At roughly 04:00 local time this morning, the Costa Concordia was declared upright after reaching her rotation of 65 degrees.
In all the parbuckling operation took 19-hours to complete and now the vessel is once again upright you can clearly see the extent of the crushing damage to her starboard side.
Franco Gabrielli, the head of Italy’s Civil Protection Authority, said “the vessel was now sitting on a platform built on the sea bed.”
In the coming months the teams carrying out the salvage operation will have to examine just how damaged the starboard side of the ship is in order to decide how to proceed.
Franco Porcellacchia, a representative of the ship’s owners, Costa Crociere, said that part of the hull looked pretty bad, which might complicate the attachment of sponsons, large steel boxes, needed for the eventual re-floating. That is due to take place sometime in 2014, after which point the Costa Concordia will be towed away for scrapping.
Author: Danielle – (All Images AP)
CruiseMiss.com 
Wow – what a tragic thing to happen.
God bless the two undiscovered souls who now can be found and put to rest with some closure for the families.
All credit to those who spent months planning the righting of the capsized liner. An amazing feat of planning and engineering.
Seeing the damaged side shows the incredible weight of that huge ship, and is a stark reminder of the nightmare that terrible night of the sinking must have been.