What To Do With Concordia: Use the cheese wire
If you're keeping up with the news, you already know about the cruise ship Costa Concordia that ran aground last week off of the Tuscan island of Giglio. Sixteen passengers perished as a result of the accident, and now the major task is to remove this giant ship without causing an environmental disaster. This is where cheese comes in.
NPR has the story:
If the decision is made to junk the Costa Concordia, the salvor would likely remove it by cutting the vessel into smaller, manageable parts — though with a 1,000-foot ship like the Concordia, manageable is a relative term — and hauling them off piece by piece.
In past removals, SMIT has used a giant cutting wire coated with a material as hard as diamonds that is suspended beneath the vessel and then raised to slice it through.
"The Dutch call it a cheese wire," Umbdenstock says.
The method was used to dismember the 55,000-ton Norwegian-flagged MV Tricolor after the nearly 625-foot car carrier collided with another ship and rolled on its side at the edge of a congested shipping lane in the English Channel.
