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Costa Concordia: Italian tragedy that reflected state of a nation

Drama that unfolded with cruise ship disaster captivated Italy and stood as a metaphor for nation’s political and economic ills

The Costa Concordia disaster was more than a tragedy in Italy. It was a national drama with an eccentric cast of characters – a reckless villain, his secret lover and a hard-done-by hero – that has riveted the country for three years. The hulking mass of the capsized 115,000-tonne cruise ship, which for 900 days lay seemingly unmovable and partly submerged in the Mediterranean, became a metaphor for the political and economic ills of an entire nation.

On Wednesday, just as Italy’s moribund economy is beginning to show signs of recovery, a court in Grosseto, Tuscany, issued the verdict that families of the victims and survivors of the ill-fated voyage have been waiting for since the ship sank hundreds of metres from shore in January 2012, killing 32 people.

Francesco Schettino, the vessel’s captain whose brazen maritime manoeuvre caused the disaster, was found guilty of manslaughter . He now faces 16 years in jail.

In the final days of a trial, which began in July 2013 and included more than 69 hearings, attorneys for Schettino described him as a scapegoat who had been vilified but deserved to be treated like a hero. While they acknowledged that the captain bore some responsibility in the accident, they insisted that his maritime instincts helped save most of the 4,000 passengers and crew on board, thanks to his decision to delay the evacuation order long enough so that the ship was close to shore before it was abandoned.

Schettino’s attorneys also pinned blame on the vessel’s helmsman – they claimed he misunderstood the captain’s orders – and the failure of the ship’s emergency generators, which prevented the watertight doors from sealing properly. “In a crew of 1,000 people is only one responsible?” said Domenico Pepe, his attorney. But that version of events did not withstand the scrutiny of the court.

The 3,299 passengers who boarded the Costa Concordia on 13 January in the Italian port city of Civitavecchia for their seven-day cruise around the Mediterranean had much to enjoy. There were 1,500 cabins, one of the largest fitness centres at sea, a Turkish bath and solarium, a poolside movie theatre on the main pool deck, and 13 bars, including one devoted to cognac.

The ship’s captain also had reason to feel chipper. The married commander, now 54, was accompanied by his lover, Domnica Cemortan, a classically trained dancer from Moldova.

That night, after dining with Cemortan, Schettino invited her to the bridge of the cruise liner, where he took command of the vessel.

What Schettino did next – and the reasons he did it – would become a central issue in the case against him.

Just as the ship was making its way north-west along the coastline, Schettino called for the vessel to be steered close to Giglio as a way to “salute” the island.

Cruise ships had sailed close to Giglio before. But this time, there was a deadly miscalculation. Just 15 minutes after Schettino had given the coordinates to his helmsman, at 9:45 pm, the Costa Concordia rammed into rocks, creating a massive 50-metre gash in the ship’s hull.

Prosecutors would later argue that Schettino’s brash move was an attempt to impress his girlfriend, an allegation he has denied.

“I didn’t do it as a favour for her,” he told the court in Grosseto.

Instead, he said he did it as a favour to the ship’s head waiter, who was a native of Giglio, and to give his passengers a beautiful view of the island.

The vessel immediately started to take in water and tilt. It lost power and the engine room began to flood. But passengers on the decks above did not initially have reason to be afraid.

Even as the crew began to frantically assess the damage and start the emergency diesel generator, Schettino ordered them to tell passengers that the ship had simply suffered an electrical outage and that everything was under control. Some reassured passengers stayed in their cabins and later lost their lives. The same erroneous information was given to the harbour master at Civitavecchia.

“I did that to calm the passengers down, I feared that otherwise there would be panic,” Schettino said in his defence at trial.

The Costa Concordia began to drift and, investigators later explained, list as a result of water in the damaged hull. By 10.15pm, the Italian coastguard began getting reports of trouble on board directly from the passengers, but Schettino still did not react.

Inside, panic reigned. Claudia Poliani, a hairdresser from Rome who survived the disaster, would later describe the chaos in court testimony.

“From the happiness and wonder of being on a cruise, we passengers became panic stricken and fell over. It was dark and no one helped us … no one told us what to do. We found lifejackets ourselves,” she said.

Another survivor, Rosanna Abbinante, told the court she feared that she would “die like a rat”.

