NOVA: "Sunken Ship Rescue" (Windfall Films, National Geographic, BBC, PBS, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, August 30) KPBS re-ran a NOVA program from 2015 called “Sunken Ship Rescue.” The sunken ship they were rescuing was an Italian cruise liner called the Costa Concordia, which ran aground off Giglio Island on the west coast of Italy on January 13, 2012 – just three months shy of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. The similarities are eerie, even though the Costa Concordia ran aground on a reef instead of being sunk by an iceberg; the Costa Concordia’s captain, Francesco Schettino, ran her too close to the shore and the ship struck the side of a reef and partially sank. The show mentioned that he was arrested for manslaughter in connection with the deaths of 32 people in the wreck – which, given that the ship had a capacity of 3,200, was actually a pretty good survival rate (though 32 deaths – 33 if you count the diver who died in the closing stages of the salvage operation – were still 33 too many). In fact he was actually convicted and served prison time. The rescue project was a joint effort by U.S., British and Italian operations, and the reason the various authorities were willing to spend $1.2 billion to raise the ship and move it to safer waters for scrapping – over twice the $500 million its owners, Carnival Cruise Lines, had spent to build it – was the Costa Concordia happened to sink in the middle of an environmentally sensitive area. If the ship had fallen off the section of underwater reef on which it precariously balanced itself after it partially sank, 2,038 tons of diesel fuel as well as other highly toxic chemicals (including the ones various items, including automobiles, the ship was carrying contained) would have been released into a delicate ocean ecosystem that includes, among other things, species of coral and underwater plants that exist nowhere else in the world.

The show, released in 2015 – just three years after the accident – detailed the long, expensive and elaborate process of moving the wreck off the reef and making sure it didn’t break apart in the process of being re-righted and refloated. A previous shipwreck in France had been salvaged by using giant welding torches to cut the wreck into nine segments, each of which could then be relatively easily salvaged and moved onto cargo vessels, but because of the extreme environmental sensitivity of the area that approach was right out for the Costa Concordia. Instead they had to figure out ways to keep the vessel intact as they refloated her after first getting her right-side up in the water – the ship had sunk at about a 45° angle and it needed first to be put upright. Among the techniques used were laying down huge balloons which were filled with cement to create a sturdy underwater platform for the ship to rest on, and creating so-called “blister tanks” to support the bow (front) of the ship so it didn’t break off and sink further into the water during the righting and raising processes. They also needed to build giant steel tanks called “sponsons” and weld them to the sides of the ship; the sponsons were filled with water and then the water was pumped out and replaced with air, so the ship could once again float and be towed to a salvage yard outside Genoa for actual dismantling and recycling. The sponsons were each the size of an 11-story building but had to be welded to the hull with such precision as to be no more than two inches apart. The technique for actually raising the Costa Concordia was called “parhauling” and had been developed by the U.S. Navy. After the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the port had been littered with sunken battleships and other large vessels, including the U.S.S. Oklahoma and Utah. To clear them out of the way so the Navy could still use the port, Navy divers threaded huge steel cables under the ships and used on-shore motors to pull the cables and right the ships. The Oklahoma was raised intact but the Utah wasn’t; it broke apart during parhauling and bits of it are still in the harbor to this day.

“Sunken Ship Rescue” was above all a tale of engineering heroes and how they managed to solve problem after problem and get the job done in an unheroic, matter-of-fact manner, though I suspect the people involved – including the story’s two biggest heroes, Nicholas Sloane (salvage master with his own company, who won the German Sea Prize in 2015 for his work on the Costa Concordia) and Rich Habib (former managing director of Titan Salvage) – had no idea when they undertook the job in the first place that it would take over 2 ½ years. (An added end title revealed that Habib died in 2016.) Among the grimly amusing scenes in the film was one in which a diver working underwater on the wreck had to isolate inside an air-pressure chamber for hours after his shift, which could only be 40 minutes long so he didn’t get “the bends” (a potentially deadly disease caused by the formation of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream after exposure to the intense water pressures of deep-sea diving). The actual raising of the Costa Concordia is a moment of deep suspense as the crew applies 5,000 tons of pressure on the various cables – and the ship doesn’t move. Though the engines they were using to power the lifting cables could produce up to 13,000 tons, they didn’t want to go that high because that would have increased the risk of breaking up the ship. Eventually they applied 6,900 tons and the ship finally righted itself – though they had to continue the operation at night because once they started it, they couldn’t stop without risking losing control and having the ship descend to a lower level of the sea, causing exactly the environmental catastrophe they were spending all that time and money to prevent. This show ends with the towing process (done by a small fleet of tugboats) just getting under way, though once they got it to the Genoa shipyard that, like all the previous stages in the process, took longer than anticipated. The last of the sponsons were removed in August 2016 and the final dismantling of the Costa Concordia wasn’t complete until July 2017. If nothing else, the Costa Concordia disaster is a fascinating example of the law of entropy in action: it’s a warning that creating something, whether a ship or a salvage operation, takes immense amounts of energy and time, whereas destroying it happens relatively quickly.