Perfect job: Costa Concordia is upright again
OK, engineers. Your job is to get a 290 metre-long, 114,500 ton cruise ship upright and removed from the island harbour where it rests. Find out how it was done, exactly according to plan, in text, photos, graphics and video.
OK, engineers. Your job is to get a 290 metre-long, 114,500 ton cruise ship upright and removed from the island harbour where it rests. Find out how it was done, exactly according to plan, in text, photos, graphics and video.
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(Left) The Costa Condoria lying at at 65-degree angle after the accident. Filippo Monteforte/AFP; The Concordia upright again after a 19-hour operation. Andreas Solaro, AFP
Costa Concordia is upright again
Engineers get perfect score
OK, engineers. Here's a problem for you. There has been a bad accident off of Giglio island in Italy in which a cruise ship carrying thousands of passengers hit an underwater rock, badly damaging it and killing 30 people. The ship managed to get to a nearby harbour, but it has turned onto its side at a 65 degree angle.
Your problem: Get the ship upright and remove it.
This photo give a good idea of just how big the ship is. AFP
Basic parbuckling. Graphic from http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/
Oh yes, the cruise ship is 290 metres long (the length of almost three football pitches) and weighs 114,500 tons.
This was the task given to a team of engineers from several countries. To minimise damage to the environment, the Italian government decided on a two-step operation: pulling the ship upright through a modern version of “parbuckling” (see graphic) and attaching huge (as high as 11-storey buildings) box-like structures called "sponsons" to its sides to allow the ship to be floated away.
Since the ship was resting on a slope, however, a very large artificial platform had to be built underwater to keep the ship from sliding to the bottom.
The operation to pull the ship upright began on Monday and took 19 hours to complete. Everything went according to plan. It was almost perfect engineering at work.
The wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship begins to emerge from the water. Vincenzo Pinto/AFP
A series of 11 towers with hydraulic mechanisms controlling 36 cables under the ship, and attached to its side, slowly rotated the vessel. Once it had risen by 24 degrees, gravity started to help since the sponsons on one side of the ship had been filled with water.
One side of the ship was badly damaged, delaying the installation of the box-like sponsons that will float it away. Vincenzo Pinto/AFP
Since the other side of the ship had been underwater for more than a year, however, it was badly damaged and it is not yet possible to attach the sponsons to float the ship away. That is likely to happen sometime next year.
Adapted from agency stories
19 hours compressed into 40 seconds in this timelapse video by AFP.
