Engineers from 24 nations have successfully wrenched the hull of the wrecked Costa Concordia ship from the waters of Italy, after the cruise liner hit a reef near Giglio Island last year, resulting in 32 deaths and the shell of a cruise liner beached by the Tuscan shore for more than 12 months.
More than 500 engineers met in Italy to move the luxury liner from its side by 65 degrees to vertical, the Associated Press reported. For the first three hours, the ship didn't move an inch, according to engineer Sergio Girotto. It took 6,000 tons of pulleys and counterweights to detach the ship from the reef, in a method called parbuckling. This approach requires an intricate, multi-step plan: first, 48 cables are looped around the hull, then twenty-two hydraulic pumps exert pressure on the ship, pushing the carrier onto six platforms stationed underneath. ABC reported that the extraction is going smoothly, and soon, the ship will be upright and ready to tow to shore.
Images from underwater cameras depicted the side submerged beneath the sea as having "great deformation" - 115,000 tons of steel eroded by water and reef life.
A ship of this size has never been straightened in the water before.
32 of the 4,200 passengers aboard Costa Concordia were killed from the accident on January 13, 2012, but two of the bodies were never found. Some officials said their remains might still be underwater.
Nerves were high before the engineers got to work on the ship - a brutal storm temporarily delayed the righting of the ship until later in the morning. Experts were also unsure whether the ship would break beneath the pressure of the various implements used to push it off of its side.
"There is a little tension now," Giovanni Andolfi, a 63-year-old man living in the area who worked on tankers and cruise ships his whole life told AP as he stood nearby, watching the engineers. "The operation is very complex."
Despite the snafus, crews successfully managed to complete the first step of moving the wreckage out of the water, after 20 months of its remains being locked in the reef.
Andolfi called the engineers "the best brains in the field," and said he wanted to witness them finish up the extraction.
"I would like Giglio to return to what it was before, a beautiful place of uncontaminated nature," he told AP.
Watch additional live video of the extraction here.
