FLORENCE, ITALY – A laurel wreath was lowered in the water Monday, January 13, 2014, at the site of the Costa Concordia, two years after the mammoth cruise ship rammed into a rock formation on Tuscany’s Island of Giglio, killing 32 people on board and injuring hundreds more.
The captain, Francesco Schettino, currently on trial for multiple manslaughter and dereliction of duty, saying the shipwreck had caused “deep grief and indelible pain for all of us”.
Costa agreed to pay a one-million-euro fine to settle potential criminal charges in April. A group of 30 shipwreck survivors staged a sit-in at Schettino’s trial hearing on Monday. A lawyer for the group demanded greater accountability for Costa Cruises and accused the company of having a greater responsibility than Schettino for the disaster.
The entire project to remove the stricken Concordia from the island of Giglio has already cost more than 600 million euros and its impact has been enormous, he told a news conference last week. Removal of the Costa Concordia cruise liner that sank off the coast of Tuscany in January 2012 will begin in June: 12 ports and companies from at least six different nations are bidding for the job of salvaging the enormous cruise liner destroyed in Italy’s worst maritime disaster since the Second World War. The government would prefer a national bid for the job, with Italian ports in Piombino, Genoa, Palermo and Civitavecchia all in contention.
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