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The Costa Concordia, the biggest salvage ever. On September the 16th 2013, 100,000 tons of steel, water and debris were pulled upright in an operation called parbuckling. It was the main make or break moment in the career of senior salvage master Nick Sloan. A day when any one of thousands of unknown factors could have spelled failure and the end of a brilliant career. Okay, we're going up 10 percent. By dawn the next day, the ship lay upright, ready to be refloated and towed away.
Costa Concordia capsized on the night of the 13th of January 2012. Tragically killing 32 passengers. One man, South African salvage master Nick Sloan, led the massive engineering project to turn her upright again and lift her off the rocks. We had 33,000 tons of steel, 20,000 tons of cement, over 15,000 individual dives. For the first time ever, the story of the senior salvage master's coordination of this unique operation can be told from the day
he set foot on the beautiful Mediterranean island of Giniu. I came from New Zealand straight to Italy and we went over the plain in Ravenna. But when you actually come and see it on the island of Gileo and you look at the island and you look at the rock and then the ship. I think it's a lot more difficult than the photograph. And then when you actually stand on board, you get the sense of actually how big it is. Eight hundred men and women worked under Nick Sloan's direct command, and thousands of others labored in shipyards across Italy to design and build the structures needed to make the parbuckling work.
On the night of the 13th of January 2012, Concordia's captain, Francesco Schettino, ordered an unauthorized close sail-by of the Tuscan island of Giglio, a maneuver designed to entertain islanders and passengers alike. The ship struck a rock that ripped open her hull. She lost power completely and began drifting dangerously out to the open sea, but mercifully The wind pushed her back to the shore. Although 4,000 passengers were rescued, 32 people drowned in the chaos that ensued. The day after the disaster, Captain Schettino was arrested as the dramatic search for survivors continued.
All but two of the bodies were recovered. Miraculously, a couple of Korean honeymooners were rescued two days later. They had survived on biscuits and bottled water as the ship sank. Very soon, islanders realized that the cruise liner wreck itself demanded immediate attention. Concordia was full of food, chemicals and heavy oil. A leak would have been an ecological disaster and ruined the island's tourist economy. There was the threat of a potential environmental disaster. If the ship had been ripped open, the fuel would have leaked out of the tanks,
and this would have polluted the whole coast, including the coast of Tuscany. The Dutch company Smits Salvage won the bid to carry out the oil removal, called debunkering. It was Friday night, the 13th of January when it happened. And we immediately mobilized a team. We had here four trucks loaded and they went down to Italy. And when I arrived on the scene in my position as operations manager to. .to assist in the first stage of the operation. Then the equipment came on board a crane barge from our partner Neiri, arriving on scene.
Working with local partner Neiri Salvage, the delicate process of removing all the ship's fuel began, as islanders watched anxiously. The danger was that of the ship collapsing. or moving with our divers working inside the hull. And this would have been fatal for them. Two months later, the job was done. The local population gathered on the quayside to show their appreciation as the debunkering crew sailed away.
The 350-meter-long ship rested on two rocky ridges that led to a 70-meter underwater cliff. Concordia not only threatened to sink, but also to break in two as she bent between the rocky outcrops. All the weight of the steel and furnishing of the cruise ship was concentrated on the weakest part of the structure. The ship represented a mortal threat to the livelihood of the islanders. The sea around Giglio is a nature reserve. A unique species of giant clam lives at the bottom of the reef Concordia rested on.
Engineer Giovanni Ceccarelli is a naval architect and he came up with an idea that he was convinced would save the island. He put his plan to local firm Micoperi and they made a bid for the salvage. The idea was always to protect the environment, and in order to do this we always believed that the ship had to be removed whole. In April 2012, Costa Cruises awarded a $450 million salvage contract to the Italian firm Micoperi and US giant Titan Salvage to remove the wreck.
Giovanni Ceccarelli's plan seemed simple enough. but would prove to be a massive engineering challenge and require the most advanced computer analysis and design. The consortium called in Senior Salvage Master Nick Sloan to manage the project. Every job you have a portion of luck that you need and you take your luck when you can get it. So it's important that you plan and prepare what you need that bit of luck. clone. The fearless South African master of ship salvage is famed for dangerous work all over the world. An unassuming mariner, he is known for his dry sense of humor and ability to thrive under pressure.
