Costa Concordia salvage mission gives families hope for news of the missing

Costa Concordia salvage mission gives families hope for news of the missing

Costa Concordia salvage mission gives families hope for news of the missing, Nick Sloane – captain, senior salvage master, lover of pig roasts and hikes – is a gregarious tough guy who is not often lost for words. But when it came to talking about the moment when he was able to tell his 500-strong team of workers that they had managed to right the Costa Concordia after 19 nailbiting hours and 16 months of preparation, there were several seconds when the emotion was a bit much, even for him.

"We called out on the [internal] radio between all the vessels, and we said: "Zero four hundred hours. The Costa Concordia is upright and safely resting on the grout mattress and platforms. And then you could hear …" His voice caught. "Yeah, you could hear the guys were really chuffed. Everyone was jumping up and down. It was good."

Of course, the woman who asked if he was crying got a flat "no". But Sloane, the 52-year-old from Cape Town who is now an Italian hero, conceded that, on a day like this, a bit of emotion was not out of place.

From the moment the foghorn in Giglio Porto broke the news at 4am that the Concordia's parbuckling had been a success, emotions were running high all over – not just in the control panel on a barge from which Sloane and his so-called "magnificent 11" controlled the painstaking process by remote. As he and his multinational group of colleagues disembarked they were greeted with warm applause from islanders who remember only too well the night 32 people died in or beside their waters.

Firefighters clapped when, at a press briefing, civil protection agency head Franco Gabrielli confirmed the meaning of the foghorn's wail: for the first time since it ran aground in Tuscan waters in January last year, the 114,000-tonne cruise ship was vertical once more, resting securely on a false sea bottom of steel platforms.

After 20 months lying on its side the 300-metre long ship was suddenly upright and the full extent of the damage to its starboard side starkly visible from the seafront.

It seemed a ship of two halves: one white, with the clean lines of the floating palace it used to be; the other brown, sludge-strewn and horrifically disfigured, its middle a huge dent of mangled balconies and portholes.

Enrico Letta, Italy's prime minister, declared that the parbuckling was "a moment of great Italian pride".

"We have turned a page in the public image of our country which, at the time of the incident with the ship, was of flight from responsibility," he said, according to news agency Ansa.

And for the two sets of relatives arriving to see the wreck that could still contain the bodies of their loved ones, it was a day of pain, but also of "new hope".

Elio Vincenzi, whose wife Maria Grazia Trecarichi had been on the cruise with her daughter as a 50th birthday gift, said he was optimistic that divers would finally find her body.

But seeing the wreck upright for the first time had not been easy. "It was very painful. I had very strong emotions," he said. "When I saw it before on its side it was like a wounded animal. Now it's different. When we arrived, it was raining and it was like a dream; it looked like the ship was alive."

Standing on the harbour wall, Kevin Rebello, whose brother Russel is the other victim still missing, said that once a search was carried out, "we hope we will all be able to go home".

Gabrielli said the search for them would begin as soon as the wreck site was declared safe – within, he hoped, the "coming days".

Sloane, a man dubbed by local newspaper Il Tirreno as "the man of (im)possible missions", warned there were many challenges still to overcome in the most expensive salvage project in history, whose cost has already topped €600m (£500m) and will keep rising.

"There's still a bit of a rollercoaster ride to come," he said at a press conference, which he refused to start without his wife in the audience. "But if this [phase] did not go well then it would be worse, so, yes, it was essential that this plan worked. There's a lot of relief and I'm very happy my wife Sandra was there to share it with me. She was texting me saying, 'Come on, what's taking you so long?'"

She wasn't the only one. Although the parbuckling went to plan, it went on for a lot longer than expected, from 9am on Monday to 4am the next day. But Sloane, the senior salvage master for Titan, the US company co-ordinating the salvage with Italian firm Micoperi, said the results had proved better than they had hoped.

The "crucial moment", he said, came several hours into the operation when, with hydraulic jacks and chains exerting a force of 6,800 tonnes, the engineers managed finally to free the wreck from the reef on which it had become moulded. While the speed of the ship's rotation for the most of the process was roughly 3.5 degrees an hour, it reached around eight or nine degrees in the final phase, when gravity took over and the water-filled sponsons on the port side pushed it down on to the platforms.

In total, Sloane and his colleagues had turned the wreck 65 degrees. Both in terms of the huge size and precarious positioning of the vessel, the operation was unprecedented.

But Sloane said that, though significant, the damage was in accordance with what had been expected. For him, now, a holiday beckons with his wife of 24 years and their three children. No one in Giglio – or Italy – will begrudge him that.

Asked to reflect on the operation, shortly after he had woken from a much-needed sleep, he remarked, with some understatement: "To roll a ship of 300 metres – three football fields … there are some concerns that she's not going to follow together. But she did."

Armbands ahoy

Nick Sloane was clear: the job is not done yet and the salvage mission will not be over until the Costa Concordia is towed away from Giglio in one piece. "We haven't finished yet," he said. "This was a really important step, and really the most challenging one. We still have a lot of work to do."

Asked when the end date would come, he said it was not possible at this stage to set a timetable, and that it would definitely not be before spring next year.

"Certainly," he added, with a characteristic flourish, "by this time next year we all want to be playing golf or fishing or doing something completely different."

In order to get to the stage of the ship's removal, the engineers must overcome several challenges. First, they must wait until the authorities arrange for a thorough search of the wreck to try to locate the two victims still missing.

Then, they must evaluate the huge damage done to the starboard side and come up with a way of fixing more sponsons on to that part of the ship. The 11 sponsons already on the ship – large, steel boxes – were filled with water in the parbuckling last night.

But, when the ship comes to be refloated – the next major stage – they will play a crucial role by expelling that water and becoming, effectively, air-filled armbands giving the wreck buoyancy.