In a remarkable exhibition of engineering skills, the luxury liner Costa Concordia, which had lain in the sea for 20 months, has been made to stand upright by a special international team. It may take a while more to tow it away to the scrap yard but the ingenuity of the operation has stunned the world. In an operation that has cost about `5,000 crore so far, an innovative South African engineer used the simplest laws of physics to help boost the modern-day Titanic out of its watery grave with very little damage to the environment.
Hollywood scriptwriters would have had no difficulty drumming up the scenario that crippled the massive ocean liner but, curiously, it was the most basic human vanity that led to the mishap. Captain Schettino, now a byword for dereliction of duty as he abandoned ship even as it was keeling over off Italy’s Tuscan coast, was trying to show off to his friend on the little island even as he had some attractive female company up on the operations deck. Schettino’s feckless display has cost the insurers about $1.1 billion while the salvage operation is certain to cost as much or more besides the loss of 38 lives.
Caissons were filled with water on one side of the ship to help bring it upright with gravity doing the rest. Now, caissons on the other side will lend balance for flotation while towing. All this is like schoolboy science but it worked like a dream. In the final analysis, the episode is a lesson to modern man that big is not always beautiful.