Table Of Content
- Singapore Keeps Top "Maritime City" Status, and UAE Moves Up the Ranks
- Video: Suez Canal Responds to Distress Call from Listing Vessel
- Costa Concordia engineers exhausted and relieved after successful salvage
- Watch: Search continues over Italian power plant explosion
- Crews Right Cruise Ship in Waters Off Italy
Costa Concordia was declared a "constructive total loss" by the cruise line's insurer, and her salvage was "one of the biggest maritime salvage operations". On 16 September 2013, the parbuckle salvage of the ship began, and by the early hours of 17 September, the ship was set upright on her underwater cradle. In July 2014, the ship was refloated using sponsons (flotation tanks) welded to her sides, and was towed 320 kilometres (200 mi) to her home port of Genoa for scrapping, which was completed in July 2017. In the coming months the team carrying out the salvage operation – Titan Salvage from the United States and the Italian engineering company Micoperi – will have to examine quite how damaged the starboard side of the ship is in order to decide how to proceed.
Singapore Keeps Top "Maritime City" Status, and UAE Moves Up the Ranks
But the 300-meter (1,000-foot) Concordia has been described as the largest cruise ship ever to capsize and subsequently require the complex rotation. The dinner plates that flew off the tables when the rocks first gashed the hull. The final mad scramble to evacuate the listing liner and then the extraordinary generosity of Giglio islanders who offered shoes, sweatshirts and shelter until the sun rose and passengers were ferried to the mainland. “Every one of us here has a tragic memory from then,” said Mario Pellegrini, 59, who was deputy mayor in 2012 and was the first civilian to climb onto the cruise ship after it struck the rocks near the lighthouses at the port entrance. Dozens of cruise ships, out of commission during the pandemic that brought tourism and demand for trips on the massive liners to a halt, have been docked off Italy's coasts for a year and a half.
Video: Suez Canal Responds to Distress Call from Listing Vessel
This morning, though, the ship was successfully refloated, the Guardian reports. Environmentalists are relieved since the ship has been marring a marine sanctuary for more than two years, while local residents say they are looking forward to no longer having to see a giant wreck each time they look out to sea. Prosecutors blamed the delayed evacuation order and conflicting instructions given by crew for the chaos that ensued as passengers scrambled to get off the ship. The captain, Francesco Schettino, is serving a 16-year prison sentence for manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning a ship before all the passengers and crew had evacuated. During this time, work also began to remove the vessel in what was the largest maritime salvage operation in history.
Costa Concordia engineers exhausted and relieved after successful salvage
GIGLIO ISLAND, Italy - In an unprecedented maritime salvage operation, engineers on Monday gingerly wrestled the hull of the shipwrecked Costa Concordia off the Italian reef where the cruise ship has been stuck since January 2012. Whether or not Captain Francesco Schettino was trying to impress his girlfriend is debatable. The wreck was not the fault of unexpected weather or ship malfunction—it was a disaster caused entirely by a series of human errors. For Concordia survivor Georgia Ananias, the COVID-19 infections are just the latest evidence that passenger safety still isn’t a top priority for the cruise ship industry. Passengers aboard the Concordia were largely left on their own to find life jackets and a functioning lifeboat after the captain steered the ship close too shore in a stunt. He then delayed an evacuation order until it was too late, with lifeboats unable to lower because the ship was listing too heavily.
Litman: How Trump’s trial will go well beyond the charges to paint a damning portrait of him
Court hears how 32 died in Italy shipwreck - USA TODAY
Court hears how 32 died in Italy shipwreck.
Posted: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 07:00:00 GMT [source]
“This was an important, visible step,” Franco Gabrielli, head of Italy’s Civil Protection Agency, told reporters at 4 a.m., accompanied by applause from a few residents who had stayed up all night to follow the operation. ROME — Engineers started refloating the deformed hull of the cruise liner Costa Concordia on Monday, a crucial step before its removal from the Tuscan island where it ran aground 30 months ago, taking 32 lives. Islanders can't wait to see the ship's removal, but it's an enormous salvage operation. The Costa Concordia is two-and-a-half football fields long, says Nick Sloane, the senior salvage master for the project. "And we're dealing with 60,000 tons of weight, on rocks right on an exposed parts of island." It's in Europe's biggest marine sanctuary, with crystal-clear waters rich in flora and fauna.
Watch: Search continues over Italian power plant explosion
That includes ships operated by companies MSC Cruise ships and Costa, Fortune reported, some of which are docked near Rome's main port of Civitavecchia. Other positive passengers will be disembarked in Civitavecchia, a port that serves Rome, or in Palermo, Sicily, it added. Guardia Costiera reports a helicopter and airplane were immediately sent to the area when they received the reports. They are continuing to monitor the vessel’s progress and reported so far, no pollution has been reported. The 8,300 dwt vessel is registered in Liberia and was on a voyage from Istanbul, where she departed on April 19, to A Coruna, Spain where she was due on April 29. The vessel was built in 2009 and according to databases has been cited for several deficiencies on recent inspections.