Ultimately, it took more than an hour for Schettino to give the order to abandon ship. By that point, the vessel was already tilted at a 30-degree angle, complicating some of the rescue effort. About 20 minutes later, even as hundreds of passengers continued to await rescue, Schettino abandoned his post and left his second in command in charge of the evacuation. Twelve minutes later, the latter also abandoned his post, with about 300 passengers still on board.

That moment in the crisis was immortalised by a recorded radio exchange between Schettino, who was in a lifeboat by then, and Gregorio de Falco, a coastguard captain who became a national hero for his emphatic order that the captain “Get back on board, for fuck’s sake”.

“You need to tell me if there are children, women or people in need of assistance,” an exasperated De Falco shouted. “Listen Schettino … you saved yourself from the sea, but … I am going to make you pay for this.”

De Falco became such a hero that, when it emerged more than a year later that he had been transferred out of operational service into a desk job, his apparent mistreatment created a new spate of soul-searching in Italy. Some suggested the country did not know how to reward people who showed good character.

The salvage of the Costa Concordia was the most expensive such operation in history, with an estimated cost of $1.2bn. It was also risky. The operation, led by a wisecracking South African named Nick Sloane, involved first moving the capsized vessel into an upright position, and then slowly shifting it into deeper water. In such an unprecedented operation, environmental contamination was a constant threat, with tonnes of rotting food, passenger belongings and other items still located on the vessel.

Ultimately, the massive ship’s final journey to Genoa took four days.

In the aftermath of the disaster, legal claims mounted against the owner of the ship, Costa Cruises. They included lawsuits by the region of Tuscany and a €189m suit by the island of Giglio, which claimed that the accident and the presence of the downed vessel hurt tourism and the local economy.

“This region is known and appreciated around the world for figures such as Leonardo, Galileo, Giotto, Michelangelo and Brunelleschi, but after the catastrophe of Concordia, it became famous for Schettino and his vulgarity,” said Enrico Rossi, the governor of Tuscany, who testified in the trial against the commander.

As the Costa Concordia made its final journey out of the port of Giglio, some survivors and families of victims looked on as a final farewell.

Martine Muller and her husband were given the cruise as a birthday gift from her children. She told the Guardian at the time how she was frantically asking everyone she knew whether they had news from her husband, while she waited at the port. Then the bodies began to arrive.

“And I said, well, my husband’s in there. And he was. He was the first person recovered,” she said.

The youngest victim of the disaster was a five-year-old girl named Dayana Arlotti, who drowned with her father after they were told there was no space in a lifeboat.

The final victim was not found until November 2014. As workers began to break apart the ship in Genoa, and they discovered the body of Russel Rebello, an Indian waiter.

The process of scrapping the ship is expected to take two years.

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• Francesco Schettino
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Another Night to Remember

By Bryan Burrough and Josephine McKenna

At the Italian port of Civitavecchia, 40 miles northwest of Rome, the great cruise ships line the long concrete breakwater like taxis at a curb. That Friday afternoon, January 13, 2012, the largest and grandest was the Costa Concordia, 17 decks high, a floating pleasure palace the length of three football fields. It was a cool, bright day as the crowds filed on and off the ship, those who had boarded at Barcelona and Marseilles heading into Rome for sightseeing while hundreds of new passengers pulled rolling bags toward the *Concordia’*s arrival terminal.

Up on the road, a writer from Rome named Patrizia Perilli stepped from a chauffeur-driven Mercedes and marveled at the ship’s immensity. “You could see it even before you entered the port; it was a floating monster,” she recalls. “Its size made me feel secure. It was sunny, and its windows were just sparkling.”

Inside the terminal, newcomers handed their luggage to the Indian and Filipino pursers. There was a welcome desk for an Italian reality show, Professione LookMaker, filming on board that week; among those arriving were 200 or so hairdressers from Naples and Bologna and Milan, all hoping to make it onto the show. As they chattered, flashed their passports, and boarded, then slowly filtered throughout the ship, they thought it all grand: 1,500 luxury cabins, six restaurants, 13 bars, the two-story Samsara Spa and fitness center, the three-story Atene Theatre, four swimming pools, the Barcellona Casino, the Lisbona Disco, even an Internet café, all wrapped around a dramatic, nine-story central atrium, itself a riot of pink, blue, and green lights.

