The crippled Costa Concordia cruise ship was pulled upright early Tuesday after a complicated, 19-hour operation to wrench it from its side where it capsized last year off Tuscany, with officials declaring it a "perfect" end to a daring and unprecedented engineering feat.
Shortly after 4 a.m., a foghorn wailed on Giglio Island and the head of Italy's Civil Protection agency, Franco Gabrielli, announced that the ship had reached vertical and that the operation t was complete.
Franco Porcellacchia, project manager for the Concordia's owner, Costa Crociere SpA, said it was "a perfect operation" with no environmental spill detected so far.
Applause rang out among firefighters in the tent where Gabrielli and other project engineers made the announcement.
The Concordia rammed into a reef of Giglio Island on Jan. 13, 2012, after the captain brought it too close to shore. It drifted, listed and capsized just off the island's port, killing 32 people. Two bodies were never recovered.
Dozens of the 4,200 passengers and crew were plucked to safety by helicopters or jumped into the sea and swam to shore.
The Concordia's captain is on trial for alleged manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship during the chaotic and delayed evacuation. Capt. Francesco Schettino claims the reef wasn't on the nautical charts for the liner's weeklong Mediterranean cruise.
The operation to right it had been expected to take no more than 12 hours, but dragged on after some initial delays with the vast system of steel cables, pulleys and counterweights. The final phase of the rotation went remarkably fast as gravity began to kick in and pull the ship toward its normal position.
Parbuckling is a standard operation to right capsized ships. But never before had it been used on such a huge cruise liner.
The ship is expected to be floated away from Giglio in the spring and turned into scrap.
The Concordia itself didn't budge for the first three hours after the operation began, engineer Sergio Girotto told reporters.
Original Print Headline: Concordia put upright after an initial delay
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