The former Durban man tasked with salvaging the wreck of the Costa Concordia says everything is on track.
|||Cape Town - As the trial of Francesco Schettino, the captain accused of causing the Costa Concordia ship accident last year, resumed in an Italian court on Wednesday, the former Durban man tasked with salvaging the wreck said everything was on track for it to be righted in September.
Kearsney College old boy Nick Sloane, who now lives in Cape Town with his wife and two children, said the excitement was building around the site of wreck off the Tuscan island of Giglio, as his salvage team prepared to righ the ship by using rope slings.
He said four of the six large platforms to be used for the ship to be rolled on to had been built and the other two should be ready by the end of next month.
“The mooring is going very well now that we have summer,” he said from the wreck this week. “We have 500 people on the project at the moment, working 24 hours a day. We have carried out about 12 000 dives and shot more than 27 000 hours of footage.
“We hope to have it erect by the end of August and hopefully by the end of September we will get permission from authorities to go ahead and move it into the harbour,” he said.
Sloane said they would not be following the trial because they were too busy.
“We have little communication out here and we don’t even have TV. We are just focused on what we are doing,” he said.
The Costa Concordia - a luxury cruise ship more than twice as big as the Titanic - had 4 229 people on board when it struck an offshore reef near Giglio on the evening of January 13, 2012.
A total of 32 people died.
Sloane, who joined the salvage division of Safmarine after the 1983 Castello da Bellver tanker fire, has been involved in numerous salvage operations off the South African coast and elsewhere.
He now works for US-owned company Titan Salvage as a salvage master.
Sloane was working on a shipwreck off the coast of New Zealand last year when he got the call to salvage the Costa Concordia.
He said recovering the Concordia had been the most challenging project in his career.
“A lot of what we are doing has been done before, but never on this scale.
“If you add them all together, there has never been a project where all these things happened at the same time. The project is huge,” he said.
Meanwhile, Schettino’s defence requested a plea bargain deal at his trial this week, saying he was ready to serve three years and five months in prison.
The request was made by lawyer Domenico Pepe after an earlier plea bargain bid was thrown out by the judge in charge of preliminary investigations into the disaster.
The proceedings in the Tuscan town of Grosseto were scheduled to start on July 9, but were adjourned because of a lawyers’ strike.
So far, Schettino is the only defendant. He faces multiple charges including manslaughter, shipwreck and abandoning his vessel.
More than 400 witnesses are expected to be heard, with the legal case likely to drag on for years. If convicted, Schettino could appeal twice before the final enforcement of a guilty ruling.
In a related development, a judge is expected to decide on Saturday whether four other crew members and one manager from cruise line, Costa Crociere, should face trial or should have plea bargain agreements accepted.
Costa Crociere has also agreed to pay a e1 million (R12.8m) fine in a plea bargain agreement. Its owners, Carnival, are expected to face a separate trial in California, starting on Tuesday.
Daily News