American company may salvage Costa Concordia

Efforts to salvage the capsized cruise ship off the coast of an Italian island were delayed again Friday.

Blinding snow and heavy surf made it too risky to get near the Costa Concordia. The weather is only one factor in what promises to be an epic salvage operation.

CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann spoke with the owner of an American company that may take on the job.

Beau Bisso runs Bisso Marine - a fifth-generation family business in New Orleans and Houston. Since 1890, Bisso ships and crews have salvaged some of the world's biggest ship wrecks.

"This barge averages 300 days a year doing salvage work," said Bisso. "With enough time and money you can do any job."

Bisso has refloated freighters in Brazil and stabilized sinking oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

Now the Costa Concordia's insurance company has invited Bisso and his competitors to send teams to examine the ship's wreckage. The crippled cruise ship could become the most complicated marine salvage operation in history and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

"I don't think it would ever be a cruise ship again," said Bisso. "The damage level is so substantial."

"Would you book a trip on it?" he asked Strassmann.

A team of divers is now surveying the Concordia stem-to-stern, including the 160-foot gash in its hull.

The ship is 115,000 tons, so big that the salvage equipment wouldn't fit around it and so, according to Bisso, you literally have to cut up the ship, chunk by chunk.

Removing all the Concordia's cut pieces by crane could take more than a year. Then there's the unpredictable Mediterranean weather and withering scrutiny from news cameras sitting just one-fifth of a mile away.

Only a half-dozen salvage companies in the world can do a job this big. Bisso believes his is one of them. But he sees the Concordia as a giant gamble, something for which he doesn't want to risk the family business.

Bisso expects to decide whether he'll bid for the job by the end of the month.

Mark Strassmann

Mark Strassmann has been a CBS News correspondent since January 2001 and is based in the Atlanta bureau.