Search For Body As Costa Concordia Refloated

The Man Who Raised Costa Concordia

Updated: 6:30am UK, Tuesday 17 September 2013

By Tom Kington, on Giglio

The man who raised the Costa Concordia was given a hero's welcome on Tuesday by colleagues and residents of the island of Giglio, where the cruise ship capsized 20 months ago.

After running a control room on a barge near the wrecked vessel, salvage master Nick Sloane was greeted by a cheering crowd in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday as he returned to Giglio port after the successful 19-hour operation to right the ship.

Around 100 members of the 500-strong salvage team toasted the 52-year-old South African salvage veteran with beer and prosecco outside a café on the quayside, shortly after the Costa Concordia was pulled upright onto undersea platforms with giant pulleys.

"This has been the most satisfying job of my life," said DJ Degraaff, 35, a Dutch salvage master. "It's been a hard job but now we are relaxed and satisfied. The ship is resting and that was the goal."

Mr Degraaff said his biggest concern as the ship was rolled upright was that her bilge tanks would collapse. "But we had reinforced them and they held," he said.

There would be no time off now, he said, since work must now start on adding flotation tanks to the starboard side of the ship before she can be refloated and towed away from Giglio.

But Denny Hoffschlag, 34, a Dutch diver, said there was a "lot of joy" among the salvage team after righting the ship. "This has given me goosebumps," he said.

Mr Sloane was accompanied on the quayside by Rich Habib, CEO of Titan Salvage, which won the contract to raise the Costa Concordia.

"The stakes were so high, but it went just the way we planned it," said Mr Habib. The so-called parbuckling did last longer than predicted, 19 hours compared to the 12 forecast, something Mr Habib put down to the need to use slightly more force in the pulleys than had been predicted.

"It needed more oomph," he said.

Habib also said that after inspecting the side of the ship he had seen that the two granite outcrops on which the boat had rested for 20 months had not pierced the hull of the ship. "The steel of the ship compacted on the rocks rather than being pierced by it," he said.

The care taken in raising the Costa Concordia without breaking it up had been done to respect the surrounding martime park, in contract to the common salvage practise of blowing up vessels said Habib. "It's a little bit easier to blow things up," he said.

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