On September 8, 2019, the massive cargo ship MV Golden Ray capsized shortly after leaving the port of Brunswick, Georgia. Inside, it was carrying around 4,000 new cars and its 24 fuel tanks were almost full.
An unfortunate accident, considering the size of the boat, but luckily all the crew members escaped unscathed. The wreckage, however, as often happens in similar cases, sat there for months and months, waiting to find the most suitable and practical solution to dismantle it. And that’s what we want to show you. In order to remove the wreckage from the ship, the technicians opted for a rather … spectacular system. A huge chain literally cut it in half, as if it was “soft”!
If you think that it is not possible to “cut out” the hull of a giant of the seas 200 meters long and weighing more than 70,000 tons, you are seriously wrong, because that is exactly what it is. made the technicians and engineers responsible for dismantling.
This was an extremely complex and risky operation, which required the use of a lifting vessel and two cranes .
Once out of the water, the MV Golden Ray was ready to be cut into pieces using a special chain.
We are not exaggerating: one only needs to look at the footage of this spectacular operation to realize that this is exactly what happened. The overpowered chain, controlled by a team of experts, swung back and forth and managed to cut through the shell as if it were made of butter, revealing its contents.
Once cut, in fact, the cars inside returned “to the light”, with thousands of Hyundai and Kias produced in Mexico and obviously never delivered.
Gradually, the Golden Ray will be dismantled into 8 sections, which will then be loaded onto other barges to be scrapped. It is truly impressive how far engineering and technology can go in certain situations.
It only remains to hope that the residues of this unfortunate cargo ship can be recycled where they will be most useful and most appropriate and that the accident did not cause too much damage to the surrounding environment.