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Reports written by Susan
Wels
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Images produced by Matt Tulloch | |||
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Thursday, August 20, 1998
"[Thomas Andrews] himself put in their places such things as racks, tables, chairs, berth ladders, electric fans, saying that except he saw everything right he could not be satisfied. He was always busy, taking the owners around the ship, interviewing engineers, officials, managers, agents, sub-contractors, discussing with principals the plans of new ships, and superintending generally the work of completion."
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 If
there is an engineering mastermind behind the ‘98 Titanic Expedition,
it is Pierre Valdy.As the expedition’s mission chief, he invented the novel strategies for recovering the Big Piece and achieving the live fiber-optic TV hookup from Nautile. "This year, there were two big breakthroughs," states Pierre, a project manager for IFREMER, France’s oceanographic agency. "Technically, I think we’ve made a lot of progress." A former motorcycle engineer in Paris, Pierre moved to Toulon on the southern coast of France and began designing submarines in the early 1980s. He supervised the original construction of Robin, Nautile’s robotic eye, as well as special tools—such as a gentle suction pad—to help Nautile recover a variety of objects from the Titanic’s debris field. |
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 Pierre
also invented the technique of using lift bags filled with lighter-than-water
diesel fuel to raise large objects, including the Big Piece, from the ocean.For much less delicate operations on far less famous and historic wrecks, Pierre invented another underwater tool, "The Grab"—a 50-ton remote-operated claw that can tear open a sunken ship like a tin can and bring up 200 tons of its contents to the surface. "The Grab" has had some newsworthy success. The giant claw recovered 17 tons of silver coins from the John Barry, a U.S. liberty ship that went down in the Sea of Oman, as well as 400 kilos of gold from the wreck of the Douro, off the coast of Lisbon. |
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 "On
the Titanic, of course, you cannot use such a tool," Pierre
declares. Instead, on this expedition, he has focused on more delicate challenges—improving
the rigging of the lift bags in order to raise the Big Piece and reduce
any possible danger to Nautile. And he came up with the long-shot
plan for achieving the world’s first live ocean-bottom TV link, 2.5
miles below the surface.The success of both these projects, Pierre says, was a bit of a surprise. "I’m generally pessimistic about what I do," he explains, "because I always think about the problems. But maybe I should be more of an optimist—because till now, I have never made any big mistakes." Back to the Expedition Calendar |
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