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Its owner, the Carnival Corporation, is spending $400 million on one of the largest salvage operations ever attempted, the Parbuckling Project. Ten years have passed since the Costa Concordia cruise ship slammed into a reef and capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio. But for the passengers on board and the residents who welcomed them ashore, the memories of that harrowing, freezing night remain vividly etched into their minds. GIGLIO, Italy (AP) — Ten years have passed since the Costa Concordia cruise ship slammed into a reef and capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio. Giglio’s vice mayor at the time, Mario Pellegrini, had climbed on board the listing ship that night to help coordinate the rescue, and found sheer chaos in the absence of orders from the captain or crew.
Rescue
“I imagine it like a nail stuck to the wall that marks that date, as a before and after,” he said, recounting how he joined the rescue effort that night, helping pull ashore the dazed, injured and freezing passengers from lifeboats. The blackout after the ship's engine room flooded and its generators failed. The 10th anniversary is also recalling how the residents of Giglio took in the 4,200 surviving passengers and crew, giving them food, blankets and a place to rest until day broke and they were ferried to the mainland.
Wrecking Near the Shore
Ortelli was later on hand when, in September 2013, the 115,000-ton, 300-meter (1,000-foot) long cruise ship was righted vertical off its seabed graveyard in an extraordinary feat of engineering. But the night of the disaster, a Friday the 13th, remains seared in his memory. The dinner plates that flew off the tables when the rocks first gashed the hull. The blackout after the ship’s engine room flooded and its generators failed. 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. The Concordia captain, Francesco Schettino, is serving a 16-year prison sentence for manslaughter and other charges for having ordered the crew to steer the ship off course and closer to Giglio in a stunt known as “tourist navigation” to give passengers and those on shore a thrill.
Securing wreck site and protecting environment
“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. This cleared the way to arrange for the ultimate salvaging and scrapping of the ship. While insisting Schettino deserves conviction and a stiff prison sentence, the plaintiffs’ lawyers had lamented to the court that no one from the cruise company’s upper echelons was put on trial.
10 years later, Costa Concordia survivors share their stories from doomed cruise ship - TODAY
10 years later, Costa Concordia survivors share their stories from doomed cruise ship.
Posted: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Concordia-class cruise ship
The ship's design is based on the design of Carnival's Conquest class fleet of ships. However, their design from lido (pool) deck up to the top deck was enlarged and redesigned. See photos of Costa Concordia in the first days after it capsized and sank, as well as the survivors taking in the scene from Giglio, Italy. A modern mega-ship slammed into a rock then began to sink on the evening of Friday the 13th.
Evacuation was made even more chaotic by the ship listing so far to starboard, making walking inside very difficult and lowering the lifeboats on one side, near to impossible. Making things worse, the crew had dropped the anchor incorrectly, causing the ship to flop over even more dramatically. 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. Bells rang out earlier Thurday in the same Giglio church that opened its doors that freezing night and took in hundreds of passengers who abandoned ship and reached shore in lifeboats.
An emergency generator failed after the crash, and water-tight compartment doors also didn’t work properly. Survivors also said they weren’t given emergency drills after they started what was supposed to be a weeklong Mediterranean cruise. In court earlier Wednesday, the former captain told the court earlier he was being “sacrificed” to safeguard the economic interests of his employer and broke down in sobs immediately before the panel began deliberating. The court added a month to the sentence for Schettino’s downplaying the gravity of the problem in his communications with maritime authorities. Concordia was designed by Ryszard Langer and owned by the West Island College Class Afloat program.
The Costa Concordia Disaster: How Human Error Made It Worse
He recalled he finally climbed down after the last passengers and crew had been evacuated, at around 6 a.m. The hospitality of the tight-knit community of islanders kicked in, at first to give basic assistance to the 4,229 passengers and crew members who had to be evacuated from a listing vessel as high as a skyscraper. In no time, Giglio residents hosted thousands of journalists, law enforcement officers and rescue experts who descended on the port. In the months to come, salvage teams set up camp in the picturesque harbor to work on safely removing the ship, an operation that took more than two years to complete. 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.
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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. Almost immediately questions were raised concerning the conduct of Schettino and other crew officers. In July 2013 four crew members and Costa Crociere’s crisis coordinator pled guilty to various charges, including manslaughter.
Costa Concordia, the Italian cruise ship that sank off the coast of Italy in January 2012, is finally leaving her resting place. The ship is being towed to a port in Genoa, Italy, where it will be salvaged. Testimony at the trial put the spotlight on errors by other crew and equipment malfunctions after the Concordia smashed into a jagged reef when Schettino steered the ship close to the island of Giglio while passengers were having supper.
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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.
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