Costa Concordia to be salvaged by US firm

Dallas Sun (ANI) Saturday 11th February, 2012

An American company is likely to salvage the capsized cruise ship Costa Concordia, which ran aground off the Italian island of Giglio in late January.

The Costa Concordia's insurance company has invited Bisso Marine, a fifth-generation family business in New Orleans and Houston that has salvaged some of the world's biggest shipwrecks since 1980, to the ship's wreckage.

"This barge averages 300 days a year doing salvage work. With enough time and money you can do any job," CBS News quoted Bisso Marine's head Beau Bisso, as saying.

According to the report, Costa Concordia could become the most complicated marine salvage operation in history and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

The ship is 115,000 tons, so big that the salvage equipment wouldn't fit around it and so, according to Bisso, one literally has to cut up the ship, chunk by chunk.

Removing all the Concordia's cut pieces by crane could take more than a year.

According to the report, efforts to salvage the capsized cruise were delayed again on Friday, due to unpredictable Mediterranean weather. (ANI)