What to do with a 450-million-euro vessel?

The Costta Concordia can take up to 4 thousand passengers and is worth 450 million euro

Since a few days now, the 450-million-euro cruise ship Costa Concordia is sinking deeper into the sea before Italy's Tuscan coast. As chances sink, that the rescue divers will find the still missing people alive in the vessel, other problems and questions arise. Is there a high risk of environmental damage due to the tons of diesel oil in the ship? Will it be possible to rescue the cruise ship or will it be declared as a total loss? How will ingenieur's remove the super-size ship?


BBC-news has taken different possible szenarios into account:

1) Before it is possible to remove or try to rescue the ship specialists have to figure out how much damage the rock, which the ship hit in this fatal night, has made. Moreover fears grow that diesel could flew out of the vessel and in this case it will be the first priority to cease the dangerous liquid from flowing into the sea. The major of the island nearby has called the vessel an "environmental-time-bomb" and hopes that it will be possible to pump the fuel out.

2) As the this enormously huge ship is worth 450 million euro, the owners maybe will try to save the whole, or at least part of it. In this case, the vessel must be brought into an upright position. It may be possible to use air filled balloons for this purpose and once brought into an upright position, the ship could be brought away by tugs. Nevertheless, if it is not possible to fix the damage made by the rock on the bottom of the ship, this method may not work. On BBC they report that there was a similar rescue mission in 1987, but in fact this ship was only a quarter of the size of the Costa Concordia. But not only the big size of the ship can be a problem when trying to save it. Given the huge damage, it may be just cut into pieces and taken away.



3) No matter if it will be possible to save the ship or not, personal belonging of the passengers and crew members have to be rescued our of the vessel. Moreover there is a huge amount of food on the ship, which will start to smell after a while and can't be just left in the sea. Furthermore the owner of the cruise ship will definitely try to save at least parts of the ship, the interieur and expensive devices.



4) What about insurance?

What's the deal with insurance?

• A normal salvage operation to recover a ship is paid for by the ship's insurers
• But if a ship becomes a write-off and has very residual value under scrap, then the wreck removal operation is paid for by those underwriting the liabilities of the ship owner

Source: International Salvage Union

No matter what the owners of the Costa Concordia will decide, in the end the tragedy of this incident is not the fact, that a cruise ship worth this enormous amount of money is maybe lost forever. The tragedy is, that an uncertain number of people died on this ship and a huge number of passengers and crew members who survived will always remember this terrible night when they had to experience such a terrible event.

for further information: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16573312

r.s.