Home treats float salvor’s boat
Not even Nick Sloane’s dog knows him after his long absence from his family
“EVERYTHING seems impossible, and then it is done.” This quotation from Nelson Mandela is Nick Sloane’s new mantra.
Despite widespread doubt, the Cape Town salvage master and a team of 500 achieved the seemingly impossible this week: refloating the Costa Concordia after it sank off the Italian coast in January 2012, killing 32 people.
One of the world’s most complicated maritime rescue operations, it took more than two years and involved experts from around the globe.
As the project finally nears completion, an exhausted Sloane is eager to come home.
The 53-year-old Somerset West family man wants to spend time with his wife and children.
“If I had known it was going to be two-and-a-half years, I would never have gone to Italy in the first place. It has been far too long away from home. My dog has even started barking at me.”
His twins, a boy and a girl, “are in matric and in the last few months of their school career. I look forward to being able to be a father once again and be part of my children’s lives,” he said.
The liner went aground when its captain, Francesco Schettino, changed the ship’s direction and it hit the rocks, tearing a gash in its hull. The ship has been stranded on the coast of the Tuscan island of Giglio ever since.
Sloane, who has 27 years’ experience and has done salvage operations across the globe, was approached in 2012 by US salvaging firm Titan Salvage.
It had won the à500- million (R7.2-billion) contract for Costa Concordia and wanted him at the helm of the biggest refloating project in history.
Sloane expected the job to take about seven months, but has been fraught with challenges and procedural delays.
“The preparation in terms of safety for this project was extensive. Everyone working aboard the Concordia had to do a climbing course before starting work. So, all in all, it has been a very bizarre project.”
The biggest risk in the operation has been the diving. In February, one of the divers died while preparing the wreck for the installation of sponsons (air chambers to increase buoyancy). In addition to unpredictable weather, bureaucratic procedures stalled the process.
“The ship is still a crime
It took more than two years and involved experts from around the globe
scene, so everything we do has to be approved by the prosecutor. Once we have finished, the officials will search the ship for the last missing body.”
Schettino is facing multiple criminal charges, including manslaughter, causing the shipwreck and abandoning ship before the evacuation of all its passengers.
But despite the delays, Sloane said the team had kept busy.
“The platforms, sponsons, steel structures and support all had to be built. It has been nonstop work for two years.”
There has been much doubt about the project from the start, with many speculating the ship would break up.
“We actually added a lot of steel and, had we not done that, it probably would have broken up. The people who said it couldn’t be done didn’t realise we had added a few extra things.”
Weighing 114 500 tons and at 290m long, the ship’s width has increased from 36m to 63m because of all the steel support structures and sponsons.
Sloane said the refloating had been done in two phases. “The first, which started at the end of April, was a partial refloat in which we got her off the platforms and rocks, moved her off the reef and then connected the balance of 56 chains under her hull to attach the sponsons. So we reduced her draft [the depth of water a ship lies in] from 32m to 29m.”
“The second phase entailed gradually emptying water from the sponsons, thereby gently pushing the ship up, and finally reducing her draft from 29m to 18m.” This was due to be complete this weekend before the ship is towed to Genoa, which will hopefully begin tomorrow.
Once it has arrived in Genoa, Sloane will hop on the first plane back home.