Tag Archives: Sicily

The stretching of MSC Sinfonia is underway

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MSC Cruises’ €200m Renaissance Program will see the second ship in drydock for the next 10 weeks as the MSC Sinfonia arrived in Sicily for her stretching.

Fincantieri’s marine engineers will carefully bisect MSC Sinfonia’s hull, after which the two halves of the ships will be slowly drawn apart.

On January 20-21 they will insert a prebuilt 2,200-ton, 24-metre midsection containing 193 extra cabins. Then they will refit and renew much of the ship’s interior, bringing an enhanced sense of comfort and space.

On Jan. 9, the new midsection was floated into the shipyard and hauled into the drydock area where MSC Sinfonia will remain for the duration of her stay.

Once the work is complete and sea trials completed, the larger MSC Sinfonia will weigh anchor from the shipyard on March 25 for Genoa, from where she’ll begin for her maiden cruise to Ajaccio, Barcelona and Marseille.

MSC Sinfonia will feature new purpose-built areas for children created in partnership with Chicco and LEGO,  and a new Baby Club, Mini Club, Young Club and Teens Club. MSC Cruises has also reimagined the onboard dining experiences, keeping the buffet open 20 hours per day and installing fresh new dining spaces, a brand new lounge and an extended restaurant.

The ship’s MSC Aurea Spa will also be enriched with additional massage areas, and a new outdoor spray park will be added on deck 13 – an exciting series of playful water features and jets.

The remainder of the Renaissance Program will progress according to the following schedule:

•    MSC Opera: 2 May to 4 July 2015
•    MSC Lirica: 31 August to 2 November 2015

MSC Cruises currently carries roughly 40,000 guests per day, but by 2022 will double its capacity to 80,000 guests a day – 3.4 million per year – once the Renaissance Programme is completed and the last of seven planned ships is delivered.

 

The curious art of ‘stretching’ a cruise ship

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Things didn’t go entirely to plan when Jane Archer watched the “stretching” – the pulling apart and inserting a new section – of MSC Armonia in Palermo

Video of MSC Armonia being cut in half

Over the past five days Italian shipyard workers in Palermo, Sicily, have been preparing to insert a new pre-built section of ship into an exisitng MSC cruise ship, Armonia. They have spent the past week cutting the 60,000gt vessel in half ahead of its “stretching”. The ship is cut just in front of the funnel (slightly behind the mid-way point) and then separated so the new section can be inserted. The hull is then resealed.

When completed, the ship will be 24 metres longer than before and have an additional 193 cabins.

During a visit to the yard yesterday a group of us stood in the blazing September sunshine to watch the next stage – the ship being pulled apart and a new section angled into place. The stretch should have started at 9am, but by 10am we were informed of a problem with the 22 “skid shoes” that would pull the ship’s front section forward.

Extra piece of the ship being rolled into dry dock at Palermo, Italy (photo: MSC Cruises)

The “shoes” were made by Fagioli, the Italian company responsible for uprighting the Costa Concordia last year (an operation known as parbuckling), and use a system of hydraulics to lift and pull the 14,000-ton forward section 23.7 metres along tracks at the bottom of the yard’s dry dock.

“It’s a bit like watching the ancient Egyptians using modern technology,” commented one onlooker who had flown in from Canada to see the skid shoes in action (they are to be used for moving parts of an off-shore platform his company is building in South Korea).

Suddenly there was movement. It was slow, inches at a time, with regular stops for safety checks. At the same time, the 2,200-ton new section, which was at the back of the dry dock, began to move into position.

The section was built at the shipyard, took three-and-a-half months to complete and in good maritime tradition was blessed by a madrina, or godmother. If all goes according to plan welding into place will begin on September 25 ahead of the interior refit.

The extension will not only making Armonia bigger (the additional cabins will take passenger count from 1,566 to 1,952) and add 90 balcony cabins, it will also create space for a water park, a crèche, teenager clubs and a new library. Fire safety and fuel consumption will also be improved.

These are cutting-edge technologies,” Emilio La Scala, general manager of MSC’s technical department, told me, I assume with no pun intended. “We need to upgrade these ships to stay competitive.”

MSC Armonia was cut in two and a new section inserted (photo: MSC Cruises)

Armonia’s three sister ships, Sinfonia, Opera and Lirica will all be stretched at the Palermo yard over the next 12 months. In all, the work will cost €200/£159 million – a tidy sum but significantly less than the cost of building a new ship (Royal Caribbean International’s Quantum of the Seas is costing $1 billion). Each ship will take approximately nine weeks to lengthen and refit, with the new-look MSC Armonia sailing out of the shipyard on November 17.

Back at the yard progress was slow. With just a metre gap between front and back our group was called to a press conference. We returned two hours later to find that nothing had happened. The skid shoes did not malfunction; we were told, but balance technicalities took longer than expected.

“The workers are at lunch,” project manager Georgio Pollina said. “We will continue while it is light and finish tomorrow.”

