Italy’s once-luxurious Costa Concordia cruise ship embarked on its last voyage yesterday, as tug boats began towing it from island wreck site to scrapyard grave in one of the biggest salvage operations in maritime history.
Hundreds of onlookers on the Mediterranean island of Giglio, including survivors from the nighttime disaster two-and-a-half years ago that left 32 people dead, watched from shore as the crippled giant began its crawl up the coast.
“This is a big day for Giglio, but we’ll only be able to relax once it reaches Genoa,” Nick Sloane, the South African salvage master in charge of the operation, was quoted by Italian news agency Ansa as saying.
Photo: Reuters
The rusting liner, about twice the size of the Titanic and now hoisted afloat by massive air chambers, will be tugged to the port of Genoa in northwest Italy, where it will be dismantled and scrapped.
The massive operation — including a 17-person crew aboard the Concordia, a dozen vessels in a convoy and two tug boats pulling the wreckage at a speed of just two knots (3.7km) per hour — is expected to reach Genoa in four days, weather permitting.
Surviving passengers who returned to Tuscany’s Giglio island for the final farewell, said they were ready to put the nightmarish experience behind them.
“We hope that what we’ve kept inside us will depart when the boat departs. And that as it goes on its way, we can finally go on ours,” Anne Decre of the French Survivors’ Collective said, clutching the hand of friend Nicole Servel, whose husband died in the disaster.
On the evening of Jan. 13, 2012, the 4,229 passengers from 70 countries were settling into the first night of their cruise when their luxury liner struck a rocky outcrop off the Tuscan island of Giglio.
The biggest Italian passenger ship ever built — the length of three football fields — the Concordia boasted four swimming pools, tennis courts, 13 bars, a cinema and a casino.
The crash tore a massive gash in its hull and it veered sharply as the water poured in, eventually keeling over and sparking a panicky evacuation and, ultimately, dozens of deaths.
In what ship owner Costa Crociere estimates is a billion-euro salvage operation — excluding the cost of its disposal — the Costa Concordia was being towed by Dutch and Vanuatu-flagged boats while the flotilla carries divers, engineers, a medical team and environmental experts with it.
Sensors attached to the sides of the ship are to monitor for possible cracks in the crippled hull, while underwater cameras are to watch for debris washing out of the vessel amid fears toxic waste could spill into the sea.
The ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, is on trial for manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all the passengers had been evacuated — even though he has claimed that he fell into a lifeboat.
Dubbed Italy’s “most hated man” by the Italian media after the disaster, he found himself in hot water again on Tuesday after photographs emerged of him partying on the island of Ischia while the final preparations were being made to tow away the wreck.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS