So once they get this boat upright again, can it be restored to useable condition? Or has insurance already paid for it, and so made it nothing but scrap?

A figure of £500 000 000 was mentioned as the cost of salvage, so does that mean by the time a restoration took place it would no longer ever be profitable?

Cut to bits and made into tuna cans.

As in understand it (i.e. – I am regurgitating what a talking-head said on the TV this morning while I was watching half asleep) it’s been in the water too long to be re-commissioned. Basically it’s going for scrap/spares/recycling.

it’s been in the water too long to be re-commissioned.

Apparantly the hull has compressed about 3m due to lying on its side so no way back for it. I think the decision to scrap it was made quite early on.

In six months that ship will be turned into washing machines and downhill mountain bikes.

what your looking at there is the new batch of DN6 tubing for building inbreds :d

Apparantly the hull has compressed about 3m

have they considered a combination of hammers, zip ties, gaffer tape, ‘no more nails’ and spoons? Generally speaking everything in the world can be fixed using that.

what your looking at there is the new batch of DN6 tubing for building inbreds :d

Blimey. They must be confident of selling a few then.

Did you know that one of the few places in the world where you can get quality metals not contaminated by Chernobyl is the German battle cruisers lying on the bottom of Scapa Flow?

I think its absolutely crackers the cost. Surely lifting it up gives the exact same risk as leaving it as a diving wreck/tourism draw? Also will they find the two bodies?

The vessel is a “Constructive Total Loss”, the cost of the refloat and repairs are way in excess of the ships value. The hull insurers will have paid out for the cost of replacement.
Technically it is not a salvage operation but a wreck removal and the operation is paid for by the owners 3rd party liability insurance. Ships are no longer scrapped but are recycled. Whoever takes that part of the contract will try to maximise their return by selling any components of the vessel that can be reused. In case I would guess very little but stuff like the anchors and chains will still have value greater than their scrap worth.
However, it is very likely that Costa will set a contract with the scrappers, that forbids them from doing so and insist that everything is reduced to scrap metal anyway.

Did you know that one of the few places in the world where you can get quality metals not contaminated by Chernobyl is the German battle cruisers lying on the bottom of Scapa Flow?

..and Hiroshima and Nagasaki which is why almost all of them have already been salvaged – 52 successfully sunk, 7 left. The remaining 7 are not being salvaged and are, I believe, protected now as historical artefacts and contributors to Orkney’s tourist economy.

Sure I read somewhere that the vessel cost £370m to construct and the salvage cost TO DATE is £500m and rising 😯

However, it is very likely that Costa will set a contract with the scrappers, that forbids them from doing so and insist that everything is reduced to scrap metal anyway.

Surely they’ll sell it to the scrappers who’ll give them the most for it (or charge them the least for disposal), scrapping parts for the sake of it doesn’t make sense.

On the other hand finding buyers might be difficult, who’d want to insure a boat where the bulkhead doors were 2nd hand?

It’ll be towed to a scrap yard, possibly in Turkey and dismantled. There is a lot of scrap value in it. There must be tonnes of copper on it to start with. I watched the remains of the Ark Royal being towed out of Portsmouth a few months ago, the turkish scrapyard that took it paid £3 million for it.

It’s being dismantled just down the coast in Italy

As I understand it, it’ll be searched and cleared of all personal belongings left on board, and those items returned to their owners, if possible, then the boat’s going to be cut up.

It’s being salvaged to clear up the island where it was wrecked and remove a pollution source. As the numbers show, it’s not economic to repair. Even if it was, how many people would want to cruise on it? In motor vehicle terms, it’s a Cat A write off.

Dumb question- so all the steel in the world is contaminated so I imagine certain scientific calculating equipment etc wont work/give a reading correctly if it uses the steel from anywhere?

hora – Member
Dumb question- so all the steel in the world is contaminated so I imagine certain scientific calculating equipment etc wont work/give a reading correctly if it uses the steel from anywhere?

Hora – Those ships down in Scapa Flow, and a few others spots in the world, provide the steel for such things. Tiny amounts only though.

As for the CC, there’s plenty of salvable stuff there apart from just the bulk steel. Lots of the odds and ends that go into a ship – engines, pumps, valves, wiring, etc will be stripped out and may find their way to other homes (ships..).

I do wonder if the third party liability policy has an exclusion for gross negligence…..if it does, Carnival must be having some nervous moments watching the trial of the captain.

Surely they’ll sell it to the scrappers who’ll give them the most for it (or charge them the least for disposal), scrapping parts for the sake of it doesn’t make sense.

I agree it doesn’t make sense but there quite a few things that don’t on that project.
There are massive political issues surrounding this ship.
When she is refloated she will be scrapped in a suitable location in Italy. Also Costa and Carnival will not want people bringing up her name regarding components from her being used on other ships.

One of the problems is finding somewhere big enough to take her, she was pretty big ship when operation, there will be huge sponsons stuck on both sides, so it will be difficult to find a dry dock where it will fit.

Project website

Anyway fair play to Titan Salvage, both Smit and Mammoet, the big Dutch companies said it was going to fail but Titan have pulled off some pretty impressive engineering.

A friend is on the salvage team working as a diver. I think he’s had to go inside the thing 😯

With the ship being relatively new this must be quite a meaty contract for the dismantler; I’m sure all the equipment wil be resold and brokered around the world for refurbishing and repairing other ships. There are plenty of people who specialise in doing just this; you should see the amount of industrial equipment that gets collected in warehouses around Britain then resold and exported. I was recently involved in helping an export customer to buy some little-used standby gensets that came out of Vodafone masts all over the UK.

Here are a couple of pics I took back in 1984 at Gadani Beach in Pakistan where they break up ships by hand; it’s in Baluchistan, which is out of bounds to foreigners so part of the excitement of the visit was being arrested in the nicest, politest possible way, by a charming police officer who sat in the back of our car and happily unloaded our wallets before letting us go.

by a charming police officer who sat in the back of our car and happily unloaded our wallets before letting us go.

🙂

I can’t see any plant or machinery being onboard having anything but scrap value, by the time it is finally recovered it would of been underwater for 30 months+

Worth noting that only half the boat approx was underwater, all the systems stuff on the Port side will be fine! I think the first u/w survey told the salvours that it was a scrapper, as these dents aren’t going to T cut out:

Don’t know what a Chain of Coffee shops was doing sailing boats anyway..

IGMC.