By the end he knew that he did not want to become one of the officers he saw around him—unhealthy men who rarely had time to go ashore, and lived a lonely, peripatetic existence. On an August day in —winter in the Southern Hemisphere, when the weather is worst—Sloane was in Safmarine's Cape Town office waiting to fly home on leave when word came of trouble about 25 miles offshore. There had been an explosion and fire aboard the Castillo de Bellver, a Spanish supertanker that had been rounding the Cape, bound for Europe carrying , tons of Arabian oil.
The chief engineer and two others had been killed, and the surviving crew members had abandoned ship. Scuttlebutt had it that the explosion occurred after crew members entered the tanker's pump room—a dangerous space because of volatile vapors—and attempted to tap illicitly into the crude-oil cargo and feed it to the main engine in order to save on fuel.
So great was the quantity of crude on tankers the size of the Castillo that it was possible at the time to sail an entire voyage from the Persian Gulf to Europe on stolen oil without the loss being noticed. Whatever the truth in this case, a spark had ignited vapors in the pump room, and the resulting conflagration spread to the cargo tanks. Now a thick column of smoke was drifting inland and raining oil particles onto pristine sheep country.
At sea, the Castillo had broken in two, and a major spill was under way. Safmarine had a salvage division that called for volunteers. Sloane joined on as a deckhand and set off on a tug toward the wreck. The bow section remained afloat and was continuing to spew so much flaming oil that the ocean itself seemed to be burning. To Sloane the scene was awe-inspiring.
The teams paused to improvise a plan, then attacked using powerful saltwater pumps and hoses to push the floating flames toward the wreck, and finally to smother them on the bow itself. This took two days to succeed. By then the bow was standing straight up out of the water, with the forward section of the hull, containing perhaps 60, tons of oil, extending deep below the surface.
The tanks had stopped leaking, but the technology did not yet exist to tap into them and remove the oil. So now what?
Eventually, the South African government approved the best of the bad solutions—a plan to tow the hulk farther out to sea and sink it in deep water. Safmarine got the job, and Sloane volunteered to go onto the wreck and secure the tow wires to the ship's anchors.
With three other men he was reeled down from a helicopter. They attached themselves with ropes to fixtures at the tip of the bow and cautiously climbed down to the anchors. The work took about a week to accomplish, but then the wires were secured, and a tug got the wreck under tow. When it reached a position miles offshore, Sloane returned to the wreck with explosive charges.
He was back on the tug when the charges were detonated, and the last of the Castillo settled and disappeared. Sloane had tasted his first blood. When he returned to Cape Town, he immediately requested a transfer to Safmarine's salvage division.
Eventually he was assigned to one of the company's deep-sea salvage tugs, the foot, twin-engine, 26,horsepower Wolraad Woltemade. That ship and its Safmarine twin, the John Ross, were the most powerful tugs in the world—purpose-built bounty hunters capable of dashing to the rescue at more than 20 knots and punching through even the heaviest storms.
They claimed their richest prizes during the Southern Hemisphere winters, particularly among supertankers and bulk carriers rounding the Cape in mountainous seas. During the summers, when the Cape seas are relatively calm, the tugs went out globally at flat rates for some of the biggest towing jobs to be found. Sloane was in his element. By late , he had passed the necessary exams and at the age of 26 was serving as first mate—second-in-command—on both of the super-tugs.
One of his captains was a tough, chain-smoking, six-foot-six Englishman who was known as a drinker, a brawler, and an excellent ship handler. He was hard on his crews. Any man who showed hesitation on the aft deck when it was being swept by waves was fired at the next port of call—told to fuck off and find a berth on a container ship if he preferred.
Speaking of fucking off, Sloane once witnessed a junior officer mutter those same words to the captain, who answered by punching him in the face and breaking his nose, then putting him ashore. Tug captains were gods in those days. Sloane thought this one was a tyrant, but he learned from him about seamanship and towage. Over the next few years, Sloane saw a lot of action.
There were storms with m. There were ships that burned, ships that foundered, and ships that went on rocks. There were ships that simply broke down. Sloane grew adept at boarding them, fighting fires, and attaching the tow wires securely.
More important, he was unusually adroit mentally. As a result, the company which through a merger had become Pentow Marine appointed him as a full-fledged salvage master and in the winter of sent him out on the Wolraad Woltemade to try his luck at hunting. With an augmented crew of 26 men, the tug sailed into the South Atlantic and anchored in the shelter of the remote British island of Saint Helena, to wait for trouble to occur.
