{{After rescuing a burning ship from pirate-infested waters off Yemen and a sinking oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, South African salvage master Nick Sloane faces his biggest test off an idyllic Mediterranean island.}}
The 52-year-old says the attempt to raise the Costa Concordia cruise ship from its watery grave, due to begin on Monday, is his “most challenging” yet in a career that has taken him to six continents and two warzones.
The Zambia-born Sloane was flown to the Italian island of Giglio last year from New Zealand, where he was working on a spill from the MV Rena oil tanker, for the biggest ever salvage operation of a passenger ship.
He has led an international operation with 500 salvage workers including divers, welders and engineers operating 24 hours a day around the rusting 290-metre (951-foot) hulk, which is bigger than the Titanic.
When the lifting of the 114,500-tonne ship gets under way, Sloane will be the one giving the commands from a control room on the shore and monitoring the unprecedented operation through eight monitors.
The ruddy salvage master hit a low point last year when storms hampered the operation and there were serious difficulties drilling into the granite seabed to install a metal platform to hold the ship stable.
“There was a lot of questioning. ‘Are you sure it’s going to work?’ ‘This is crazy!’” he remembers.
Work has sped up since then and Sloane has said he is confident of success, while remaining realistic
The most serious risk is buckling in the hull as the luxury liner is dragged upright, which Sloane has compared to a “banana” effect — the extent of which will only become clear as the operation is underway.
“There’s a lot of unknown factors about the ship. We’ve made a lot of assumptions,” he admits.
Sloane has warned that the hull is slowly compressing in on itself and that now is the last chance to lift the Costa Concordia before it collapses too much.
“You can’t afford to wait. Time is your worst enemy,” he says, warning about the large swells expected once winds known as the sirocco hit the island in autumn.
{wirestory}
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