He was called to the Concordia site from another nautical disaster on the other side of the world. When you're going into a burning ship, you've got no idea what the cargo is. These big container ships carrying thousands of different types of products and sometimes they react with heat or water so you've got no idea what the manifest is. So those are, yeah there's always a sense of risk. I think it suits the people that have a bit of adrenaline junkie factor behind them. Despite his easygoing manner, Nick Sloan has no less than 30 years experience in ship salvage.
It all started I think when I was on the Saf Marine and there was a burning ship off the Cape called the Castelo de Belver and there was a Spanish VLCC supertanker that eventually broke in half. The bow section had to be towed out 200 miles and then explosives were put around the bow to release the buoyancy and then she was let go into the bottom of the ocean. And after that I decided that was more my line of career. Costa Concordia is the longest project he has worked on, but before that, another was even more stressful. The Tasman Spirit in Pakistan, that was quite a challenge.
The ship broke up in the harbor entrance. There was a lot of oil, a lot of political pressure to get it out. So that was sort of seven months of stress plus time where to finish before the monsoon. Over the years, he's learned. that no vessel is too big or difficult to raise from the seas, not even the largest cruise ship wreck of all time. You get used to planning and seeing ships in this condition, so what other people think is quite dangerous, you've already mitigated those risks before, so you know how to make it safe for people to climb
all over a ship that's at an angle like this in the background. The Titan mecopery plan involved securing the ship and building an artificial reef to rest her on before writing her in an operation called power buckling although other ships have been par buckled such as the battleship Oklahoma after the Pearl Harbor attack nothing quite this complex has ever been attempted before. The first phase is the stabilization of the ship Using cables that hold this element, which is lying on its side, resting on its side, and we need to prevent it from doing this. In April 2012, the first jack-up barges arrived to
prospect the subsea surface in preparation for securing the ship with chains attached to anchor blocks installed on the rocks. Carlo Femmiani is Micoperi's head salvage master, who explains the first difficulties the team encountered. Unfortunately, the undersea surface proved to be harder than we anticipated. We had to engineer special chisels, and with these chisels make holes in the granite, and then use perforating drills to penetrate the rock so as to be able to drill down.
During the summer of 2012, Nick Sloan became increasingly concerned that the island's hard granite might slow the pace of drilling and push back completion of the anchor blocks. This is a drilling operation here and it's very shallow, you can see the rocks. So we have to work around the rocks and they're landscaping the granite. So behind it you'll see the landscaping operation. They cut into the granite to position the anchors. Then the drilling machine comes into the anchors and drills piles 16 meters into the granite. At last, by October 2012, enough anchor blocks were in place to guarantee the ship would not sink.
It was a crucial milestone. There's 16 strand jacks already on the port side. That's just to hold the stabilization wires. So that gives us 1,000 tons per anchor, which is 4,000 tons to hold her in position. Drilling holes for the platform pylons proved equally difficult. We had to landscape the rock, put down templates so as to exactly level out the perforating pylons that we will need to position. As winter approached, the ship was now secured and the salvage was well underway.
Costa Concordia lay on her side, held back from slipping into the dark, watery abyss by massive chains. Now, the long process of parbuckling could begin. It was one of the most complex salvage operations in maritime history, and would take years. The ship weighs 45,000 tons, and with the water and with all the structures we're about to build on it, it will reach 60,000 tons. So we have to rotate 60,000 tons. from 65 degrees inclined to the vertical.
We've had three different engineering teams plus ourselves making our own assumptions and we've come to a range of what the weight is. So we're planning for the worst case scenario and hope for the best. Passenger ships are characterized by having the superstructures, in other words the upper decks, built with light material so as to keep the center of gravity low. and they have the stronger structures in the lower decks, so the difficulty will be transferring the forces from outside into the ship, so as to rotate her.
The idea in itself was very simple. Given the undersea slope, the reef would have to be extended using a cement bed and steel platforms on which the ship would rest once righted. The Italian company Micoperi specializes in building oil platforms and was confident, although building so many platforms in a row had never been attempted before. Huge ballast tanks called Scuderi, The Sponsons would need to be attached to the ship's side in order for it to be floated. Before it was rotated, they would be attached to the port side only, so their weight and gravity would help pull the ship upright,
yet at the same time stop it from rolling over when righted. They would then be attached to the starboard side. buoyancy would have to lift Concordia off the rocks. When we refloat her, we put a life jacket around her or armbands. And we're going to recreate external buoyancy. We're not going to worry about achieving internal buoyancy due to the damage. The key element in this ship's salvage would be the strand jacks. These are hydraulic pulleys that use small movements to move huge masses.
