Posted on 02/05/2020 10:08:19 AM PST by rktman
When a drilling platform is scheduled for destruction, it must go on a thousand-mile final journey to the breaker’s yard. As one rig proved when it crashed on to the rocks of a remote Scottish island, this is always a risky business.
It was night, stormy, and the oil rig Transocean Winner was somewhere in the North Atlantic on 7 August 2016 when her tow-line broke. No crew members were on board. The rig was being dragged by a tugboat called Forward, the tethered vessels charting a course out of Norway that was meant to take them on a month-long journey to Malta. Within the offices of Transocean Ltd, the oil-exploration company that owned the rig, such a journey might have been described with corporate seemliness as an “end-of-life voyage”; but in the saltier language heard offshore, the rig was “going for f***ing razorblades” – for scrap, to be dismantled in a shipbreaking yard east of Malta. In that Atlantic storm, several thousand miles from her intended destination, Winner floated free.
(Excerpt) Read more at getpocket.com ...
Interesting article and well-written. When the USAF was testing the facilities at Vandenberg AFB that was to have been the West Coast Space Shuttle Launch and Landing Facility, they towed the External Tank to Vandenberg through the Panama Canal so that it could be mated with the dummy orbiter on the launch pad. The barge trailed a second towline aft of the barge so that, in the event the main tow line parted, the tug could circle back and pick up the second tow line.
Why had the rig been pulled into a storm that was long forecast? Walls seemed to suggest that the master on the tugboat Forward had tried, in error, to outrun or outmuscle the Hebridean seas.
I used to go on the tow from New Orleans to KSC and a couple buddies made the 30 day trip to VAFB.
Up until a couple months ago I was in the ship repair/scrapping business. Our owner made a fortune scrapping oil rigs. I read a story a while back about some investors buying an operable oil rig for 10 cents on the dollar ($65m for a $650m rig). The point of the story wasn’t what a good deal it was, it was how stupid the investors were for buying an offshore oil rig.
It must be as massive an undertaking to dismantle something that huge as it is to build it.
Except there are drawings to build it. Cutting it up would be hazardous.
Presumably, you could use the same drawings for both.
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