If there was a significant fire onboard, that may have driven the decision to scrap the ship in place, rather than salvage and refurbish her.
Without any personal expertise, or any reason to know better, I wonder why they wouldn’t just cut some holes in the side of the ship and use an “orange peel” grapple bucket on a crane to fish the cars out.
You’re thinking of ARC’s Courage. Somewhere I’ve got a hard drive that has all the pictures and videos taken from that. This video was posted on Youtube and shows inside the cargo hold during a bad set of rolls (you can see people in the background hanging on for the ride). The second half of the video is a slideshow of the cargo damage.
The LIDAR picture looks to me like fire damage. I have a hard time seeing that the tires would get removed just from the action of the ship flopping. My thoughts are that the image was taken through the ventilation duct that had smoke coming out of it shortly after the Golden Ray laid over.
One more video from the Courage shows what the weather was like from the wheelhouse:
Lifting lugs to be used for the salvage of Golden Ray has been transported by Combilift from Bremerhaven to Brunswick:
https://www.combi-lift.net/blog.html
They are now being installed on each of the sections of the wreck to be lifted:
Then the cutting operation has started:
But the first cut took longer than anticipated:
