The wrecked Costa Concordia cruise liner limped into its last port on Sunday, when it was towed to the northern Italian city of Genoa to be broken up for scrap, two-and-a-half years after running aground and sinking with the loss of 32 lives.
After a four-day journey from the Tuscan island of Giglio, where it sank on Jan. 13, 2012, the 114,500-tonne hulk was manoeuvered into place and secured at the conclusion of one of the largest and most complex maritime salvages ever attempted.
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi flew to Genoa to hail the completion of the operation which restored some pride to Italy after a disaster that was widely interpreted as a national humiliation as well as a human tragedy.
“This isn’t a day for showing off or creating a spectacle, but it’s a mark of gratitude from the prime minister for getting something done which everyone said would be impossible,” Renzi told reporters on the dock, saluting the work of the salvage engineers from Italy and around the world.
“We have had a terrible page to turn, but Italy isn’t a country destined for the scrap heap,” he said.
In contrast to the night when the Concordia ran aground and capsized during a display sometimes performed by cruise ships known as a “salute”, the salvage operation has been a resounding technical success.
After hours of preparation, dockworkers fixed the wreck in place in the industrial port of Voltri, just outside the main harbour in Genoa.
It will be dismantled by a consortium led by Italian engineering group Saipem and Genoa-based San Giorgio del Porto in an operation expected to cost 100 million euros and take up to two years.
The overall salvage effort is expected to cost Carnival Corp , owner of the ship’s operator, Costa Cruises and its insurers more than 1.5 billion euros ($2.14 billion).
The Costa Concordia, as long as three football pitches laid end to end with 13 passenger decks, was carrying some 4,000 passengers and crew when it went down shortly after the start of a Mediterranean cruise.
Its captain, Francesco Schettino, is on trial for causing the shipwreck, which ended in a chaotic nighttime evacuation during which 32 people died. The body of one crew member lost during the accident has still not been recovered.
Copyright Ships & Ports Ltd. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit given to www.shipsandports.com.ng as the source.
