Salvage Tug Data Feed — Trial With a North Sea Operator
A salvage operator asked whether the deck telemetry could be streamed to the tug command before boarding. Six weeks of integration work later, the answer was yes.
A North Sea salvage operator approached us after the Morning Midas casualty with a specific question: could the live deck telemetry from an instrumented PCTC be streamed to the tug command before boarding decisions are made? The answer required six weeks of integration but ended up being a yes.
What had to be built
- A read-only data path from the vessel server to a shore relay during emergency conditions.
- A simplified telemetry view scoped to deck thermal state, no operational data.
- An access protocol triggered only by the master's explicit authorisation.
What changed in the salvage approach
The salvage operator was able to see deck-by-deck thermal state during the tow-in approach, including which decks were still escalating and which had stabilised. Boarding decisions changed; tug positioning relative to wind direction changed. The qualitative feedback was that the data shifted the approach from "manage the unknown" to "manage the known."
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The Salvage Economics of a Burning Vehicle Carrier
Hull value is the headline number. The real cost of a RoRo fire is salvage, wreck removal, cargo claims, and the route capacity that quietly disappears for months after.
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A 2006-built PCTC, 3,159 vehicles including 65 BEVs and 681 hybrids, abandoned 300 nm south of Adak in June 2025. The lessons did not make the press releases.