The high number of cables and the small movements multiply the forces the hydraulic pulleys are able to exert. In total we'll have 124 strand jacks used on the operation itself, which is again quite a few multipliers more than ever used before in salvage. For the first six months, nearly all the work was underwater, and this required the presence on site of over a hundred divers. They were lodged in this enormous floating hostel, the Pioneer, where they would eat, rest and sleep between their gruelling shifts of work.
The Pioneer barge was also where the cement was produced that was pumped into the massive underwater nylon bags, a process called grouting. We've got half a barrack of doctors on the team. We've got paramedics, 14 medics in total. So we're ready for trauma, we're ready for diving accidents. We have 10 chambers, but decompression chambers on location. So we're pretty well set up for protecting the diving operation. Although the divers worked on the anchor blocks and the subsea platforms, they were mainly employed building an enormous cement
mattress, an extension of the reef the wreck was caught on. All the activities, especially the underwater activities, are carried out with no dispersion of material. So it's all done with sealed and closed circuits. model that they've made of the ship. It had 904,000 structural components. It's the biggest model ever made anywhere for finite element analysis. We have a team of divers who compile a report every day, comparing it with the state of the ship the previous day. The ship's hull was inspected daily to check for new cracks and fissures. Salvage masters worried that the constant deterioration of the ship could put the operation at risk.
We have a program that just calculates structural parameters and every day imports this data, processes it. And it's very nice because the pictures are colored and we say that as long as there is There's no. no red or blue we are happy. The biggest risk as we come into winter we've got to make sure that we protect her as much as possible. So there's a lot of pressure on just to get the hold back anchors in which we finished this week and then. and well, I guess that's the biggest risk is the winter weather. In December 2012, as winter storms began pounding the rusting hull of the Costa Concordia, Nick Sloan was presented with a worrying new factor.
His engineers said that there was a risk the bow might break off during power buckling. The team brainstormed and found the only solution was to give the weak bow of the ship extra buoyancy. They designed special blister tanks that fitted the curved hull-like gloves. And these were added to the already massive engineering contracts given to shipyards around Italy. On the 13th of January 2013, the families of victims of the Costa Concordia disaster gathered to commemorate that tragic night, together with the islanders.
It was the first time in 12 months that the salvage operation stopped for a whole day. By February 2013, the anchor towers on the inshore side of the ship had been completed and the 22 strand jacks that would pull the ship upright had been installed. There's 11 towers. Each one has two of the blue pulling machines. They're hydraulic rams. They grab the wire and they pull a stroke of about 450 mm and then it goes back to recover the next stroke. So they're going under the water.
around the anchor bollards and then they go all the way underneath the Concordia herself. So this gives us about 11,000 tons of footing capacity. Meanwhile, Italian shipyards Rosetti, Cimolai and Fincantieri were building the massive undersea platforms and buoyancy tanks in Precce. preparation for the power buckling. Consortium engineers checked that the units were built to millimetric precision. With all the weight of the cruise liner concentrated on the side of the hull and between the rocks she was resting on, it was inevitable that the ship would begin to bend.
It became vital that the design and construction of the sponsons perfectly match their housings on the hull. Well, we'd like to have more space and bigger tolerances, but unfortunately to get that much buoyancy on the midship section, when we designed it, we thought 15mm of tolerance would be enough. That's actually reduced to 38 mm. And the worrying thing was that if you had a bad wind through and there was any distortion or deflection in the ship's hull, that the actual sponsors would start touching each other with the deflection. The hard granite undersea surface had required templates to be fitted so as to accurately align the platform pylons.
There was no room for error. We had to make a template that they used for setting the platform legs. We use the same. templates we put on the seabed for drilling the holes into the seabed. So the margin for error for the angle for the holes to be out was less than 1% of error, otherwise the legs would not fit. In early 2013, at last the massive steel structures that the salvage team had designed would begin to arrive. And the project entered its critical phase. A year after the tragic wreck of the Costa Concordia, maritime history's biggest salvage operation was in full swing. The first platforms began arriving from shipyards around Italy.
