Parbuckle salvage

The capsized battleship USS Oklahoma is rotated upright while under salvage at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 8 March 1943. The ship is in the 130-degree position, with its bow on the left and the starboard deck edge just rising from the water.

Parbuckle salvage, or parbuckling, is the righting of a sunken vessel using rotational leverage. A common operation with smaller watercraft, parbuckling is also employed to right large vessels. In 1943, the USS Oklahoma was rotated nearly 180 degrees to upright after being sunk in the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia was successfully parbuckled off the west coast of Italy in September 2013, the largest salvage operation of that kind to date.