ROME — One of the most expensive and challenging salvage operations ever planned, the removal of the luxury liner Costa Concordia from granite rocks off the Tuscan coast, where it ran aground in January, will begin next week, the companies in charge announced Friday.
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.
“This is the largest ship removal by weight in history,” Rich Habib, Titan’s managing director, told reporters in Rome. “The magnitude of the job and the magnitude of the techniques used are something unprecedented.”
The operation is estimated to cost at least $300 million, more than half the value of the ship, and will be covered by its operator’s insurers.
Ships like the Costa Concordia “are the biggest industrial objects built to move in the world,” said Emilio Campana, the director of the research institute for naval and maritime engineering at Italy’s National Research Council. “Their gigantism creates the main challenge to this operation, because it’s like raising from the ground a floating city. It’s very delicate and complex.”
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.
All operations, including the removal of all the structures on site, are expected to take up to a year, a long time for a tourism-dependent island, Giglio, that is now approaching its peak season. To minimize the operations’ impacts, the equipment will be stored at the nearby Tuscan port of Piombino.
During the work, oil-response devices will be in place, and salvagers will monitor the quality of the water daily and clear any debris that might come out of the vessel. After removal, a protected type of sea grass surrounding the pylons needed to anchor the ship will be replanted.
While some argue that the strong winds and waves of another winter could cause the ship to slide into the 300-foot-deep sea bottom, the local authorities agree that sea and weather conditions capable of significantly moving the ship are unlikely.
In January, the vessel’s captain, Francesco Schettino, steered the ship, carrying 4,229 people, too close to shore, where it hit a rock and capsized, killing 32. Two bodies are still missing. Since then, the Costa Concordia has been resting in a relatively stable position, and the winds and waves are not very strong in the nine-mile-wide channel between the island and the mainland, the authorities said.
“Of course we are worried about next winter and the impact of the salvage on the seabed, but there is no way out,” said Mayor Sergio Ortelli of Giglio. “There is a huge, extraneous object right off our harbor. Leaving it there is by far a larger damage to our environment and our economy.”