The Italian Coast Guard is responding to a collision between two ships off the eastern coast of Sicily. Both vessels suffered some minor damage, including reports that the hull of a Peter Doehle-managed containership was holed. The 19-hour, highly complicated salvage operation had managed to completely rotate the ship, leaning it on an underwater platform built underneath, the engineers said. Engineers in Italy say they have successfully righted the wrecked Costa Concordia cruise ship after a marathon operation that lasted around 19 hours and proved a nailbiting wait for those involved in the world's most expensive salvage plan. Final preparations are under way to refloat and remove the Costa Concordia from the pristine waters off Giglio in what has been the largest and most expensive maritime salvage operation ever attempted.
The Costa Concordia was owned by Costa Crociere, a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation & PLC. When launched in 2005, it was Italy’s largest cruise ship, measuring 951 feet (290 metres) long with a passenger capacity of 3,780; by comparison, the Titanic was 882.5 feet (269 metres) long and could accommodate up to 2,435 passengers. It featured four swimming pools, a casino, and reportedly the largest spa on a ship. In July 2006 the vessel undertook its maiden voyage, a seven-day cruise of the Mediterranean Sea, with stops in Italy, France, and Spain. Last January, the captain of the Italian mega-cruise ship Costa Concordia committed an apparent act of maritime bravado a few yards from the shore of a Tuscan island.
Costa Cruises and its parent companies
The authorities said Monday that the first phase of the undertaking had been successful and that the ship was afloat for the first time since it hit a reef and capsized in early 2012, setting the stage for an operation unparalleled in the annals of marine salvage. Work has begun to remove the tons of rocky reef embedded into the Concordia cruise ship's hull, off Giglio Island in Italy. Never before has such an enormous cruise ship been righted, and the crippled Concordia didn't budge for the first three hours after the operation began, engineer Sergio Girotto told reporters. But the report noted that some passengers testified that they didn’t hear the alarm to proceed to the lifeboats.
5 convicted over deadly Costa Concordia cruise liner wreck in Italy - CNN
5 convicted over deadly Costa Concordia cruise liner wreck in Italy.
Posted: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 07:00:00 GMT [source]
It was the same church that sheltered many of the 4,200 passengers and crew members of the Costa Concordia on a cold night in January. A few dozen island residents gathered Monday on a breakwater to witness the operation. One woman walking her dog near the harbour sported a T-shirt with "Keep Calm and Watch the Parbuckling Project" written across it in English.
Engineers used remote controls to guide a synchronized system of pulleys, counterweights and huge chains that were looped under the Concordia's carcass to delicately nudge the ship free from its rocky seabed. But after some 6,000 tons of force were applied — using a complex system of pulleys and counterweights — Girotto said "we saw the detachment" from the reef thanks to undersea cameras. Yet progress was much slower than predicted and the delicate operation to rotate the luxury liner from its capsized position to upright appeared likely to stretch into Tuesday, a senior official said. Air was pumped slowly into 30 tanks or "sponsons" attached to both sides of the 290-metre, 114,500-tonne Concordia to expel the water inside, raising it two metres (6.5 feet) off the artificial platform it has rested on since it was righted in September. Ananias and her family declined Costa’s initial $14,500 compensation offered to each passenger and sued Costa, a unit of U.S.-based Carnival Corp., to try to cover the cost of their medical bills and therapy for the post-traumatic stress they have suffered. But after eight years in the U.S. and then Italian court system, they lost their case.
Now, the marooned hulk dominates the Giglio skyline and has become a sinister attraction of what some call disaster tourism — drawing hundreds of gawking tourists who snap away at the photo opportunity. Schettino faces multiple manslaughter charges as well as charges of causing the accident and abandoning ship. He was released this week from house arrest, and in his first TV interview, he blamed his junior officers.
On the night of Friday, January 13, the luxury cruise ship Costa Concordia, with more than 3,200 passengers and 1,000 crew members on board, struck a reef, keeled over, and partially sank off Isola del Giglio, Italy. Six people are now confirmed dead, including two French passengers and one Peruvian crew member, apparently after jumping into the chilly Mediterranean waters after the wreck. Fourteen more people still remain missing, as search and rescue teams continue their efforts to find survivors. The incident occurred only hours into the cruise, and passengers had not yet undergone any lifeboat drills -- that plus the severe list of the ship made evacuation chaotic and frightening. Captain Francesco Schettino has been arrested on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship. Gathered here are images of the Costa Concordia, as efforts are still underway to find the fourteen passengers that remain missing.
The lifeboats wouldn't drop down because the ship was tilted on its side, leaving hundreds of passengers stranded on the side of the ship for hours in the cold. People were left to clamber down a rope ladder over a distance equivalent to 11 stories. According to the Genoa daily newspaper Il Secolo XIX there were some 4,000 passengers in all aboard the ship, which arrived in Genoa from Marseille. For reasons unclear, two of Russia's sanctioned military supply ships have had to make a heroic journey around Europe after their latest run to the naval base at Tartus, Syria. The freighter Sparta IV has traveled back and forth between Russia and Tartus for years, moving equipment and stores for the Russian military. Tartus is an important base, providing the Russian Navy with a year-round, sanctions-free haven in the Mediterranean.
Six months after one of the biggest passenger shipwrecks in recent history, relatives of the dead attended a memorial service Friday near the site of the disaster. Once the ship is upright, engineers hope to attach an equal number of tanks filled with water on the other side to balance the ship, anchor it and stabilize it during the winter months. The flat-keeled hull itself will be resting on a false seabed some 30 metres (100 feet) underwater. The operation, known in nautical parlance as parbuckling, was used on the USS Oklahoma in 1943 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
