Salvaging a 50,000 ton ship by cutting it into slices

[Jon]

The MV Tricolor was a 50,000 ton Norwegian-flagged vehicle transport ship launched in 1987. In 2002, while traveling with a load of nearly 3,000 new Volvos, Saabs, and BMWs, she collided with Kariba, a Bahamian-flagged container ship, 17 miles north of the French coast, in the English Channel. Kariba was able to continue on, but Tricolor sank, about 100 feet down.

Tricolor had sunk in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, in water that was shallow enough for the wreck to stick out above the waterline. Two more collisions with it happened in the days after the sinking, and French authorities ordered the wreck to be removed from the seabed.

A consortium of companies worked together for over a year to salvage Tricolor. They did this by slicing the wreck into nine sections with a cutting cable covered in cemented carbide. Two platforms were built on either side of the wreck, with the cutting cable suspended between them. As each cut section was pulled up, it was placed on a barge and towed to shore for scrap.

The pictures nicely show each section cut up, with many of the cars cut in half along with the ship.















More:

Real Life Cutaways: Here's How You Saw a 50,000-Ton Ship Carrying 2,800 Cars Into Slices (With the Cars Still Inside) - Core77

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Tricolor