One by one, the six enormous platforms were lowered. The last, the smallest, went underwater in June. The platforms were welded to the barge to keep them stable during transit. And on the day, once positioned over the undersea template, they had to be detached. The massive shear leg of the Mikko Peri 30 held the platform in place as it was freed from its support, and slowly the barge was removed. The platforms could be lowered while underwater cameras on ROVs monitored progress. Salvage masters worried that a single error could jeopardize the whole operation. But the months of careful engineering paid off, as the platform sank
underwater into the precisely located holes drilled to host the pylons. The three platforms on the midship section are just about the size of a football field, and you've got a footprint of over 40 meters between some of the legs. Over the same period, The massive ballast tanks arrived too and were hooked onto the side of the ship. The tallest was the equivalent in height to an 11-story apartment block. Again with millimetric precision, the caisson was slowly positioned over the hull of the ship. It was then slid into the housings on the side of the ship.
The big sponsors are like an 11-story building, just a big steel box, 10.5 meters by 11.5 meter footprint, and then 22 meters high for the short ones and 33 meters high for the tall ones. And they get cladded onto the outside, so on the port side we'll have 11 for the power buckle, plus the blister tanks, and what they do is that when she rolls over, as gravity starts to pull her over, they enter the water and create buoyancy and slow her down. Now that the sponsons were fitted, came the critical moment of mounting the bow blister tanks. Blister tanks are pretty big.
They're 36 metres wide, 21 metres high and 30 metres long. Basically they shape like the flare of a bow. So the bow has a very fine flare and then this is like a cervical collar. So basically it supports the ship around the neck as you roll it. The massive steel structures were built to fit snugly against the Concordia's bow. But actually placing them on the ship was the most complicated of all the engineering tasks of the Holm salvage. The blisters had to be sunk and then gently slipped under the ship's nose. It was a delicate and time-consuming task, but was a necessary step to ensure that the ship.ship would not rip open on the day she was power buckled.
By the end of August 2013, 18 months after the tragic wreck of the Costa Concordia, the power buckling operation had reached a crucial turning point. Every item of the massive salvage was designed to the most minute tolerances. Even the smallest, unpredicted force could cause breakages of hinges and cables that could prove fatal to the operation. The ship's condition was a source of constant concern.
The lever for the breakout force is about 450,000 ton meters of leverage that we have, and that's quite phenomenal. And it's also a crushing force, so it wants to crush the ship because you're actually pulling the ship together as you rotate it. But the ship, we put in doubler plates on the turn of the bulge, 40-40-millimeter plates, five and a half meters long, to try and spread that load all the way around the turn of the bulge and into the keel. Once the caissons and blister tanks had been mounted, the cables that would turn the ship were attached. They would eventually be connected to the undersea platforms.
The massive chains that held the ship back and would help turn her upright threatened to cut into the hull itself on the day of power buckling. Divers laid specially designed cement bags with grooves so the undersea chains could slide through them. Basically when the chains come underneath the ship we have little horse pipes where we fabricated to allow the chain to come through. And then next to the chains we have what we call the Kit Kat bags, and that's to support the keel of the ship as she rolls, rotates over onto the keel.
The chains go into the gaps between the Kit Kats and displace the sand that we put in there, and then the hull is supported on the Kit Kat bags themselves, and that stops the chain from being forced up into the ship and cutting her. A row of red strand jacks were mounted on the top of the sponsons to provide massive pulling power. On the top of the sponsons you can see the red strand jacks. There's 36 of them on the outboard side and they go to the outside of the platforms. And that gives us just on 13,000 tons of pulling capacity from the top of the sponsons. So that's like a big lever that just rotates as you pull together.
And you've got about 24,000 tons of actual pulling force but several hundred thousand meter tons of momentum. Once the ship had rotated 25 degrees, the sponsons would begin working in favor of the salvers. Basically, the strain jacks do the first 25 degrees of rotation and then gravity takes over. And then you introduce the buoyancy into the sponsons as they get immersed. And you control the ballastine of that just to make sure everything's in balance. So you want it to be a smooth and steady movement from where she is at the moment all the way up and then onto the platform. And the smoother you can make that, the better the chance of success.