Some of the hundred or so Americans on board weren’t so wowed. One likened wandering the Concordia to getting lost inside a pinball machine. “It kind of reminded me of old Vegas, you know?” says Benji Smith, a 34-year-old Massachusetts honeymooner, who had boarded at Barcelona with his wife, along with two of her relatives and two of their friends, all from Hong Kong. “Everything was really gaudy, lots of fancy blown glass in different colors. The entertainment kind of reinforced the old-Vegas thing, aging singers performing solo on a keyboard with a drum track.”

There were just over 4,200 people aboard the Concordia as it eased away from the breakwater that evening, about a thousand crew members and 3,200 passengers, including nearly a thousand Italians, hundreds of French, British, Russians, and Germans, even a few dozen from Argentina and Peru. Up on Deck 10, Patrizia Perilli stepped onto her balcony and daydreamed about sunbathing. As she began to unpack in her elegant stateroom, she glanced over at her boyfriend, who was watching a video on what to do if they needed to abandon ship. Perilli teased him, “What would we ever need that for?”

As the world now knows, they needed it desperately. Six hours later the Concordia would be lying on its side in the sea, freezing water surging up the same carpeted hallways that hairdressers and newlyweds were already using to head to dinner. Of the 4,200 people on board, 32 would be dead by dawn.

The wreck of the Costa Concordia is many things to many people. To Italians, who dominated the ship’s officer ranks and made up a third of its passengers, it is a national embarrassment; once the pinnacle of Mediterranean hedonism, the Concordia was now sprawled dead on the rocks in a cold winter sea.

But the *Concordia’*s loss is also a landmark moment in naval history. It is the largest passenger ship ever wrecked. The 4,000 people who fled its slippery decks—nearly twice as many as were aboard the R.M.S. Titanic in 1912—represent the largest maritime evacuation in history. A story of heroism and disgrace, it is also, in the mistakes of its captain and certain officers, a tale of monumental human folly.

“This was an episode of historic importance for those who study nautical issues,” says Ilarione Dell’Anna, the Italian Coast Guard admiral who oversaw much of the massive rescue effort that night. “The old point of departure was the Titanic. I believe that today the new point of departure will be the Costa Concordia. There has never been anything like this before. We must study this, to see what happened and to see what we can learn.”

Much of what happened on the night of January 13 can now be told, based on the accounts of dozens of passengers, crew members, and rescue workers. But the one group whose actions are crucial to any understanding of what went wrong—the ship’s officers—has been largely mute, silenced first by superiors at Costa Cruises and now by a web of official investigations. The officers have spoken mainly to the authorities, but this being the Italian justice system, their stories quickly leaked to the newspapers—and not simply, as happens in America, via the utterances of anonymous government officials. In Rome entire transcripts of these interrogations and depositions have been leaked, affording a fairly detailed, if still incomplete, portrait of what the captain and senior officers say actually happened.

By Brooke Baldwin

By Bess Levin

By Kase Wickman

Captain, My Captain

The Concordia first sailed into the Tyrrhenian Sea, from a Genoese shipyard, in 2005; at the time it was Italy’s largest cruise ship. When it was christened, the champagne bottle had failed to break, an ominous portent to superstitious mariners. Still, the ship proved a success for its Italian owner, Costa Cruises, a unit of the Miami-based Carnival Corporation. The ship sailed only in the Mediterranean, typically taking a circular route from Civitavecchia to Savona, Marseilles, Barcelona, Majorca, Sardinia, and Sicily.

In command on the bridge that night was 51-year-old Captain Francesco Schettino, today a figure of international contempt. Dashing and deeply tanned, with lustrous black hair, Schettino had joined Costa as a safety officer in 2002, been promoted to captain in 2006, and since September had been on his second tour aboard the Concordia. Among the officers, he was respected, though the retired captain who had mentored him later told prosecutors he was a bit too “exuberant” for his own good. Despite being married, Schettino had a lady friend at his side that evening, a comely 25-year-old off-duty hostess named Domnica Cemortan, from Moldova. Though she would later become an object of intense fascination in the press, Cemortan’s role in events that night was inconsequential.

Before leaving port, Captain Schettino set a course for Savona, on the Italian Riviera, 250 miles to the northwest. As the ship steamed into the Tyrrhenian, Schettino headed to dinner with Cemortan, telling an officer to alert him when the Concordia closed within five miles of the island of Giglio, 45 miles northwest. Later, a passenger would claim he saw Schettino and his friend polish off a decanter of red wine while eating, but the story was never confirmed. Around nine Schettino rose and, with Cemortan in tow, returned to the bridge.

