The BBC website has time-lapse photography showing the salvage operation for the Costa Concordia. Pretty cool, I love a bit of time-lapse.
Thanks for the link Charley. Holy hell, her starboard side took a beating!
The damage is almost entirely from the lift cables.
Oh I agree that the cables, pulling from the port side, scraped/damaged the starboard side somewhat, but I humbly contest the parbuckling of the ship did
most of the damage. I suggest the rocking motion of the ship from the currents for the last 20 months did most of the damage to the starboard side.
Sorry, missed edit window. I meant to say the rocking from the weather/waves did most of the damage to the starboard side. The current, not so much.
I was wondering, why is the ship still way under the normal water line? Those white boxes on the side of the ship are white metal caissons filled with water, more caissons will be added to the other side, then the water will be removed from the boxes to raise the ship to a normal waterline.
It’s because it is filled with water and water weighs.
It looks like much of the hull plating was removed on the port side, to mount the sponsons directly onto framing members. That would mean all of the buoyancy for the tow to drydock would be from the sponsons, with the hull remaining water-filled below the surface. I would hope everything loose, including the last 2 bodies, would have been removed beforehand. Of course, mounting the starboard sponsons is not going to be quite as simple, given the ship’s condition, but the greatest damage there appears to be to the superstructure and not the hull.
It also appears the funnel, with its huge Costa logo, got cut off some time ago so it wouldn’t appear in photos (as if that would really help, marketingwise). But the logo on the bottom of each swimming pool still shows up in every picture of the parbuckling operation. Just as an aside, it used to be common to paint out the airline logo on any crashed airliner before the news photogs could get there, too.
Nice username post combo, 
but it was a rhetorical question.