Life there was famously pleasant. Once the ship had been rigged for action, the men went ashore a few at a time to wander the island's small town, or took to the boats to explore the immediate coast.
Back on the ship they enjoyed clean accommodations, decent food, plenty of movies, and a stock of good wine. In the officers' salon, meals were served by stewards in white jackets. But everyone was keyed up for the job, and the radios were monitored at all times. After nearly two weeks the radio watch paid off.
At two in the morning, a distress call came in from the Rio Assu, a foot Brazilian freighter bound for Southeast Asia. A fire had broken out in its cargo of paper rolls and cellulose, and was burning uncontrollably. Aboard the Wolraad Woltemade the radio officer made contact and established the ship's position— miles to the south of Saint Helena.
Within 30 minutes, the tug had raised anchor and was throttling up to full speed. A storm had passed to the south the day before, but conditions had settled to Force 5 with foot swells. It's the Rio Assu. She's on fire, but we're on our way.
Get ahold of the owners. They came upon the casualty at four in the afternoon. It was an unremarkable ship creeping downwind with barely discernible smoke rising from a midship cargo hold. Sloane and his team shuttled to it by Zodiac, climbed onto the deck, and through an open cargo hatch peered at the fire below.
The hold was a cavern 55 feet deep; the burning paper and cellulose lay within it in unstable piles of densely packed bales. It would later be determined that the fire had started with a cigarette, presumably tossed aside by a stevedore in Brazil. The flames were climbing the sides, leaving the tops of the piles unburned. Sloan met the captain on the bridge and had him sign the Lloyd's Open Form. The captain was exhausted after days of struggling with the fire; he said they thought they had extinguished it, but when they opened the hatch to check, it flared up again, and with heat so intense that it buckled the deck and jammed the hatch cover open.
With the ship's structure now at risk, Sloane needed to move fast and get water onto the fire. He discovered, however, that the ship's fire hoses were useless because of leaks, and indeed that much of the fire-suppression system had rotted.
The first order of business was to assemble a replacement system across the deck using hoses and equipment brought over from the tug. This took hours to accomplish, but by midnight the job was done, and the salvage team had secured an aluminum ladder into the center of the burning hold, where it reached the fire-free peak of the cargo.
Sloane and another man suited up in full protective gear, put on breathing masks and tanks, and descended the ladder to survey the fire and install four fixed hoses. It was extremely hot work, with limited visibility, carried out on a steep, unstable pile inside a ship that was rolling in moderate seas. Around four in the morning the pile suddenly shifted and collapsed, leaving the two men hanging from the ladder as a fireball exploded past them.
They returned to the deck, installed a longer ladder that could reach the re-formed pile, went back down, and finished positioning the hoses. The nozzles were set to spray rather than gush.
This was more than a firefighting measure. Sloane intended to use as little water as possible. He was concerned about the sloshing that could occur, and the effect that a flooded hold might have on the ship's stability, but mostly he was determined to preserve as much of the cargo's value as possible.
As a corollary he had to reduce the oxygen content in the hold. The second day was spent cutting steel, winching the giant hatch cover closed, and sealing it the best they could with rope, oakum, and tape. The fire was still active, but as the internal atmosphere filled with steam, the cargo began to smolder rather than flame. By the end of the third day, the immediate crisis had been handled.
The next step was to get to Cape Town, 1, miles to the southeast, where fire-suppressing carbon dioxide could be pumped into the hold and cranes could be used to remove the cargo.
The Rio Assu could not make the trip on its own power. Its engine could be run at low speeds only by burning diesel fuel, of which it did not have enough; if the engine was run on the standard bunker oil, of which there was plenty, it could not be throttled back, and the resulting winds across the deck would find their way into the hold, bringing the flames back to life and out of control.
The problem was advantageous to Sloane, who having captured a prize was not inclined to let it go. He attached a wire from the Wolraad Woltemade, and the long slow tow began. It took 12 days to reach Cape Town. Sloane remained aboard the Rio Assu for the duration, as he did at the pier for the six weeks following, during which the fire continued to flare up as the cargo was unloaded.
Once the hold was empty, Sloane oversaw temporary repairs to the main deck, reloaded undamaged cargo, and returned the ship to its owners in a condition that allowed for the onward voyage to Asia. Sloane's team received a bonus. He was 31 years old. His capture of the Rio Assu was seen as a small affair, but perfectly executed and a promise of larger prizes to come. The business of maritime salvage is not hard to understand.
Lloyd's of London stands at the heart of it, as it does of shipping generally. Lloyd's is not Lloyds Bank, which is a bank. It is not Lloyd's Register, which is a risk-management organization.
