- Back in September of 2019, a 600+ foot cargo ship called the MV Golden Ray, which was apparently loaded in an unstable fashion with over 4,000 cars, capsized in St. Simons Sound just off the port of Brunswick, Georgia. Since then, responders have been working to remove the ship in sections to send the hulk to the scrapper. November was particularly exciting, as workers used a chain to cut off the first enormous chunk of ship, revealing mangled cars within. Here’s a look at the fascinating way the team pulled this off.
The main player in the complex slicing operation is called the Versabar VB-10000 lift vessel, a gigantic yellow dual-barge crane used for the first time in 2010 and developed in response to hurricanes damaging oil platforms.
Maxar Satellite Imagery shows Golden Ray Carrier Ship Capsizing
They did something sort of similar with the Kursk recovery, cutting off the damaged bow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster
“The divers installed two large hydraulic suction anchors into the seabed and attached a high-strength tungsten carbide abrasive saw that was pulled back and forth over the bow between the anchors. It took ten days to detach the bow.”
At least that sounds like a saw. Cutting a hull by dragging an anchor chain across it at seven feet per minute sounds crazy, but with engineering it’s always whatever works.
These cars were manufactured in Mexico by a South Korean company. The ship departed Georgia for the Port of Baltimore. The cars were to be sold in the Middle East. So many things happen in the world.