Life and times of palmsolo (aka Matthew Miller) » salvage

Off on another marine salvage trip

palmsolo — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 15:24:29 +0000

I just received a call last night and will be flying out tonight to North Carolina where a dredge that was being towed started sinking and then flipped over. It is now upside down with a small portion still floating on the surface. This will definitely be a very challenging engineering problem as we need to pump off the fuel and lube oil and then try to refloat her upside down. Then she will be towed into port and parbuckled (flipped right side up). It is a dredge with a large excavator mounted on one end so it will probably be one of my most challenging and difficult salvage jobs.

I can only stay until next Thursday and will be relieved by a coworker because I have a trip to Spain that I will blurb about later.

Coal carrier safely afloat

palmsolo — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 15:25:53 +0000

I mentioned a salvage case I was working on a couple of days ago and after working through many calculations and submitting a salvage plan that was then approved by the USCG, I am happy to report that the vessel was safely refloated this morning! As I talked about in my earlier post, this type of engineering is extremely rewarding due to the quick results you see. I have been a salvage engineer since 1997 (wow, 10 years now) and every case has been a success. Thank you Lord Jesus for continuing to watch over me and give me the abilities and resolve to perform my job well. Without Him I could not do this job.

Sometimes I really enjoy my day job

palmsolo — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 23:10:16 +0000

I received a call last night that a 225 meter bulk carrier fully loaded with coal ran aground in Maryland and I was being asked to use my salvage engineering skills to develop a salvage plan to help refloat her. Check out one news article about the situation. Groundings are kind of my speciality and I have been very successful in performing calculations and coming up with ways to refloat vessels in the past 10 years. There is a possibility I will have to fly out to Maryland and if my wife wasn’t out of town in Texas for a Party Lite leader training conference then I would most likely already be there. It has been a crazy day trying to balance taking care of the girls and respond to calls from the salvage team while running calcs and coming up with a plan to offload coal and refloat the vessel.

I LOVE this type of engineering though where you perform calcs and see almost immediate results. Oftentimes when an engineer performs calcs you don’t see results or you see results years down the road. Salvage can be stressful, but I am pretty experienced and have some incredible tools at my disposal so I personally have a great time with it and if I wasn’t a father of three young daughters I may even want to do it full time.