Ahead lay mountainous Giglio, a collection of sleepy villages and vacation homes clustered around a tiny stone harbor, nine miles off the coast of Tuscany.

The *Concordia’*s normal course took it through the middle of the channel between Giglio and the mainland, but as Schettino arrived, it was already veering toward the island. The ship’s chief maître d’, Antonello Tievoli, was a native of Giglio and had asked the captain to perform a “salute,” essentially a slow drive-by, a common cruise-industry practice intended to show off the ship and impress local residents. Schettino had consented, in part because his mentor, Mario Palombo, lived there, too. Palombo had performed several salutes to Giglio, Schettino at least one.

As the ship made its approach, Tievoli, standing on the bridge, placed a telephone call to Palombo. The retired captain, it turned out, wasn’t on Giglio; he was at a second home, on the mainland. After some chitchat, Tievoli handed the telephone to the captain, which, Palombo told prosecutors, caught him off guard. He and Schettino hadn’t talked in at least seven years; Schettino hadn’t bothered to call when Palombo retired. “The call surprised me,” Palombo said. “I was even more surprised when Schettino asked me about the depth of the seabed in front of Giglio Island, the harbor area, specifying that he wanted to pass at a distance of 0.4 nautical miles [around 800 yards]. I answered that in that area the seabeds are good, but considering the winter season”—when few people were on the island—“there was no reason to go at close range, so I invited him to make a quick greeting and to honk the horn and remain far from shore. I want to clarify that I said, verbatim, ‘Say hi and stay away.’ ”

Just then the phone went dead. It may have been the very moment Schettino saw the rock.

Not until the ship had closed within two miles of the island, Schettino’s officers told prosecutors, did the captain take personal control of the ship. As Schettino recalled it, he stood at a radar station, in front of the broad outer windows, affording him a clear view of Giglio’s lights. An Indonesian crewman, Rusli Bin Jacob, remained at the helm, taking orders from the captain. The maneuver Schettino planned was simple, one he had overseen many, many times, just an easy turn to starboard, to the right, that would take the Concordia parallel to the coastline, dazzling the island’s residents with the length of the fully lit ship as it slid past. In doing so, however, Schettino made five crucial mistakes, the last two fatal. For one thing, the Concordia was going too fast, 15 knots, a high speed for maneuvering so close to shore. And while he had consulted radar and maps, Schettino seems to have been navigating largely by his own eyesight—“a major mistake,” in one analyst’s words. His third error was the bane of every American motorist: Schettino was talking on the phone while driving.

Schettino’s fourth mistake, however, appears to have been an amazingly stupid bit of confusion. He began his turn by calculating the distance from a set of rocks that lay about 900 yards off the harbor. What he failed to notice was another rock, nearer the ship. Giving orders to Bin Jacob, Schettino eased the Concordia into the turn without event. Then, coming onto a new, northerly course just over a half-mile from the harbor, he saw the rock below, to his left. It was enormous, just at the surface, crowned with frothing white water; he was so close to Giglio he could see it by the town’s lights.

He couldn’t believe it.

“Hard to starboard!” Schettino yelled.

It was an instinctive order, intended to steer the ship away from the rock. For a fleeting moment Schettino thought it had worked. The *Concordia’*s bow cleared the rock. Its midsection cleared as well. But by turning the ship to starboard the stern swung toward the island, striking the submerged part of the rock. “The problem was that I went to starboard trying to avoid it, and that was the mistake, because I should not have gone starboard,” Schettino told prosecutors. “I made an imprudent decision. Nothing would have happened if I had not set the helm to starboard.”

“Hard to port!” Schettino commanded, correcting his mistake.

A moment later, he shouted, “Hard to starboard!”

And then the lights went out.

It was 9:42. Many of the passengers were at dinner, hundreds of them in the vast Milano Restaurant alone. A Schenectady, New York, couple, Brian Aho and Joan Fleser, along with their 18-year-old daughter, Alana, had just been served eggplant-and-feta appetizers when Aho felt the ship shudder.

“Joan and I looked at each other and simultaneously said, ‘That’s not normal,’ ” recalls Aho. “Then there was a bang bang bang bang . Then there was just a great big groaning sound.”

“I immediately felt the ship list severely to port,” Fleser says. “Dishes went flying. Waiters went flying all over. Glasses were flying. Exactly like the scene in Titanic. ”

“I took the first bite of my eggplant and feta,” Aho says, “and I literally had to chase the plate across the table.”

