LONDON (Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2013), Oct 28, 2013 - The cruise ship Costa Concordia, carrying twice the passengers of the the Titanic, did not have to worry about icebergs as it plied the waters of the Mediterranean in early 2012. It was a large rock that gashed the hull. It managed to get close to shore before it listed to one side and sank. For a few months, it lay ignominiously on its side in the shallow waters off the coast of Giglio, an Italian island once known as a tourist destination. But now Giglio is famous worldwide for the biggest cruise ship wreck in history. With the captain having an illicit lover at the helm, then fleeing the scene, being rounded up to be charged for manslaughter (32 passengers perished), you couldn't get a juicier story. Also, a cruise ship capsized off shore is not good for tourist business. The whole thing was a national embarrassment. The ship had to go.
Image from Daily Mail, UK
Then conventional way to remove a ship is in parts. An army of workers swarm the ship, peeling off pieces like mad ants, hauling them off in a giant salvage operation. To do so would introduce all manner of pollutants into an area protected as a marine sanctuary. Why can't someone right the ship and sail it away?
It wasn't a new concept. Pulling a ship back upritght is known as parbuckling. But no one had had ever done this with a ship this size. This did not deter Tecon, an Italian firm specializing in offshore structures, who not only was able to pull the Concordia upright, but proceeded to tell us about the effort at the Bentley conference. Bentley's SAC software was used to analyze the structure and the forces.
Tecon welded a structure to the side of the ship and attached cables to it. Supporting the ship on a somewhat stable bed especially made for for this operation that served as a pivot point, the cables were pulled until the ship was in the proper orientation. It took over 24 hours.
video from Tecon site
As of the time of this writing, I'm not sure the gash has been repaired. The water still needs to be be pumped out to make it float again. The ship currently sits that way on a temporary platform. It will one day sail away as I presume it is now getting shipshape -- at least to the point at which it can limp to a suitable salvage site.