saving commercial ships from running aground or flipping over…. these guys are crazy!
You have to read this Wired magazine article about a special group of guys who are called upon as a last resort when a ship is about to sink, keeping a good portion of the cargo for saving it. On one hand, it’s millions of dollars that we’re talking about, on the other it’s one of the most dangerous careers, with people dying often.
“Salvage work has long been viewed as a form of legal piracy. The insurers of a disabled ship with valuable cargo will offer from 10 to 70 percent of the value of the ship and its cargo to anyone who can save it.”
The biggest competitors are Dutch firms who used heavy equipment, while Titan Salvage believes that ships could be saved by human ingenuity, not horse power.
“In 1992, a freighter sank alongside a dock in Dunkirk, France. Again, the Dutch called for cranes, but Titan won the contract by proposing a novel approach: It hired a naval architect to create a computer model of the ship. The model indicated that the vessel would float again if water was pumped out of the holds in a specific sequence. Titan put the plan into action using a few crates of relatively inexpensive pumps; the ship bobbed to the surface as if by magic. Since then, a naval architect capable of rapidly building digital 3-D ship models has been a key member of the Titan team.”
but, there’s so much to this article, one of epic size so give yourself a bit of time to read it… the story is feature film worthy..