More than three weeks after they started, crews finished cutting the first slice of the Golden Ray shipwreck over the weekend.
The car carrier overturned as it was leaving Brunswick more than a year ago. Since then, the Golden Ray has been on its side, half underwater near St. Simons Island, with 4,200 cars still inside.
To get rid of the wreck, the plan is to slice the ship into eight massive pieces using a giant chain and then haul those pieces away. The cutting began in mid-November. Officials had said that slice alone would take 24 hours.
It ended up taking more than three weeks.
“So sometimes when we look at what’s on paper, it doesn’t always translate in real life,” said U.S. Coast Guard Cmdr. Efren Lopez, the federal on-scene coordinator for the team removing the wreck.
He said that before they started cutting, engineers had said they would need to cut continuously. But once they began, and realized they could start and stop, they decided to take it slower.
“What they originally figured didn’t translate exactly as we were doing on hand,” he said. “You know, you have all these ideas when you start designing this, but when you start actually performing the cut, we found other areas that we could improve on.”
They made changes such as with the type of chain and the angle of the cut, according to the Incident Commander Tom Wiker with Gallagher Marine Systems, the company that represents the owner of the wreck.
There were also interruptions.
Early on, the chain broke and had to be repaired. And they had to pause operations while Tropical Storm Eta blew by.
Car Parts And Oil Globules
There’s a barrier around the whole wreck that’s meant to soak up oil and to trap cars that fall out, but debris has gotten out.
Pieces of cars and globules of oil have washed up on shore.
Wiker said they’ve seen oil sheen on the water, mostly inside the environmental protection barrier, but also outside the barrier in amounts too small to collect; it dissipates before they recover it, and he said it hasn’t made it to shore.
But oil globules have washed up.
Officials say they don’t know if that oil came from debris from the cars, or if it was left over in the ship. Soon after the wreck, they had removed most of the oil from the Golden Ray itself.
And then there are the car parts. The net on the barrier around the ship has wide holes, so that it won’t trap sea life. But that means smaller pieces of cars can get through, too.
Fletcher Sams, executive director of the environmental group Altamaha Riverkeeper, said he collected a couple yard bags’ worth of debris.
“It’s mangled, melted pieces of car. Some of it’s been ripped apart by the chain, some of it has been melted,” he said. “Some of both types have been oiled.”
Sams also found globules of oil on Jekyll Island, but he said, so far, it hasn’t been a huge mess. He’s more worried about what comes later.
“It’s the next few cuts that are that are the ones that are keeping me up at night,” he said.
Because more oil might leak from those, and the structural integrity of the ship starts to break down.
The first giant slice of the Golden Ray is now on a barge. It will eventually get shipped down to Louisiana to get dismantled and recycled.
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