Greece has ordered the removal of a cruiseship that sank off the Aegean island of Santorini more than ten years ago.
Merchant shipping minister Panagiotis Kouroublis published on Friday a letter telling coastguards and local authorities to set in motion the removal of the 22,000-gt Sea Diamond (built 1986).
The vessel went down in April 2007 after hitting rocks just off Santorini, one of the world’s top tourism destinations. Two French passengers were killed.
Kouroublis’s letter contains no provision on who would pay to remove the wreck.
Knowledgeable sources speaking to TradeWinds estimate the operation would cost hundreds of million of US dollars and that its environmental risks may outweigh its potential benefits.
Fuel from the Sea Diamond’s wreck was removed as early as in 2009. In 2011, Greece’s then government said it could not afford to remove the wreck and that owning company Louis Cruise Lines would have to cover the cost of any such operation.
Kouroublis may have revived the issue to deflect criticism of the way he handled a much more recent sinking – that of the 3,200-dwt tanker Agia Zoni II (built 1972), which went down just off the Athens coast last month.
The incident caused a relatively small oil spill. Its compensation bill, however, may nevertheless run up to $70m, since four kilometres of commercially valuable Athens coastline were polluted.
