Easy to cut holes in a ship, as most docks are very well equipped with the good old fashioned gas axe, in sizes that range from small (only going to cut a quarter inch of steel) and going up from there to ones that require the use of a crane to move the cutting head, and where the gas supply comes from cryogenic tanks and a vapouriser, and where you burn a cut through 10 inches of steel without any problem. Cutting through the typical half inch single wall steel of a ship hull is not something they are inexperienced with, and there are a corresponding team of welders who will come and fix the patch back in afterwards using a really big arc welder, and a whole load of welding rods, or a roll of welding wire and shield gas to fill the gap up.
Of course you then get the guys who come, remove all people from the area, put up the barrier tape and signs and then bring in the Cobalt60 gamma source to check the welds afterwards. There are quite a few times those sources have been stolen from the yards by those who are after the stainless steel of the housing, and who are blissfully unaware of the meaning of the symbols on the container and the warnings. that is why you find scrapyards have Geiger counters at the depots, to find any of those contaminated loads. Bad day for all concerned if that detector reaches the trip level, there is a pile of bovine product that just gets deeper as time goes on. Nice area in Brazil, that is a park now in a poor area, where the one was opened.