As most of the media was flying out that evening, I suspect that was news for the cruise line, too.

Italy cruise ship Costa Concordia aground near Giglio

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Italy cruise ship Costa Concordia aground near Giglio

The Independent’s travel editor Simon Calder: ”It is unbelievable … that this should happen to a 21st Century ship”

Three people are confirmed dead after a cruise ship carrying more than 4,000 people ran aground off Italy.

There were s

cenes of panic as the Costa Concordia hit a sandbar on Friday evening near the island of Giglio and listed about 20 degrees. People reached land by lifeboats but some swam ashore.

Rescue teams have been going from cabin to cabin, searching for survivors.

Italians, Germ

ans, French and British were among the 3,200 passengers. There were also 1,000 crew on board.

Helicopters evacuated the last 50 people on the deck who were in a “worsening” situation.

Three people were confirmed dead, Italian coast guard officials said on Saturday morning – fewer than the six or eight deaths reported by Italian media earlier.

Costa Concordia with hole in its hull (14 January 2011)The Costa Concordia was carrying more than 3,200 passengers when it ran aground off the Italian coast

Mediterranean cruise

The Costa Concordia had sailed earlier on Friday from Civitavecchia port near Rome for a Mediterranean cruise, due to dock in Marseille after calling at ports in Sicily, Sardinia and Spain.

One thousand passengers were Italian, with 500 Germans and 160 French.

Cabin steward Deodato Ordona says the ship suddenly began to tilt.

Some “tens” of British passengers are believed to have been on board, said the UK Foreign Office, which is sending a team to the scene.

Some passengers told the Associated Press the crew had failed to give instructions on how to evacuate the ship. An evacuation drill was scheduled for Saturday afternoon.

“It was so unorganised, our evacuation drill was scheduled for 17:00 (16:00 GMT),” Melissa Goduti, 28, from the US told AP. “We had joked what if something had happened today.”

‘Groaning noise’

Passengers were eating dinner on Friday evening, when they heard a loud bang, and were told that the ship had suffered electrical problems, one passenger told Italy’s Ansa news agency.

“We were having supper when the lights suddenly went out, we heard a boom and a groaning noise, and all the cutlery fell on the floor,” said Luciano Castro.

Passenger Mara Parmegiani told Italian media there were “scenes of panic”.

Costa Concordia

  • Entered service in 2006
  • Built by Fincantieri in Italy at a cost of 450m euros (£372m; $570m)
  • Capacity for 3,780 passengers
  • 1,500 cabins, including 12 suites, five restaurants and 13 bars
  • Four swimming pools and five Jacuzzi whirlpool baths
  • A 6,000 sq m (64,600 sq ft) spa with gym, sauna, Turkish bath and solarium
  • Sports pitch, cinema, theatre, casino and disco

Source: Costa Cruises and cruise industry websites

“We were very scared and freezing because it happened while we were at dinner so everyone was in evening wear. We definitely didn’t have time to get anything else. They gave us blankets but there weren’t enough,” she said.

The 290-metre (950 ft) vessel ran aground, starting taking in water and listing by 20 degrees, the local coast guard said.

Orders were given to abandon ship, Deodato Ordona, a cabin steward on the Costa Concordia, told the BBC.

“We announced a general emergency and took passengers to muster stations,” he said.

“But it is hard to launch the lifeboats, so they moved to the right side of the ship, and they could launch.”

Costa Concordia seen from land (14 January 2011)The cruise operators thanked the authorities and citizens of the island of Giglio for rescuing those on board the Costa Concordia

Hypothermia

Elderly passengers were crying, said Mr Ordona, adding that he and some others jumped into the sea and swam roughly 400 metres to reach land.

Rescued passengers were accommodated in hotels, schools and a church on Giglio, a resort island 25km (18 miles) off Italy’s western coast.

Most have now been moved to the mainland, Elizabeth Nanni from Giglio’s tourist information service told the BBC.

“Usually there are 700 people on the island at this time of year, so receiving 4,000 and some in the middle of the night wasn’t easy,” she said. “Some people jumped in the sea so they had hypothermia.”

Searches are still going on for “possible missing people”, regional official Giuseppe Linardi told the Italian broadcaster RAI.

Once the search of the cabins above the waterline has been completed, scuba divers will then check the decks which were submerged by the crash.

map

Coast guard official Francesco Paolillo, a local coast guard official, told the AFP news agency there was a 30m hole in the ship but that it was too early to say what exactly had happened.

“We think this happened as a result of sailing too close to an obstacle like a reef,” he said.

Costa Cruises, the company which owns the ship, said it could not yet say what had caused the accident.

“The gradual listing of the ship made the evacuation extremely difficult,” a statement said. “The position of the ship, which is worsening, is making more difficult the last part of the evacuation.

“We’d like to express our deepest gratitude to the coastguard and other emergency services, including the authorities and citizens of the island of Giglio, who did their best in saving and helping the passengers and crew.”

Two years ago, a Costa Cruises ship crashed into a dock at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, killing three members of the crew.