Environmental concerns prompted the decision to undertake the expensive and difficult process of refloating the ship rather than taking it apart on site. The ship is expected to arrive in Genoa on Sunday, August The Costa Concordia disaster — Tugboats pull the Costa Concordia after the first stage of the refloating operation on Wednesday, July The ship will be towed north to the port in Genoa, Italy.
The Costa Concordia disaster — Thirty-two people died when the ,ton vessel, seen here on July 14, ran aground off Giglio in January The Costa Concordia disaster — In December , crews managed to rotate the ship into an upright position. The Costa Concordia disaster — To float the ship, seen here on Thursday, June 26, crews attached 30 steel tanks to fill with compressed air.
The Costa Concordia disaster — Ship captain Francesco Schettino, left, returned to the Concordia in February for the first time since he ran the liner aground. He is on trial on charges of manslaughter, causing a maritime disaster and abandoning ship with passengers still on board. He denies wrongdoing. The Costa Concordia disaster — Experts inspect the ship's damage in January.
They boarded the vessel to collect new evidence, focusing on the ship's bridge and the onboard elevators. The Costa Concordia disaster — The wreckage of the Costa Concordia cruise ship sits near the harbor of Giglio on Tuesday, September 17, after a salvage crew rolled the ship off its side. The Costa Concordia disaster — The ship had been lying on its side for 20 months off the island of Giglio.
Here, members of the U. The Costa Concordia disaster — Damage to the right side of the ship is apparent in September. The Costa Concordia disaster — Using a vast system of steel cables and pulleys, maritime engineers work on Monday, September 16, to hoist the ship's massive hull off the reef where it capsized. The Costa Concordia disaster — A water line marks the former level of the stricken Costa Concordia as the salvaging operation continues on September The procedure, known as parbuckling, has never been carried out on a vessel as large as Costa Concordia before.
The Costa Concordia disaster — Technicians work to salvage the half-submerged ship in July The Costa Concordia disaster — Giant hollow boxes have been attached to the side of the ship, seen here in May Attempts to refloat the ship will be aided by the compartments. The Costa Concordia disaster — A commemorative plaque honoring the victims of the cruise disaster is unveiled in Giglio on January 14, Engineers would start studying how to go about fixing the damage and welding on more sponsons, he said.
The record-breaking cost of the Concordia's salvage is being footed by its owners, Costa Crociere. But he added that the company's priority was the preservation of Giglio's pristine waters, which are known for their marine life. He said the company's insurers would not cover the total cost of the salvage operation. This article is more than 8 years old. Salvage workers 'very satisfied' as parbuckling operation paves way to search wrecked cruise ship for remaining two bodies.
More than workers worked nearly around the clock to dismantled the ship in a safe and environmentally-friendly manner, working a combined one million man hours. Schettino began his prison sentence this past May. Have a news tip? Let us know. Now, Woman Offshore welcomes the maritime industry to stand up against sexual assault and sexual Tags: costa concordia. Sign up for our newsletter. Prev Back to Main Next. Be the First to Know. The problem was advantageous to Sloane, who having captured a prize was not inclined to let it go.
He attached a wire from the Wolraad Woltemade, and the long slow tow began. It took 12 days to reach Cape Town. Sloane remained aboard the Rio Assu for the duration, as he did at the pier for the six weeks following, during which the fire continued to flare up as the cargo was unloaded.
Once the hold was empty, Sloane oversaw temporary repairs to the main deck, reloaded undamaged cargo, and returned the ship to its owners in a condition that allowed for the onward voyage to Asia.
Sloane's team received a bonus. He was 31 years old. His capture of the Rio Assu was seen as a small affair, but perfectly executed and a promise of larger prizes to come. The business of maritime salvage is not hard to understand. Lloyd's of London stands at the heart of it, as it does of shipping generally.
Lloyd's is not Lloyds Bank, which is a bank. It is not Lloyd's Register, which is a risk-management organization. It is not Lloyd's List, which is a publication. And it is not even an insurance company, though it is often mistaken for one. Instead it is a forum in the City of London where brokers representing shippers wanting to hedge their risk meet with syndicates willing to underwrite that risk for a price.
Lloyd's vets the players, supervises the encounters, provides rules and information, and stands by with a central fund should an underwriter fail to meet its obligations.
The system dates back to , when it began in a London coffeehouse, called Lloyd's, where maritime traders gathered to swap information and bargain over vessels and their cargoes. The conversations were global from the start. The business was naturally wild. Beyond the standard problem of market swings, it had to contend with the special dangers inherent to seafaring.
Financing those risks was so important to world trade that at the coffeehouse it eventually became the only business being done.
Today, Lloyd's occupies a glass-and-steel building considered to be a masterpiece of modern design. It contains a dramatic glass-roofed atrium overlooked by open-office galleries and populated by hundreds of buttoned-down brokers and underwriters who sit in clusters under their group names, peering at flat-screens and murmuring into phones with a British calm that belies the intensity of the decisions they must make.
Marine coverage now constitutes only about 7 percent of the activity, but it continues to define the Lloyd's culture. Here's how it works. The owner goes to a Lloyd's broker, who negotiates basic coverage for the ship with the syndicates there. That coverage typically excludes liability for loss of cargo, pollution, and wreck removal. In the end, therefore, the ship is insured by a consortium, and Lloyd's is at the helm.
