Accommodation support for Costa Concordia salvage

The high numbers of people involved meant that a flexible offshore accommodation solution was required and as a result, the Ferguson Group was contracted to provide its Accommodation Service Vessel to house these workers.

The ASV Pioneer has spent the last 13 months in the Mediterranean Sea supporting the Costa Concordia salvage mission, providing offshore accommodation for up to 90 team members, including divers and salvage specialists.

The Pioneer’s large deck area was also used as an on board grout manufacturing plant, which produced around 30,000 tonnes of grout during the project. This was used by divers to help stabilise the cruise liner, before it was raised upright on to a steel platform.

The ASV Pioneer was introduced as part of Ferguson Group’s extensive fleet in 2011 and is currently configured for 120 people on board with the ability to increase. Accommodation includes two person cabins complete with en-suite facilities, galley, mess, gym, medic and recreational facilities. The vessel accommodation complex is manufactured to DNV 2.7-1/EN12079 standards and offers a large working open deck area measuring 1100m², with a load capacity of 15 tonnes/m².

The vessel’s flexible configuration and equipment capabilities means that the ASV Pioneer is particularly suited to projects in the energy industry and in May 2012, it completed its first contract in the renewables sector, a cable-laying project for a wind farm in the North Sea.

The project involved the installation of 140 wind turbines, with a total capacity of 500MW, enough to power around 530,000 homes. ASV Pioneer was specifically used to tow a plough, designed for simultaneous lay and burial of submarine cable systems in challenging soil types.

Mike Melville, commercial director at Ferguson Group said: “The ASV Pioneer is one of the most flexible offshore accommodation solutions in the market place and the open deck configuration means that it can be very quickly adapted to suit a wide range of equipment.

“Ferguson Group’s ASV is a very unique accommodation solution for the offshore industry which can be adapted to suit client requirements, rather than a fixed solution which offshore operators must work around.

“Securing the contract to provide accommodation and equipment support to the Costa Concordia mission was testament to ASV Pioneer’s flexibility, not only showing the capacity for different configurations, but also how it can be used across offshore projects in many industry sectors and in many global locations.”