'Titanic Of The Alps,' Ship That Sank 90 Years Ago, To Be Lifted 700-Feet To Surface With Balloons

A ship that's older than the Titanic – which is also aptly dubbed ‘The Titanic of the Alps’ – is set to be lifted from the bottom of a German sea with the help of some balloons over 90 years after it initially sunk. 

How's that for ambitious? How are YOU spending your week?

"You can still see the paint on the side and read the letters on the side of the ship," Silvan Paganini, the president of Ship Salvage Association, told The Sun.

"We have here a freshwater lake, it’s really deep at 210 meters (nearly 700 feet), it’s very dark there, it’s not much oxygen, so it’s really good conserved."

Titanic of the Alps about to resurface nearly a century later 

I don't know why, but these stories just fascinate me. You've just had a ship at the bottom of a lake for nearly a century and now you're gonna yank it back to the surface? Wild. 

Anyway, the ship in question is the Säntis steamship, which was originally built back in 1898 and spent decades sailing across Lake Constance. 

It sits at 158-feet long and could hold up to 400 people back in it's prime (and by that I mean when it wasn't at the bottom of the river). 

Unfortunately, this Titanic-wannabee ran into some tough financial woes in the 1930s when it transitioned from coal to oil, and it eventually just went out of use. 

"It was a big crisis in 1933, and they took away all that they could still use – so, for example, the whole wooden deck they removed because they could burn the wood to make heat," Paganini said.

"Also some of the doors for example – they were found in cellars in the village here. Then they had still the steel left, and in the crisis steel had no price."

Push came to shove, and instead of just dismantling this beast, the folks overseas thought it was most economical to just sink her. 

So they did! And it went down eerily similar to the Titanic, hence the name. You can see it in the above video. 

Anyway, fast-forward a nearly a century and Paganini and his crew have finally gotten the green-light to pull this old broad out of the water – and they're gonna do it in maybe the most basic way imagineable. 

"The cheapest solution is lifting bags. They’re like balloons which work underwater, you fill them with air and then they lift.

"We plan to do the first lift at the end of March, from 210m to 12m, and then in April, the final lift from 12m to the surface."

So there you have it! The Säntis steamship – AKA the Titanic of the Alps – is set to return to this world next month. A lot has happened since the 1930s, Santis – you may wanna sit down. 

Ever heard of something called ‘COVID?’