To control some risks, the consortium requires that the ship meet the standards of a classification society. Classification societies are non-governmental organizations, invented at Lloyd's in the 18th century, which oversee the technicalities of ship construction and operation.
There are at least 40 such organizations in the world, some with integrity. At that point Nick Sloane shows up with the Lloyd's Open Form and offers a tow in return for partial possession. They know Sloane and his reputation. The decision is purely financial, with no emotion involved. This is how the business is supposed to work, and often does.
But there is also a murkiness to the arrangement that sometimes comes into view. There are shipowners, agents, and salvors who believe it is only normal to game the system hard.
The simplest technique is to pay a crew to take an old ship out to sea and scuttle it. This may explain why ship sinkings increase when scrap-metal prices fall. The problem, however, is that the owners are reimbursed only for the value of the hull. Far better are the possibilities afforded by salvage, in which the value of the cargo is taken into account, and the ship returns to service after the deed is done.
It is widely assumed that a system of kickbacks exists by which certain unscrupulous tug companies, awarded a salvage contract, are expected to return a percentage of their gains to the shipowners who gave them the job. This leads to a recurring scam in which shipowners arrange to have a vessel break down in a convenient location, get it salvaged by friends, then repossess it and carry on to the original destination.
The underwriters in London are usually wise to these cases, but for lack of proof have to pay up. During the attack, its engine and pump rooms were nonsensically set on fire. After the pirates rifled the ship's safe, they and the crew escaped in separate directions, leaving the ship to drift. A Greek company got the salvage job and dispatched a team from Aden, who extinguished the fire and took the ship under tow.
Sloane was sent in to assist but is tight-lipped about the case, which remains in dispute. The record is nonetheless abundant. The pirates had arrived in a patrol boat and were dressed in Yemeni uniforms. Initially this was reported as a clever ruse by nefarious Somalis, but given that they had not done what pirates do—take the ship, take the cargo, take the crew—suspicions soon grew that the reverse was true, and that they were in fact Yemeni authorities pretending to be pirates.
A few days later a British insurance investigator named David Mockett inspected the ship and made the mistake of sending an e-mail expressing his opinion that the attack was a fraud. He wrote that he had scheduled a meeting for the following day that would prove it. He copied Sloane on the e-mail, along with his wife and a few others. It is widely presumed that the e-mail was intercepted or leaked. The next day a powerful bomb detonated beneath Mockett's car and killed him.
The Yemeni government blamed al-Qaeda. A year later, after an investigation by Scotland Yard, a detective testifying at a British inquest said he believed that Mockett had been killed for getting too close to the truth. By implication, Yemeni authorities were involved. Suspicions were further raised during the transfer of the cargo to another tanker when it was discovered that the Brillante Virtuoso may have been carrying junk oil worth barely more than half the declared value.
This time, it seems, the scheming had gone too far, and London has not yet paid out for the claim. The Greek salvage company, however, describes the Brillante Virtuoso operation as a success and reports that the ship was delivered back to its owners. In the late s, because of growing sensitivity to the health of the oceans, and the liability that results, particularly from oil spills, the marine-insurance industry decided to create an incentive for intervention even in cases where it is unlikely that ships can be saved.
The arrangement is complicated and does not preclude a much larger claim if the ship is saved. A few months later, Sloane's company, now called Smit Pentow, invoked it for the first time. It was winter in Cape Town. A ship reporting cracks in its hull dropped anchor about six miles offshore, near penguin breeding grounds.
The ship was a large bulk carrier named the Treasure, bound for Brazil with a load of iron ore. Its tanks contained 1, tons of bunker oil, 56 tons of marine diesel, and 64 tons of lubricating oil. When surveyors went aboard they discovered that 90 feet of plating was missing from the side of the hull and that a cargo hold was flooding, threatening to sink the ship at any moment.
Authorities ordered the Treasure to raise anchor immediately and head farther out to sea, but the crew refused and took to the lifeboats instead. The John Ross was in port and rushed out to hook up a tow, but the ship went down as the connection was being made. It sank fast, bow first, hit the ocean floor, feet below, and snapped in two, rupturing the fuel tanks. More than 1, tons of bunker oil rose to the surface and contaminated the penguin habitats.
The recovery took more than two months to accomplish. It involved removing the remaining oil from the submerged wreck, cleaning the waters and shores, and rescuing the penguins. To his surprise, Sloane, the hard-driving salvage master, found himself on the penguin side of things, working with environmentalists and about 12, volunteers to capture and save 40, exposed birds, half of whom had been soaked in oil. As the cleanup of the shores continued, the penguins were washed and dried, then trucked hundreds of miles up the coast, where they were released into the ocean to find their way home.
This they did with impressive determination, as indicated by the progress of electronic beacons attached to some of them. On the way, however, groups were distracted by an area rich with squid, and went into a feeding frenzy. The local fishermen went out with shotguns to protect the stock, and Sloane reacted by trying to call them off. His next encounter with environmentalists came about a year later. On September 5, , a large oceanic storm hit the Cape of Good Hope with violent winds and foot waves.
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