The Race to Save the Cougar Ace

Recently, I read a pretty amazing article about a team of people who rush in to save abandoned, damaged ships [wired.com]. The article follows the team through a job. There is a damaged ship that is severly listing in the middle of the Pacific. It is full of brand-new cars. They will get a percentage of the value of the cargo if they can prevent the ship from sinking, right it, and get it back to port. If they fail, they get nothing.

All they do is big-money, big-risk operations. And one crew member died in the process of this job. Here's a quote:

Titan's business plan hinged on the idea that ships could be saved by human ingenuity, not horsepower, and the company's unconventional approach worked... ...Titan won [a 1992] contract by proposing a novel approach: It hired a naval architect to create a computer model of the ship. The model indicated that the vessel would float again if water was pumped out of the holds in a specific sequence. Titan put the plan into action using a few crates of relatively inexpensive pumps; the ship bobbed to the surface as if by magic. Since then, a naval architect capable of rapidly building digital 3-D ship models has been a key member of the Titan team.

The amount of ingenuity they display is amazing. It's the kind of job that I would dream about (but would never want, in actuality) -- using mountain climbing gear to maneuver around ships, using computer models to form a solution, and racing against time to get the job done.

The article is complete with several interesting pictures of the job.