Removal of Costa Concordia to Begin

I missed this a couple of weeks ago. From the New York Times:

The companies, Titan Salvage, which is based in Florida, and Micoperi, an Italian underwater construction and offshore contractor, plan to lift the half-submerged vessel with pullers mounted on a platform and a subsea platform to roll it on, using water-filled caissons to stabilize it, and finally tow it to a yet unidentified Italian port. There, it will be demolished.

. . .

The 951-foot-long Costa Concordia is estimated to weigh 54,000 tons, 6,000 of which are the water and debris that have been cramming its 17 decks for four months. Raising such a tremendous weight from its right side, now deformed by the granite rocks underneath, has to be an inch-by-inch movement, experts said. Just rolling it onto the platform will take a few days, the company said.

“It would have been easier to cut it up in sections, but it’d have produced a tremendous amount of debris,” said Joseph Farrell Jr., chief executive of Resolve Marine Group, based in the United States, which had also bid to salvage the Costa Concordia. “Authorities wanted to have it removed in one hunk.”

Salvagers are set to stabilize the wreck by the end of August and then start building the underwater platform to help rotate the vessel. According to the companies’ schedule, the ship will be rotated at the beginning of December and floated one month later.

Open thread.

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posted by rdbrewer at 03:07 PM

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