Almost one hundred meters long, 2 thousand tons of tonnage, effectively abandoned by the shipowner in December 2019. For five years the merchant ship Lira has been in complete disrepair in pier 1 bis of the port of Olbia. The cargo vessel also constitutes a problem from an environmental point of view, because the shipowner, a Turkish maritime operator, is completely disinterested in the ship.
The merchant ship Lira was left at the mercy of the sea, along with a dozen sailors of the crew, in front of Ustica and without fuel and in distress, it arrived pushed by the currents to the coast of northern Sardinia. The tugboats of the Maritime Directorate of Olbia towed it to port, avoiding the disaster. Now the Court of Tempio has put the cargo up for auction, ruling in favor of the sailors of the Lira who are asking for compensation. They were abandoned in Olbia from December 2019 to September 2020.
And that's not all, because the ghost cargo is also creating problems for the Regional Port Authority. The Lira is unduly occupying a dock on Isola Bianca without the shipowner ever having paid a cent, we're talking about a debt of half a million euros. And then there's the environmental risk that the shipowner, if it exists, is completely uninterested in. In the documents of the civil case underway in Tempio, we read that "A corrosion phenomenon can almost certainly be started due to galvanic currents and there is already a slight lowering of 20 centimeters of the waterline and possible infiltration of rainwater from the deck which, due to deterioration, no longer guarantees the watertightness of the areas communicating with the interior of the ship".