Costa-Concordia

We all have watched the movie Titanic or have at least heard the story of the movie, but how many of you know about Costa-Concordia? The Costa-Concordia is a ship of length 290.2 m and a capacity of 4890 including the crew. The ship has 13 decks and each named after a European state. The ship started its voyage on 14 July 2006.

On 22nd October 2008, due to heavy winds the ship was pushed against the dock, crashing its bow the front of the ship’s hull, luckily no one was harmed and the repair was made soon. The superstition that Friday the 13th is a bad omen has a lot of instances to prove it; the accident on 13 January 2012 is also an addition to it. The Costa-Concordia hit a rock which weighs about 6 tons off an island named Isola-del Giglio. The collision caused a 53 meter dent across 3 compartments of the engine room. This caused a loss in power so no propulsion. After some time due to strong winds the ship was pushed to the island and it rested on a small underwater mountain peak. The evacuation of the ship took more than six hours with 32 fatalities.

The Titan salvaging team with help from MICOPERI started the salvaging process. That was considered the most expensive and most difficult salvaging operation in the history of salvaging projects. Their plan was to add steel boxes to the side of the ship that was on top of the surface of the water and to make it stand vertical. A base for the 60,000 tone ship to rest on was drilled into the mountain peak with holes of diameter 8 feet. Both the teams were scared about the weather because strong waves and winds can cause the ships structure to collapse and break or lose it stability and fully submerge. After facing a lot of struggles and criticism the Costa-Concordia was brought to a vertical position on 17th September 2013. Both the teams worked for 19 hours continuously to bring the ship to a vertical position because; the process cannot be stopped in the middle once it has been started. With a big relief the teams had their next mission, to re-float the ship and tow it to Genoa for scrap. On 23rd July 2014, the ship was afloat again. With 14 ship escort the ship reached the port on 27th July 2014. The cost for the entire process was approximately 2 billion US dollars.