Concordia: the last act

Genoa - “Starboard prow tugboat, half throttle ahead to the north.” The tugboat carries out the order. It hauls, with half of the power at its disposal, to the north. On board the Concordia, to guide it on its last voyage, elevated and protected by a weir of innocent pipes, is John Gatti, the chief pilot of the port of Genoa. He gives orders with his radio. The sky is clear, the heat infernal. Beneath him, the body of the ship has been stripped of everything, it is now only the shell of the ship that ran aground off the Island of Giglio on 13 January 2012, taking 32 lives. The metal structures, naked, raw and ghostly. Even further down, fifteen metres below the platform from which the commands are being given, the sea is as flat as a table. Gatti is the last man to board the tragic ship. He did the same during the previous phase, from the breakwater at the PSA Terminal to the former Superbasin area in the Port of Genoa in May, 2015. But then, although wounded and disfigured, it still looked like a ship: “Then I took shelter in an area that was underwater for a very long time, I found an old deckchair, and at that moment I certainly felt the spirit of the wreck.” The spirit of a ship that was “too young to end like that,” as the people of the port say when they look at what remains. It sailed for only six years, launched on 7 July, 2006, in the port of Civitavecchia.

THE GASH THAT WAS NEVER CLOSED

Now everything is different, the spirit of the ship is simply no longer there. The Concordia looks like an enormous and ghostly barge that moves slowly, they have cut off part of its stern and part of its prow. It was impossible to close the sixty-metre gash produced by Schettino’s disastrous manoeuvre, and so they built a sort of a jacket around it, like a “bathtub that pushes it in the right direction.” It is a push upwards that prevents water from coming in again. Months were spent studying this final manoeuvre that brought the ship to its final resting place. In six months, the cruise ship that was the main player in one of the greatest tragedies of the sea will no longer exist. Its 114,000 tonnes will be dismantled, 82% of the material recycled. At nine o’clock sharp, from this privileged point of view, at the highest point on the wreck, one sees the last two ferries glide away: then the port will be blocked off as an impassable red zone until the end of the operation. The operation starts at nine-fifteen: “Raising it from the gap between the prow and stern caissons was easy,” the chief pilot said, “and the trip doesn’t present any difficulties.” They had estimated it would take eight hours to reach basin number four of the Naval Repairs area, its intended destination. The most delicate moment: the giant hull must enter with only 40 centimetres on its starboard side, the same on the port side, and the same beneath to worm its way into that extremely tight space. On either side is an engineer with a telemeter: they are measuring the distance second by second, so that the manoeuvre is as precise as possible. But it works the first time without any problem. The journey is complete at 11:20, by the fastening of four mooring cables. Of course there are still many tasks to complete and the completion of the operation is only officially announced at 6 PM: “The ship is secured in the shipyard and positioned on the notches.”

NO PROBLEM

The basin is completely emptied of water. Opposite, from the dock at the head of the Cotton Warehouses, Admiral Giovanni Pettorino is watching every moment of the operation. Everything goes like clockwork, but he admits: “I won’t rest until it is all done, as a matter of fact, until the ship is completely dismantled in a few months.” The wisdom mixed with superstition that is typical of men of the sea. In the end it all goes very well. Pettorino praises the entire Genoese port community, the Civil Defence Force, and the Port Services. “There is pleasure in seeing this work done,” he reveals, “but never joy, because we can never forget that 32 families never saw their loved ones return home after the tragedy.”