As I write this, the Costa Concordia has been refloated and should be on its way to Genoa for dismantlement. For a prairie chicken who has never even been on such a large boat and who grew up in a family fascinated with the Titanic, it's been enrapturing.
There's lively discussion about this being the most expensive wreck recovery to date, at $1.5 billion so far, and that doesn't count cutting it up in a Genoa drydock.
They are being careful, of course, to ensure no environmental damage occurs - no spilled fuel oil, lubricants, etc. There was a bit of a kerfuffle when some of this occurred, but they were able to catch it in time.
Everything seems prim and proper, which leads me to think of the state of affairs 70 years ago, when the Mediterranean, North Atlantic and Western Pacific were aflame with burning fuel oil from sunken ships..
The Costa Concordia is a much bigger ship than anything afloat during the Second World War. Displacing 117,000 tons, she was more than three times the displacement of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier (CV-8), star of the Pacific theatre. Concordia had an even greater mass, if not length, than the recently-retired nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CVN-65), which displaced 94,700 tons.
However, all this pales compared to the losses in battle, particularly in the North Atlantic. Convoy HX-72 lost six ships to a single U-boat, for a total gross tonnage of 50,340. In November 1942, the allies lost 729,160 gross registered tons of shipping to U-boats. America built cookie-cutter Liberty ships by the thousands and saw them sunk by the hundreds. By 1943 they were launching three Liberty ships daily just to keep ahead of the losses.
With a gross tonnage of 14,300, it took nearly 10 Liberty ships to equal the size of one Costa Concordia. But hundreds of these, as well as thousands of other ships, ended up on the ocean floor. They included tankers, general carriers and bulk carriers. You name it, they sunk it. There was zero consideration for the environment back then. It was sink, or be sunk.
Indeed, the USS Arizona, on the floor of Pearl Harbour, is still leaking fuel oil 73 years later.
We never hear about the environmental calamities that were the First and Second World Wars. The Greenpeace folks never seem to bring that up. Surely when you sink thousands of ships, there must be some sort of fallout?
There was a program after the war to recover valuable cargo, such as metal ingots. This salvage program ran many years, using giant grapples to smash through the shipwrecks and harvest their holds. I don't think much consideration went into recovering PCBs or fuel oil, however.
Even if they wanted to, most of those wrecks were unrecoverable - either too deep, or in too many pieces.
One would think that the oceans would have never recovered from the ravages of the Second World War. Whether it did or it didn't, no one seems to think about it.
When man seeks to kill man, consideration for all else goes right out the window. That includes consideration for the environment. It's all very quaint that they made sure as much as possible the Costa Concordia didn't cause any spill. But considering how much fuel oil, and blood, was spilled off the coast of Italy 70 years ago, I think a drop or two probably is not going to make much of a difference.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
