There's a whole industry around ship recovery and they know how to do things like patch things back together with some light underwater welding and then pump the water back out the hole in the bottom with compressed air. Lots of times, this is done while the ship is busy worrying itself to death on a reef.
Ship salvage is a combination of batshit crazy and real-time engineering marvel with a healthy dose of understanding tides waves and currents. There's also a strange maritime law business going on where the captain and or insurance company have to sign a contract. IF the ship is a 'wreck' the salvage company gets what ever they can save or whatever it's agreed on in the contract. If it just needs some help, the contract will be lighter. But many ships have sunk completely while the insurance company and salvage company have argued over whether it was a total loss or just suck in a low tide.
I always find the salvage stories to be super interesting. Seeing people do hard ball business while the ship is breaking up under them is really something else.
Reminded me of the Kathryn Spirit ; "After years of immobility, the federal government awarded an $11-million contract last year to a conglomeration of businesses to dismantle the ship. Ironically, one of the companies picked was the same one that abandoned the wreck in 2011."
Where: "years"=8
"Built in 1967, the Kathryn Spirit has not had an owner since 2015, at which point the federal government took control. The ship, which had been used as a cargo ship in the past, had been towed to Beauharnois in 2011 by the Groupe St-Pierre, which wanted to dismantle it in the St. Lawrence River to then sell the scrap metal."
Ship salvage is a combination of batshit crazy and real-time engineering marvel with a healthy dose of understanding tides waves and currents. There's also a strange maritime law business going on where the captain and or insurance company have to sign a contract. IF the ship is a 'wreck' the salvage company gets what ever they can save or whatever it's agreed on in the contract. If it just needs some help, the contract will be lighter. But many ships have sunk completely while the insurance company and salvage company have argued over whether it was a total loss or just suck in a low tide.
I always find the salvage stories to be super interesting. Seeing people do hard ball business while the ship is breaking up under them is really something else.