CONCORDIA
January 2013, The wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise liner lies on rock in the port of Isola del Giglio. She ran aground on January 13th, 2012 and one year later, Titan/Micoperi’s salvage crews work day and night to refl oat the ship in order to tow it away from the environmentally sensitive area to be scrapped.
Photo Credit: MALAVOLTA FRANCESCO/SIPA/1301131959
CRITICAL CONCERNS CONSIDERED T is is not your typical salvage operation, and innovative ideas for removal were a requisite. Foschi pointed out that the Titan Salvage/ Micoperi proposal best fulfi lled the project’s main objectives, including removal of the wreck in one piece, minimal risk, and minimal environmental impact, among others. Likewise, environmental concerns are driving the removal strategy devised by Titan Salvage and Micoperi. Rescuing the vessel as a whole, rather than in parts, ensures the least amount of damage to the marine environment—but poses perhaps the greatest diffi culty from an operational standpoint. T e solution they’ve come up with is to parbuckle—or rotate to an upright position—the partially submerged luxury vessel and tow it away. T e time-consuming, multi-phase process must be completed before storms strike and splinter the Costa Concordia. Not surprisingly, wire rope is essential to the parbuckling eff ort. While racing against time, the elements, and countless
unknowns, Titan Salvage/Micoperi is also contending with what’s been deemed one of the riskiest, most complex, and—with an estimated cost of well over $400 million—most expensive salvage projects of its kind.
And that’s not all: for the parbuckling operation to succeed, it must be accomplished in one attempt.
UNKNOWN FORCES AT WORK In spite of the careful preparations and diligent progress, no one is 100 percent sure that the multifaceted project will be successful. Because of the ship’s tilted position, workers have been unable to
measure, fi rst-hand, the extent of damage to the Concordia’s interior structural integrity; instead, engineers have relied on technology to hypothesize outcomes. “T e condition of the internal structure of the Concordia is based on assumptions of damage that has not been sighted, but that has been ‘modeled’ after review by a large team of engineers,” explains Captain Nicholas Sloane, Senior Salvage Master for the project. “T ese assumptions always mean that the actual structure of the Concordia— and her reaction to the parbuckling forces—shall be diff erent to that in the computer model, and these diff erences shall add to the risks of the whole operation.” Forces such as weather and sea conditions add to the long list
of unknowns that must be considered. “Weather factors on the day of the operation are unknown at present, but we have to have
WIRE ROPE EXCHANGE
MARCH-APRIL 2013
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