• October 25, 2021
• News, Safety and Security, Shipping, Video

Image taken from video shows final portion of wreck being towed away from under giant heavylift catamaran VT 10000

More than two years after the capsize of the car carrier Golden Rayon September 8, 2019, the final section of its dismantled wreck has now been removed from St. Simons Sound, Ga.

Video released by the St. Simons Sound Incident Response shows wreck removal personnel stowing the final section of the wreck and transporting it to a local facility for partial dismantling. Once partially dismantled, the wreck section pieces will be transloaded to container barges and shipped to a recycling facility in Louisiana.

The response Unified Command and representatives from T&T Salvage and the Coastal Resources Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources will give remarks at 10:00 a.m., Tuesday, which will be live streamed on Facebook here.

Though many questions remain unanswered, in particularly the likely staggering cost of the salvage, the reason the ship capsized in the first place is not one of them. Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board said it had determined that the probable cause of the capsizing was the chief officer’s error entering ballast quantities into the stability calculation program, which led to his incorrect determination of the vessel’s stability and resulted in the 665 foot long vessel having an insufficient righting arm to counteract the forces developed during a turn while transiting outbound from the Port of Brunswick through St. Simons Sound.

Contributing to the accident was vessel operator G-Marine Service Co. Ltd.’s lack of effective procedures in its safety management system for verifying stability calculations.