Nick Sloan was now ready for the big day. The islanders were ready too. The equipment to do the job had been engineered and constructed. He was optimistic it would work, although there were still many surprises in store. Once, well, we were pre-tensing up to about 40% of the expected forces the night before. We'll start just after daylight, so it'll be about. five hours to get through the critical phase and then about three to five hours for coming down and resting on the platform so eight to ten hours we
hope to be finished by sunset as the big day approached nick sloan took stock of the massive organization that he led for a year and a half he was not the only salvage master on the job we had four set complete separate operations going on and this is the one team's Doing the towers, the hull back systems, then you got the pioneer, they're doing the grout, then you got the team on the Concordia itself doing all the preparations, the welders, and then the offshore project was the large dams, the drilling for the platforms to come in. So four completely separate teams and projects, and then you have a salvage master running each one of them, so I was just the one that had to take the fall.
You need a strong leadership. And to be able to basically bring all the fine and talent that's on board to get them all going in the right direction. A lot of different nationalities, but some really good talent for those nationalities. There are over 500 at one time, that's before the power buckle. But if you look at the rotation, people with their back-to-backs and rotation, so maybe 700 to 800 people have been on site. And that's a big team. On the morning of September 16, 2013, all was ready for the cruise liner to be righted.
Over 600 TV and press journalists gathered on the quayside. to broadcast the event in real time worldwide. It was the salvage of the century. It was the culminating point of Nick Sloan's successful career. The day before power buckling, storm clouds raised fears that the operation might not go ahead.
Yeah, my wife came over. So she came over for four days and she said, listen, don't waste my time. It's a long way to come over. So it's two days each way. And we had that storm the night before with all the electricity and the heavy rain. And we thought maybe we should postpone it for a few days just to double check everything. But when you're ready, if you start postponing it, then you'll never do it. So you've got to say, listen, we're ready, let's do it. In the end, the Pabachling was given the green light, after just a few hours delay.
It's simply that last night the weather wasn't very favorable and we had a few operations that overlapped. But everything is absolutely within the norm. It is as it should be according to a certain sequence of preparation that is absolutely as planned. As the storm subsided, the command post was pawned in front of the ship.
Nick Sloan took his place in his headquarters, located in front of the bow of the giant wreck. He had announced that it would take about nine hours. The rest of the day would be the adventure of his life. Yeah, just confirm all personnel of the convoy. The strand jacks were set in motion, and as they pulled the cables that were wrapped around the hull of the ship, just four centimetres at a time, they began applying. 24,000 tons of force. For hours, nothing seemed to happen.
45,000 tons of steel began rotating under the pulling force of the strand jacks. The blue and red hydraulic pulleys only had to apply sufficient force to move the ship a few degrees so that its mass was closer to the center line. where the weight of the sponsons and the ship's steel itself would come into play. During the afternoon, a few centimetres of the sunken part of the swimming pools began to emerge. The ship was indeed moving.
Constantly monitored by underwater ROVs, the ship continued to move centimetre by centimetre. Then, eight hours into the power buckling process, all activity was stopped. The cables that were slowly being pulled through the strand jacks had become tangled, and a crew was sent aboard to get them straightened out. Extra floating barriers were also laid to control any leaked pollutants. The process was much slower than anyone had imagined.
As the sun set over Jiljo Island, the media waited and speculated on the outcome of a salvage now into its second year. The critical phase of the Costa Concordia salvage began on the morning of September 16, 2013. It was the culmination of 19 months work led by senior salvage master Nick Sloan. If you have a rock like this, it sticks up like a knuckle, then you have to tear it off. I don't know the exact forces required for that because we didn't know the profile of the rocks. So then when we started the breakout, then we got to 4,000 tonnes, 5,000 tonnes, 6,000 tonnes.
6,000 tonnes was again to the higher side of what we expected. So 6,500 and 6,800. People were very quiet thinking, like, hold on, you know, we're right up at the top side of the curve already. But at 6,800 this year started coming. The ship had rotated the first 20 meters. 25 degrees and was now turning under its own weight. At 25 degrees, we knew that we had a, it was just a matter of just slowly putting her down. So what happened was, you're pulling from one third of the ship, so you got one third on the bow, one third on the stern that's not been pulled, and that's where you expect it to sag like a banana. But it came up nice and straight, very parallel.
