Italy races to remove oil from crashed cruise liner

Just ten days ago, the Costa Concordia was a luxury liner cruising the Mediterranean coast. Now it poses a huge threat to a stretch of pristine coastline in Tuscany, as fears grow that the stricken ship could leak heavy fuel from its tanks. A specialist team from the Netherlands, known as Smit, is on the scene, getting ready to begin work on pumping away the oil. They arecurrently waiting for the go-ahead from the Italian authorities to begin this complex and potentially dangerous operation. CCTV is the only television crew to be allowed access to film the barge acting as a staging area for the operation. Our correspondent Vanessa Mock reports from Giglio. These are some of the most specialised divers in the world. They are engineers who work deep under water on ships and oil rigs. They’ve been drafted into Giglio to prevent an environmental catastrophe from the Concordia, the 8000 ton vessel that capsized more than one week ago. Some of its fuel tanks are positioned deep inside the vessel. But the crew are undaunted by the challenge ahead. Divers will plunge to the ships hull, carrying heavy drills to literally cut their way into the fuel tanks. "The divers go in the sea with the Smit frame, they go down. divers place the material the cutting engine, then have 50 minutes to drill, then come out and then in 3 minutes they have to be in the chamber for decompression illnesses." The cruise liner holds 2300 tons of fuel and its slowly slipping further along sea bed, increasing the risk that one of its 14 fuel tanks could get punctured. "With every day that passes, the risk of an oil leak grows. The Concordia contains an oil that is extremely thick and potent. And would devastate wildlife and coastline here." Much of this stretch of the Tuscan coastline is an area of outstanding natural beauty. It supports wildlife and tourism. But the Italian authorities are not giving the go ahead to the drilling because they are worried the ship is too unstable. "We don’t yet know enough, if the ship is moving due to the tide, winds or something else." But the data is conflicting and the Dutch crew on the crane barge have their own monitoring equipment and they say are ready to drill. "Its a different ship, but a ship is still a ship and its our jobs." Meanwhile, there are still plenty of open questions as to how it was even possible for this accident to happen. And environmental groups are calling for lessons to be learned. "What happened was human error, the hull was ripped open. It was madness. But still, its clear there should be more controls on shipping in the Mediterranean." It’s likely to take more than many weeks to drain the Concordia of all its oil – an operation that will remain risky throughout "One of the bridges could break, the ship could move and oil could still seep out." So time is of the essence. But for now, all they can do is wait.