Operation to raise Bulgaria from riverbed underway

RT -

Divers have ended the work on sealing the sunken Bulgaria passenger ship, and the lifting operation has started. Bulgaria sank in minutes on July 10 killing at least 114 people.

"It is a long process. It will take not one hour," an official of the Transport Ministry said.

After the sunken Bulgaria motor ship has been raised, it will be tugged to the Kuibyshevskaya repair and maintenance base located near the Kuybyshev Reservoir [a reservoir of the middle Volga in the Russian republic of Tatarstan], Deputy Transport Minister Viktor Olersky, who is overseeing the operation, told the Interfax news agency late on Saturday.

“The whole lifting operation consists of four phases,” Olersky said. “Phase one is to fix the hoists; phase two, to put the sunken vessel on the even keel; phase three, to raise the vessel and finally phase four ,to transport the ship to the dock,” explained Olersky.

Water removal will begin when the first two decks emerge.

Seventy-seven people (among them 49 divers) and 19 ships are taking part in the salvage operation. All in all, more than 800 people are involved in raising Bulgaria from the Volga bed.

So far the operation headquarters, which is investigating the accident, has no theories.

"Initially we thought that its port side bumped against some obstacle under water, but it turned out that there was no damage. So far I cannot even assume why the vessel sank.We will see when we raise it," Olersky said.

Russian Emergencies Minister Sergey Shoigu is at the tragedy site. He has arrived to supervise personally the salvage operation of the vessel that sank not far from Kazan.

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