More Than 4,200 on Board
A LUXURY CRUISE LINER RAN AGROUND near Tuscany, Italy, late Friday night, ripping a 160-ft.-long seam in the hull. The Costa Concordia, carrying about 3,200 paying passengers and 1,000 crew, had just embarked that evening for a 2-week cruise on the Mediterranean Sea. The mandatory evacuation drill wasn't scheduled to be held until Saturday evening.
BBC News
The USA Today further reports:
Survivor Christine Hammer, from Bonn, Germany, shivered near the harbor of Porto Santo Stefano, on the mainland, after stepping off a ferry from Giglio. She was wearing elegant dinner clothes — a gray cashmere sweater, a silk scarf — along with a large pair of hiking boots, which a kind islander gave her after she lost her shoes in the scramble to escape. Left behind in her cabin were her passport, credit cards and phone.
Hammer, 65, told The Associated Press that she was eating her first course, an appetizer of cuttlefish, sauteed mushrooms and salad, on her first night aboard her first-ever cruise, which was a gift to her and her husband, Gert, from her local church where she volunteers.
Suddenly, "we heard a crash. Glasses and plates fell down and we went out of the dining room and we were told it wasn't anything dangerous," she said.
Several passengers concurred, saying crew members for a good 45 minutes told passengers there was a simple "technical problem" that had caused the lights to go off. Seasoned cruisers, however, knew better and went to get their life jackets from their cabins and report to their "muster stations," the emergency stations each passenger is assigned to, they said.
Once there, though, crew members delayed lowering the lifeboats even thought the ship was listing badly, they said.
"We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side," said Mike van Dijk, a 54-year-old from Pretoria, South Aftica. "We were standing in the corridors and they weren't allowing us to get onto the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble."
As they were donning their life vests and getting into the life rafts, several dozen people panicked and began jumping into the sea. A few managed to swim to the nearby island of Giglio, but at least 3 drowned and nearly 70 others are missing.
Stranded lifeboat gives mute testimony to
the ship's crew's incompetence.
As the ship took on water it began listing and several of the lifeboats were unable to be lowered off the steep incline of the ship's side. As other ships and nearby ferry boats began arriving to aid in the rescue, several helicopters hovered overhead lighting up the area for the rescue effort. The helicopters also plucked about 50 passengers from danger and took them to the island.
After all known survivors were removed, rescue divers began searching through the ship for any victims.
ABC News prepared this early video report:
The residents of Giglio immediately began opening up schools, churches and other large buildings to shelter and take care of the passengers until they could eventually be transferred to Porto Santo Stefano on the mainland. Elizabeth Nanni from the island's tourist information service told the BBC, "Usually there are 700 people on the island at this time of year, so receiving 4,000 and some in the middle of the night wasn't easy," she said. "Some people jumped in the sea so they had hypothermia."
BBC graphic
There will be many questions raised at the inquiry into the wreck, including why was the ship so close to shore in treacherous waters? Also, why was the mandatory evacuation drill not held promptly after setting sail as is required? Why was the ship's crew so unprepared for an emergency that they could not function during the evacuation?
For more details see:
USA Today HERE.
BBC News has MORE.
CNN International HERE.
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