The Costa Concordia cruise ship wreck will start its final phase of an unprecedented $817 million salvage effort in June when it will be taken off Tuscany and moved off to a port to be disassembled, the Associated Press reported.
The timetable and the rundown of what would be needed for the ship to be refloated again was provided by Italy's civil protection chief and Costa Crociere officials at a news conference on Friday.
The conference was held just days before the second anniversary of the ship's January 13, 2012, grounding that killed 32 people, the AP reported. Piombino, Genoa, Palermo and Civitavecchia are some of the ports that are bidding to take in the wreck and dismantle it for scrap. Ports in France, Turkey, Britain and even China are also bidding for the job.
To limit potential environmental damage while the broken ship is in transit and to keep any economic benefits at home, the preference was to keep the project in Italy, said Andrea Orlando, Italy's environment minister, and Michael Thamm, head of Costa Crociere SpA.
The winning bid is expected to be decided in March, they said.
According to the AP, when the captain of Concordia took it off course in an apparent stunt to bring it closer to the island, the ship slammed into a reef off the island of Giglio. With a 70-meter (230-foot) gash in its hull, the ship lasted for an hour and finally capsized off Giglio's port.
Alleged manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all the passengers had been evacuated are some of the charged being faced by Captain Francesco Schettino. He said he is innocent and that he saved lives with the ship's final maneuvers, the AP reported.
Salvage operators in September righted the Concordia from its side and brought it to rest upright on a false seabed in a 19-hour engineering job. Crews have stabilized the ship since then and built its heavily damaged starboard side, which had borne the weight of the ship against underwater rocks, to be outfitted with giant tanks that will help float it, the AP reported.