It is not Lloyd's List, which is a publication. And it is not even an insurance company, though it is often mistaken for one. Instead it is a forum in the City of London where brokers representing shippers wanting to hedge their risk meet with syndicates willing to underwrite that risk for a price.
Lloyd's vets the players, supervises the encounters, provides rules and information, and stands by with a central fund should an underwriter fail to meet its obligations. The system dates back to , when it began in a London coffeehouse, called Lloyd's, where maritime traders gathered to swap information and bargain over vessels and their cargoes.
The conversations were global from the start. The business was naturally wild. Beyond the standard problem of market swings, it had to contend with the special dangers inherent to seafaring. Financing those risks was so important to world trade that at the coffeehouse it eventually became the only business being done.
Today, Lloyd's occupies a glass-and-steel building considered to be a masterpiece of modern design. It contains a dramatic glass-roofed atrium overlooked by open-office galleries and populated by hundreds of buttoned-down brokers and underwriters who sit in clusters under their group names, peering at flat-screens and murmuring into phones with a British calm that belies the intensity of the decisions they must make.
Capt Schettino was charged with manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship. His trial began in July , and he could face up to 26 years in prison if found guilty. He denies all the charges. Five other senior crew members, convicted of manslaughter in , were allowed to enter plea bargains in exchange for lenient sentences. None of them has served time in jail. There have been appeals during the captain's case for senior executives of Costa Crociere to be made to pay damages.
A lawyer representing some passengers who were on the ship said some responsibility for the 32 deaths lay with the company, because of technical problems after the ship hit the rocks and language difficulties among the crew. Video from Titan Salvage and Micoperi describes the operation as "the largest and most complex recovery ever attempted". The co-pilot of the Germanwings flight that crashed into the French Alps on Tuesday was in sole control of plane and intentionally started its descent, officials say.
The final journey back to its home port of Genoa took four days. The process of scrapping the ship is expected to take up to two years. Delicate parbuckling In September the Costa Concordia was hauled upright in the most delicate phase of the recovery operation.
Please turn on JavaScript. Workers will then raise the decaying cruise liner one deck at a time by pumping more air into the sponsons. Each deck will take approximately six hours to raise and clean. Once they've raised the Concordia three decks above water, Italian environmental officials will inspect it for leaks.
Then it's tow time. With 60, tonnes of salvage gear attached to its , tonne frame, the Concordia isn't exactly a speedboat. Traveling at a maximum speed of two knots 2. It could happen as early as July 18th, but only if the weather grants the salvage team a clear five-day forecast.
It's just too risky to attempt to tow the decomposing liner through anything less than calm waters. The ship's been upright since September. What's taken so long?
Weather has accounted for a number of delays. It was September more than 18 months after it sank by the time the stricken vessel was rotated upright, and the ideal time to tow it away had already passed for the year. The Mediterranean is at its most tranquil from mid-July to early August, so salvage crews spent the past 10 months making final preparations for this window of time.
Interactive: How the ship was tipped upright. What does Greenpeac e have to say about this? Greenpeace has chartered a ship to monitor the Concordia operation. The environmental group is concerned that the ship will leak a trail of toxins into the Mediterranean during its five-day voyage to Genoa, and says the fragile liner should be taken to Piombino, a much closer port that could be reached in a single day.
The port at Piombino may be closer, but it would need to be dredged in order to be deep enough to take the Concordia. The port wouldn't be ready until the end of September, and by then the weather conditions would make Mediterranean waters too choppy to navigate until this time next year.
Costa Crociere, the firm that owns the Concordia, also runs a large part of Genoa's port. The company wants to bring what's left of their former marquee ship back to their home port, rather than having to keep tabs on it from afar. Costa also wants to recycle intact parts of the ship -- engine components, plumbing structures, anything else that's waterproof -- and use them in their other cruise liners. It will take around workers between 18 months and two and a half years.
Once the Concordia's in Genoa, crews will construct a giant tent over the ship and none of us will ever see it again. The front and the back will be dismantled first, and any possessions that passengers left behind as they fled the sinking liner will be returned to their owners. What are the chances of the ship making it to Genoa? The worst case scenario was that the ship could fall apart during the first six hours, but things appear to have gone well.
The next biggest risk is that it could break while it's being towed through the waters off the coast of Corsica, which is where the Mediterranean's currents are the strongest. Not at all. Once the Concordia leaves Giglio, a company will come in to clean up the mess left by the salvage firms.
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