SAVANNAH, Ga. – When rescue crews began cutting the Golden Ray, a shipwreck the size of a 70-story office building with 4,200 cars on cargo decks, in early November they predicted demolition could end New Year’s Day.
Four months later, the work is far from over.
Both ends of the cargo ship have been cut and ripped by barges into a pair of giant pieces. But about three-quarters of the ship remains stranded off the island of St. Simons, off the coast of Georgia, where the South Korean cargo ship capsized shortly after leaving port on September 8, 2019.
“There have been nothing but problems here,” said Andy Jones, a resident of St. Louis Island. Simons heads to the wreck site on his small fishing boat most days to check the demolition and post updates on a YouTube channel. “It’s a disappointingly slow pace.”
Rescue experts decided more than a year ago that the golden ray, which was 199 meters long, was too large to remove intact. They were established in a plan to cut the ship into eight massive pieces, each weighing up to 4,100 tons (3,720 metric tons).
They sank in the wreck with a high crane with a system of winches and pulleys connected to a 400-foot (122-meter) anchor chain that acts as a bladed saw blade, which tears the hull of the ship with brute force.
From start to finish, each individual cut was supposed to last a single day. Given the time required to load each section of ship cut into a barge and prepare for the next part, the multi-agency command overseeing the effort predicted that the work would take eight weeks.
It has turned out to be much more difficult.
The first cut began on November 6 and took three weeks. The lifting of the bow section of the ship revealed battered cars and SUVs in neat rows and layered on the interior decks. The second cut began a month later, on Christmas Day, and ended in a week.
The crews spent the entire month of February attempting a third cut in the ship’s engine room, a section fortified with thicker steel. After the pressure on the cutting apparatus forced extensive maintenance, the recovery crew stopped with the cutting only about half finished.
They spent days moving the crane to the other end of the ship, where they began cutting a new section on May 7 while rethinking plans to complete the unfinished.
The ship’s steel has been shown to be harder than expected, slowing the process, and crews have paused to conduct additional inspections and maintenance, said Michael Himes, a spokesman for the multi-agency command that oversaw the demolition.
“If people wonder when it’s going to be done, we’ll do it as quickly and safely as possible,” Himes said. “But he quickly takes a back seat to safety.”
He said it is possible that the last piece of the ship could head for scrap in June, the first month of the Atlantic hurricane season. Workers have taken steps to make the cut more effective, using torches to remove strips from the lining of the ship’s hull and form a guide for the cutting chain. They also use a large mechanical claw to pull cars from the inside of the boat to throw weight before cutting and lifting sections.
Conservationists worry the longer the wreck remains in St. Louis. Simons Sound, greater threat of pollution poses for waterways in the area, beaches and saltwater marshes.
The wreck site is surrounded by a mesh barrier intended to contain debris for cleaning once the large sections have been removed. Ships equipped with skimmers and absorbent feathers are kept on hold to remove any oil that may leak or other contaminants.
However, bumpers, tires and other car parts falling from the boat to the beaches have been found. Oil-covered birds have been found. And while most of the fuel has been drained from the ship’s tanks, there is concern that it is estimated that there are 166,500 liters of fountains left once the cut-off chain destroys the ship’s fuel line.
“The longer anything is left in the water, on the boat or in these cars, the more it breaks,” said Susan Inman, guardian of the Altamaha Riverkeeper conservation group. “You have lead paint on your boat. You have all these pieces of plastic, hydraulic fluid. Many of these things will only exist for years.”
When the demolition of the golden stream began in November, the project had already been delayed for several months due to a busy hurricane season and a handful of coronavirus infections among team members. recovery.
Ironically, the commanders of the wreck sites insisted on pulling the ship to large chunks because it was supposed to be faster. A year ago, command fired its original rescue contractor for wanting to dismantle the ship into smaller pieces, saying it would take too long. The abandoned company sued in federal court, but a judge refused to stop the rescue after agreeing there was no time to lose.
Paul Hankins oversaw the planning of a smaller-scale demolition of the Golden Ray until his employer, Donjon-SMIT, lost his job to a competitor. He has since left the company. If his team hadn’t been fired, Hankins said, the dumped boat would be a souvenir off the coast of Georgia.
“We would have finished,” Hankins said. “Here we are a year later, and they are nowhere near.”