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Italian cruise line Costa Cruises took to the seas on Saturday for the first time in more than four months, buoying an industry capsized by the COVID-19 pandemic. I left the bar and found myself stumbling along sloping corridors with passengers and crew members. Francesco Schettino, the captain of the cruise liner, was jailed for 16 years for multiple manslaughter after the disaster that left 32 people dead.
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On 16 September 2013, the parbuckle salvage of the ship began, and by the early hours of 17 September, the ship was set upright on her underwater cradle. In July 2014, the ship was refloated using sponsons (flotation tanks) welded to her sides, and was towed 320 kilometres (200 mi) to her home port of Genoa for scrapping, which was completed in July 2017. The MS Costa Concordia, the Italian cruise ship that killed 32 people when it sank off the coast off Isola del Giglio in 2012, has just been sitting off the Tuscan coast ever since.
Collision and rescue
On 13 January 2012, the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia capsized off the coast of Tuscany after hitting a rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea. "I imagine it like a nail stuck to the wall that marks that date, as a before and after," he said, recounting how he joined the rescue effort that night, helping pull ashore the dazed, injured and freezing passengers from lifeboats. It will also honour the 4,200 survivors and the residents of Giglio who took in passengers and crew, offering clothes and shelter until passengers could return to the mainland.
Costa Concordia disaster
Ananias and her family declined Costa’s initial $14,500 compensation offered to each passenger and sued Costa, a unit of US-based Carnival Corp., to try to cover the cost of their medical bills and therapy for the post-traumatic stress they have suffered. But after eight years in the US and then Italian court system, they lost their case. "For us islanders, when we remember some event, we always refer to whether it was before or after the Concordia," said Matteo Coppa, who was 23 and fishing on the jetty when the darkened Concordia listed toward shore and then collapsed onto its side in the water. "There was really a melee there is the best way to describe it," he told Cobiella. "It's very similar to the movie 'Titanic.' People were jumping onto the top of the lifeboats and pushing down women and children to try to get to them."
He said it was an emotional moment for his client and that his going aboard the ship could help ascertain the facts. Thursday is the second inspection authorized by the court since the beginning of the year in an effort to determine whether any factors beyond human error contributed to the loss of life in the disaster. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli tells our Newscast unit that prosecutors had asked for a prison sentence of 26 years for the ship's captain, Francesco Schettino. Rose Metcalf, a dancer who had been performing on the ship, was one of the last people to be winched to safety by a helicopter after clinging to the stricken vessel. "Usually there are 700 people on the island at this time of year, so receiving 4,000 people in the middle of the night wasn't easy," she said.
Survivor recounts Costa Concordia cruise capsizing 10 years later - USA TODAY
Survivor recounts Costa Concordia cruise capsizing 10 years later.
Posted: Wed, 12 Jan 2022 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Elizabeth Nanni, of Isola del Giglio Tourist Information, said those who arrived on the island were survivors in a state of shock, ''desperate people looking for each other'' and people suffering from hypothermia after jumping into the sea. "We were on the same level as the water so some people started to swim because they weren't able to get on the lifeboats," said Mr Costa. When I got there I found myself with other crew members and passengers on this huge dancefloor. We were expecting some instructions, some kind of explanation, but the ship began to have multiple blackouts and power failures. There are going to be substantial risks before the Costa Concordia is gone for good, however.
Wrecking Near the Shore
While the ship was tipping over I was confronted with a portrait of an ongoing tragedy, a grotesque paradox. But no one came from the bridge, and of course the ship, in the meantime, was still performing this very macabre choreography of slowly capsizing. It was really unexpected because the conditions at sea meant it made no sense for this to happen.
Specifically, experts will be examining an electrical generator in the ship's engine room and the bridge. Judge Giovanni Puliatti stressed that Schettino was being allowed onto the ship "as a defendant, not a consultant" and therefore that he could board the ship to help investigators, but not to ask questions. Mr Metcalf, from Dorset, told the BBC his daughter had phoned to say she was safe but that she had feared she would have to jump into the sea.
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The unprecedented salvage operation continues, and workers hope to re-float the ship in the next few months and then tow it away from Giglio. "Everybody was trying to get on the boats at the same time. When people had to get on the lifeboats they were pushing each other. It was a bit chaotic. We were trying to keep passengers calm but it was just impossible. Nobody knew what was going on." Monica, a German passenger who was in the cruise liner's theatre when the ship began to suffer problems, said it was hard to reach the lifeboats.
"I felt like (my daughters) were going to get trampled, and putting my arms around them and just holding them together and letting the sea of people go by us." His firm, part of the US Carnival group, returned to the ocean again last September, limiting calls to Italian ports, only to suspend operations again in December. "A year and a half without going anywhere is a long time. It was about time we set off again for the sea, the atmosphere, the views. We've been missing all that," said Jean-Pierre Faux, a 74-year-old pensioner from Belgium holidaying with his wife Martine.
Rival MSC has carried some 60,000 passengers since it resumed some routes last August, breaking off over the Christmas period owing to Italian restrictions. "The crew has so been looking forward to this moment. Everyone was so enthusiastic at the thought of setting off once again. The ship is like a family to us," said skipper Pietro Sinisi from his position on the bridge. Passengers boarded a little hesitantly at first after completing their battery of health tests before settling down in the knowledge that they could finally begin their holiday. The Mediterranean voyage will last from three to seven days, depending on where it stops on the Italian coast - La Spezia, Civitavecchia, Naples, Messina or Cagliari. Residents are looking forward to that day, but a decision as to where the ship will be taken for scrapping is still pending. Another woman, who has lived on Giglio for 60 years, said Schettino should not bear the blame for the disaster alone.
Eyewitnesses have described scenes of chaos on board the Italian cruise ship the Costa Concordia, which has run aground off Italy, killing at least five people. I was not alone of course, there was a bunch of between 35 to 40 people around me, passengers and crew members. Prosecutors blamed a delayed evacuation order and conflicting instructions given by crew for the chaos that ensued as passengers scrambled to get off the ship. The calamity caused changes in the cruise industry like carrying more lifejackets and holding emergency drills before leaving port. GIGLIO PORTO, Italy — The curvy granite rocks of the Tuscan island of Giglio lay bare in the winter sun, no longer hidden by the ominous, stricken cruise liner that ran aground in the turquoise waters of this marine sanctuary ten years ago. Following the conclusion of the righting operation, the ship was kept on the platform while further inspections were made and the starboard sponsons attached.
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