow1 6y agoIs it possible to have Adblock on mobile? That site is literally unreadable do you the unbelievable amount of ads.
- jve 6y agoCan be enabled within Samsung Internet on Android
- FrankSansC 6y agoTry Blokada : https://blokada.org/ https://blokada.org/
- laurent92 6y agoHave you tried the Reader mode of your phone? Oftentimes it succeeds to display the text only. I now browse with Reader mode by default.
- _verandaguy 6y agoMobile Firefox supports uBlock origin and others.
- 93po 6y agoEven with adblock on my mobile I closed it before finishing because the big white space gaps were annoying as heck
- parliament32 6y agoOn Android, yes, Firefox lets you install extensions. On iPhone, no.
- tristanb 6y agoYou can absolutely install an adblocker on iOS. Safari supports plugins: https://adblockplus.org/blog/adblock-plus-for-ios-9-finally-here-and-pssst-it-s-free https://adblockplus.org/blog/adblock-plus-for-ios-9-finally-...
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- bobthedino 6y ago"My god, it's full of cars!"
- supernova87a 6y agoIf you ever thought tech people got paid obscene sums compared to the rest of society, just look into marine salvage, marine welding, etc. and the cost of those ships per day...
- tyingq 6y agoPresumably a lower margin activity though.
- shakezula 6y agoI would guess the opposite actually. There must be such a small number of companies that can handle these scales but a disproportionately large number of ships that we’ve produced of this size. I would bet there’s real good money to be made.
- tyingq 6y agoOnly the ones that get marooned have the really high costs.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoI consider underwater welders to be the real 10x engineers
- intrasight 6y agoGreat article and better distraction
- ashtonkem 6y agoThis related to, but not the same as, the mechanism by which modern torpedoes kill warships. Historically torpedoes used to hit the sides of ships, punching big holes. The response by ship builders was to build empty “torpedo bulges” on the sides of ships to trigger the torpedo early, preventing structural damage. Modern torpedoes instead detonate under the ship. The explosion creates a massive bubble (most explosives being nothing more than a solid that’s itching to turn into a hot cloud of nitrogen). This bubble ends up under the ship, resulting in a ship that’s supported at the ends and not the middle. It turns out modern ships aren’t strong enough to support their own weight in this way, and the ship breaks in two. Obviously this lacks the grinding mechanism described here, but the similarity is in the application of a huge amount of force in the middle of a ship to break it.
- sandworm101 6y ago>> huge amount of force in the middle of a ship to break it. But that isn't what they are doing. This isn't cracking the ship into halves. This is very slowly grinding a hole through the structure. Look to the edges of the cut line and you will see the failure mode of the metal is very different. No sharp/jagged fractures, more round peeling off of metal. It is the difference between using an axe and using a saw.
- ashtonkem 6y agoIt’s almost as if I put a disclaimer at the top of my post about how these two concepts were related, but not the same....
- gist 6y agoI found what you said interesting (my other comment) and noted if you had said 'this reminds me of' probably others would not have jumped on you for the phrasing. (I thought it was fine and I learned something I hadn't known or thought of.)
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoThis is a great example of a generalization gone well beyond the end of its usefulness. This has no relation to a torpedo at all except that the localized mechanical force exceeds what the material can handle. But that's how every, cutting bending shearing, swaging, grinding, etc, etc operation works.
- tadeegan 6y agoThis is straight up right out of that book “3 Body Problem”. https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/blxvy1/spoiler_question_about_a_certain_ship_in_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/blxvy1/sp...
- rkagerer 6y agoThe amount of ads on this website is insane.
- gpvos 6y agoDo they prevent the cars and other cargo from falling out when they move the sawed-off part of the ship away, and if so, how?
- dotancohen 6y agoDoes nobody else have a problem with these "lazy loading" webpages? Each image takes a few seconds to load, and if I scroll too far then the images no longer load. It seems that no image will load until the previous image has loaded, and only images currently at the scroll position will load, so I cannot just scroll to the bottom of the page and let it all load. This is on Firefox 83 / Ubuntu.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fudged71 6y agoI’ll be adding the Versabar 10000 to my Christmas wishlist
- gregoriol 6y agoHow do they put the chain under the ship for the cutting? The ship is on the ground, and the article doesn't provide any details on that part.
- dredmorbius 6y agoA salvage operation with some similarities was that of the MV Tricolor, a car carrier ship with a bumpy history sunk in December 2002 and salvaged 2003--2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Tricolor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Tricolor Video documentary: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0ENOJBLVgjw https://youtube.com/watch?v=0ENOJBLVgjw
- nojvek 6y agoThe amount of ads and crappy scroll jacking is very annoying. I read and quit halfway. Couldn’t tell what was ad and what was content.