Ship Shape

If you've been reading this blog for a while you probably know I am mildly fascinated with the salvage operation regarding the wreck of the Costa Concordia, the cruise liner which ran aground last year on a small island off the coast of Italy when the Captain tried to get close enough to show the ship to his friends and didn't know there was a reef under the water. What has followed as a result has turned into the most massive salvage operations in the history of shipwrecks with crews working around the clock to get the ship off the rocks. But I'm not only interested in this story because of the scale, I'm also curious as to why it is happening in the first place. Reportedly the operation has already cost the company which owns the ship $500 million and costs are expected to go even higher than that. I understand they need to recoup as much money out of this as they can but I would think it would be easier to go in, strip anything that was of value out of the ship and then rent a few dozen heavy-duty tugboats to haul it further away from the island and sinking it to become a man-made reef (you know, to replace the one you ran into.) Instead they are spending all this money to re-float the ship, sail it a couple hundred miles and then take it apart. Seems like a waste of money if you ask me. If they are doing this in the name of PR I have some unfortunate news for them - they could spend as much money as they want - no one who was on the original cruise will ever go sailing with them again.

Anyway, yesterday was the most critical phase of the operation in which they would actually get the ship upright, off the rocks and onto these massive platforms which had been buried under the surface. This was the most critical stage of the whole thing because if the operation was going to fail everyone assumed this is where that would happen, as all the water inside the ship could cause it to be too heavy or weaken the structural integrity and the boat would break apart (rendering all that work and money a waste). The tipping of the ship started early in the morning and was supposed to take roughly 12 hours. However, the ship ended up being heavier than expected and while it remained in one piece the task of getting it onto a platform started slowly and thus took longer than expected (closer to 20 hours). When the ship was finally upright it was about 4 in the morning and I'm sure the quiet Italian village located nearby really appreciated all the foghorns which were set off in celebration (as if this operation hadn't messed with their lives enough). But while the most dangerous part is over there is still a long way to go before the operation is over. Crews need to structurally repair the side which has been underwater all this time, then attach a series of giant floats, raise the ship and pull it to dry dock, none of which is expected to take place until next spring or summer. After that comes the attempts to restore the reef to its pre-crash levels (which, let's be honest with each other, is never going to happen). The hardest step may be done but there are plenty of steps left to take.

But before we rush to worry about the next steps I want to go back and focus on the process of righting the ship. As I mentioned I have been interested in how this was going to work since seeing an extensive report on it during a recent "60 Minutes". So when I heard there was going to be a live feed where I could watch the operation taking place I was pretty excited to check in with it throughout the day. As it turns out, taking 20 hours to right a ship is just as boring as it sounds. Going in I understood it was not going to happen in a flash but I still expected it to at least be visible to the naked eye. Nope. If it weren't for the line of algae which had coated the half of the ship which was underwater I never would have been able to tell if any progress had been made between my visits. Before too long I forgot to even check back and see if the operation had been a success. Thankfully, Twitter came to the rescue because when I saw "Costa Concordia" was trending later that night I knew by the laws of the internet things had either gone really well or really badly. Not only did the subsequent Tweets provide good pictures of the now-righted ship it even had a time-lapse video of the operation. I got to watch the entire 20 hours in about 2 minutes. I have to say, it was a much more efficient way to watch the news.

Normally I am against things like episode recaps before the start of shows because I feel like they are the Cliff Notes versions of TV series and since TV doesn't require any effort the people who took the time to watch last week's episode deserve to have a leg up on the people who couldn't be bothered to set their DVR or watch the episode through the dozen on-Demand options available to people. It's all about rewarding people for their loyalty. That being said, I can really see the advantages to watching a long video in a short amount of time and only getting the highlights. I don't want my entertainment delivered to me in this fashion, but I could get used to my news being condensed down to the essential facts and nothing else. I'm always complaining the news is too bloated with stuff which isn't actually news, but I bet those stories would bother me a lot less if I could blast through them in seconds instead of minutes. I know this is the general idea of a DVR but that just has you totally skipping sections and it is not that I don't want to hear these stories, I just want the unimportant items to be two or three lines instead of 10 or 15. I actually think people would watch more news if they were given this option. I am also willing to bet the salvage crew on the Costa Concordia wouldn't mind a fast-forward button either because while the next time I check on the ship will be when it finally starts to head to a dry-dock, those guys are going to be there every day putting in a lot of effort. I guess if they need to skip the occasional episode of their favorite show to get the work done I can excuse it this one time.