We had sensors all the way along. And the maximum deflection we had for the whole operation. It was a quarter of a degree. The Swansons hit the water and slowed the rotation until, under Nick Sloan's precise orders, the valves were opened and they began to fill slowly with water, providing the soft landing he had anticipated. It's just the first phase of basically the refloats, the important parts to get away from Zillow. But if we couldn't power buckle, then there's no refloat. Then it became a cut job. So we didn't want to think of that.
By four in the morning, the ship was upright, resting on the massive cement and steel structure. Nick Sloan was surprised by the welcome he received back on dry land. We came in support. By that time it was just after five, but we didn't expect anyone to still be awake. But there was a lot of people awake. Thank you.
It took a bit longer, but the results were better than we hoped. So that was really nice to see that it's all tough in the morning. Thanks very much, personally. We had a couple of beers, went to bed, and then the next day we had a big roast, barbecue. That's when we sort of really relaxed. The next day, the damage to the starboard part of the ship could be examined. The 45,000 tons of the cruise liner had weighed down on the two areas that were in contact with the rocks, crushing the balconies and outer cabins.
But the steel structure was essentially intact. At that period the search and rescue guys, we had to do a survey to see how dangerous it was the steel hanging down before they could get in the water. So it took about 10 days to clean up all the dangers for them. They got in the water and they finished last Friday with the search and rescue side of it. One body is confirmed to be identified. We're hoping that the second one is as well because obviously it's. It would be a lot better for everyone if we could get some closure on that. After power buckling, the first task of the salvage team
was to make the ship accessible and as safe as possible. Well, what we've done is on board we've steam cleaned it to get rid of all the muck and taken out all the stuff in the passageways so that we can go through and do a full inspection. At the moment they're spraying the fumigating because there's some air. airborne particles which aren't very good for you. In the meanwhile, the next steps of the salvage operation were being planned. Nick Sloan took a deserved break. You're on a bit of a drill. We're in on the high for weeks before it happens and maybe nerves as well. So when you get home, actually your body collapses, so you just want to relax, sleep.
We went up onto the river on the South African-Namibian border. It's no cell phone, no internet. We just canoed and did some rafting, rapids, camping on the side of the river and barbecuing. Keeping in touch with family while on a salvage far away is one of the greatest challenges of the challenge. job. Well, there's a wonderful thing called Skype. And so, but if you talk to your family at least ten minutes a day, which I've learned to do, I think it keeps you in touch with them. In these unique images from the air, the full structure of the wreck can be seen, resting on the cement bags and undersea platforms.
Now the sponsons were nearly all under water. The ship sat snugly on the custom-built steel cradle. Nick Sloan knew this salvage would go down in history. Biggest graft job in history, the biggest diving project in history, most ROV footage, 33,000 tonnes of steel, you can build the world's biggest supertanker with that. So if you add all those together, it's just a crazy project. It had been a dangerous job, and the salvage workers had risked their lives over the months. A lot of cuts and bruises, one or two crushed fingers. compound fractures, broken bones.
We've had about 20 serious injuries and then one very serious with a fractured skull but that was treated correctly. I mean they all back so when he fractured his skull he fell, bounced over a piece of steel, broke his shoulder. and then landed on the deck, shattered his climbing helmet and fractured his skull. Nick Sloan himself knows from personal experience how important it is to have paramedics on standby. So there's been some times where I've been hurt without anyone there and the treatment that you get could be really bad, life changing. So you want to make sure whoever comes on board goes home in one piece or at least if they're not on one piece they will be back to work within six months.
Work began immediately to prepare the starboard side of the ship to hold the sponsons that would float the wreck away. First thing now is the weather, winter, to see what other damage is going to happen. But hopefully we've done a whole lot of winterization planning. We're putting large steel girders on the offshore side that will keep her rigid onto the platforms. And then from the bow all the way inshore to the island itself, next week we'll put a tubular brace and that will hold the bow so
she won't be able to move in a yaw and she won't be able to roll. So she should be fine for winter then. The lights of the cruise ship were turned back on, recalling the scene on the tragic night when she sank nearly two years before, taking the lives of 32 people. The November storms were on their way. The Concordia would have to wait another winter, before being taken to her final resting place.
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