Listing nearly 90-degrees to one side, the massive Cougar Ace was towed and moored in Wide Bay before it was finally stabilized and nearly fully righted a month later. The ship was eventually saved, but tragically a member of the salvage team was killed during the recovery operation. While Mazda reported little damage to the vehicles on board, in December of that year it made the decision to scrap all of the vehicles that were stranded on the Cougar Ace. This month, after sitting in a huge parking lot for more than a year, 4,703 of the Cougar Ace Mazdas were dropped into a 50-foot-tall shredder in Oregon and finally destroyed.
Wired magazine just published an interesting in-depth article about the salvage operation to recover the Cougar Ace. It's a long read, but we're bloggers with the attention span of a gnat and got through it just fine.
[Source: Wired]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Darren @ Mar 1st 2008 12:42PM
Here is the crazy thing about this article. Last week a close friend that runs a shop here in Portland asked me to dispose of a customer's car that had been rolled several times. I happened to find a place nearby that handled auto recycling. As I unloaded the wreck I noticed a small fleet of brand new Mazda's in the back of the yard. Then I noticed mechanics (being polite) dismantling the cars, and then a forklift drove up to one, punched out the two side windows, smashed in the doors, lifted the car by the roof and carried it away. WTF?!?!
Amazingly, when I got back home my new issue of Wired was waiting in my mailbox and as I scanned the contents I was amazed to find that the story of the Cougar Ace answered all of my questions. Wired, how could your timing be so eerily dead-on? Wow!
Timothy Auhll @ Mar 1st 2008 10:23PM
Why shred 4703 Mazda's instead of donating them to high schools , college's . Am I missing somthimng here?
dinnercoat @ Mar 2nd 2008 12:59AM
Liability, I imagine.