Ocean Engineering Stuff

This video shows the salvage of Taylor Energy's Mississippi Canyon 20 platform topsides. The platform was toppled by a mudslide. Mudslides are underwater avalanches and can be triggered by a hurricane. In this case, Hurricane Ivan was the culprit. You can see that the lower part of the structure is clean, indicating that it was embedded in the mud. Note how they had to build a special frame to transport the deck. This saved them the problem of having to turn the thing while it was on the hook.

The lift is being performed by Versabar using the custom designed lift barge, VB 10000. The weight of the lift is 3000 tons. The water depth is about 800 feet.