Long-submerged vessel slowly heaved upright
IN AN unprecedented maritime salvage operation, engineers yesterday gingerly wrestled the hull of the shipwrecked Costa Concordia off the Italian reef where the cruise ship has been stuck since January last year.
Progress was much slower than predicted and the delicate operation to rotate the ship from its side to upright appeared likely to stretch into today, a senior official said at the time of going to press.
The crippled Concordia didn’t budge for the first three hours after the operation began, engineer Sergio Girotto said.
But after about 6 000 tons of force were applied – using a complex system of pulleys and counterweights – “we saw the detachment” from the reef thanks to undersea cameras.
He said the cameras did not immediately reveal any sign of the two bodies that were never recovered from among the 32 people who died on January 13 last year when the Concordia slammed into a reef and toppled half-submerged on its side after coming too close to Giglio Island.
Images transmitted yesterday by robotic diving vehicles indicated the submerged side of the hull had suffered “great deformation” from all its time on the granite seabed, battered by waves and compressed under the weight of the ship’s 115 000 tons, Girotto said.
The initial operation to lift the Concordia from the reef moved the ship just 3 degrees towards vertical, leaving the vessel about 62 degrees shy of being pulled upright. While a seemingly small shift, the movement was significant enough to be visible: a few metres of slime-covered ship that had been underwater slowly became vis- ible above the waterline. “It’s taking longer than expected,” Girotto said in a late afternoon briefing.
“Even if it’s 15 to 18 hours, we’re okay with that. We are happy with the way things are going.”
Officials stressed that so far no appreciable pollution from inside the ship had spewed out. Giglio is part of a Tuscan archipelago in a marine sanctuary where dolphins and fish are plentiful. – Sapa-AP