“Suddenly there was a loud bang,” recalls Patrizia Perilli. “It was clear there had been a crash. Immediately after that there was a very long and powerful vibration—it seemed like an earthquake.”

A Bologna hairdresser, Donatella Landini, was sitting nearby, marveling at the coastline, when she felt the jolt. “The sensation was like a wave,” she recalls. “Then there was this really loud sound like a ta-ta-ta as the rocks penetrated the ship.” Gianmaria Michelino, a hairdresser from Naples, says, “The tables, plates, and glasses began to fall and people began to run. Many people fell. Women who had been running in high heels fell.”

All around, diners surged toward the restaurant’s main entrance. Aho and Fleser took their daughter and headed for a side exit, where the only crew member they saw, a sequined dancer, was gesticulating madly and shouting in Italian. “Just as we were leaving, the lights went out,” Fleser says, “and people started screaming, really panicking. The lights were out only for a few moments; then the emergency lights came on. We knew the lifeboats were on Deck 4. We didn’t even go back to our room. We just went for the boats.”

“We stayed at our table,” recalls Perilli. “The restaurant emptied and there was a surreal silence in the room. Everyone was gone.”

Somewhere on the ship, an Italian woman named Concetta Robi took out her cell phone and dialed her daughter in the central Italian town of Prato, near Florence. She described scenes of chaos, ceiling panels falling, waiters stumbling, passengers scrambling to put on life jackets. The daughter telephoned the police, the carabinieri.

As passengers tried in vain to understand what was happening, Captain Schettino stood on the bridge, stunned. An officer nearby later told investigators he heard the captain say, “Fuck. I didn’t see it!”

In those first confusing minutes, Schettino spoke several times with engineers belowdecks and sent at least one officer to assess the damage. Moments after the Concordia struck the rock, the chief engineer, Giuseppe Pilon, had hustled toward his control room. An officer emerged from the engine room itself shouting, “There’s water! There’s water!” “I told him to check that all the watertight doors were closed as they should be,” Pilon told prosecutors. “Just as I finished speaking we had a total blackout I opened the door to the engine room and the water had already risen to the main switchboard I informed Captain Schettino of the situation. I told him that the engine room, the main switchboard, and the stern section were flooded. I told him we had lost control of the ship.”

There was a 230-foot-long horizontal gash below the waterline. Seawater was exploding into the engine room and was fast cascading through areas holding all the ship’s engines and generators. The lower decks are divided into giant compartments; if four flood, the ship will sink.

At 9:57, 15 minutes after the ship struck the rock, Schettino phoned Costa Cruises’ operations center. The executive he spoke to, Roberto Ferrarini, later told reporters, “Schettino told me there was one compartment flooded, the compartment with electrical propulsion motors, and with that kind of situation the ship’s buoyancy was not compromised. His voice was quite clear and calm.” Between 10:06 and 10:26, the two men spoke three more times. At one point, Schettino admitted that a second compartment had flooded. That was, to put it mildly, an understatement. In fact, five compartments were flooding; the situation was hopeless. (Later, Schettino would deny that he had attempted to mislead either his superiors or anyone else.)

They were sinking. How much time they had, no one knew. Schettino had few options. The engines were dead. Computer screens had gone black. The ship was drifting and losing speed. Its momentum had carried it north along the island’s coastline, past the harbor, then past a rocky peninsula called Point Gabbianara. By 10 P.M., 20 minutes after striking the rock, the ship was heading away from the island, into open water. If something wasn’t done immediately, it would sink there.

What happened next won’t be fully understood until the *Concordia’*s black-box recorders are analyzed. But from what little Schettino and Costa officials have said, it appears that Schettino realized he had to ground the ship; evacuating a beached ship would be far safer than evacuating at sea. The nearest land, however, was already behind the ship, at Point Gabbianara. Somehow Schettino had to turn the powerless Concordia completely around and ram it into the rocks lining the peninsula. How this happened is not clear. From the ship’s course, some analysts initially speculated that Schettino used an emergency generator to gain control of the ship’s bow thrusters—tiny jets of water used in docking—which allowed him to make the turn. Others maintain that he did nothing, that the turnabout was a moment of incredible luck. They argue that the prevailing wind and current—both pushing the Concordia back toward the island—did most of the work.

“The bow thrusters wouldn’t have been usable, but from what we know, it seems like he could still steer,” says John Konrad, a veteran American captain and nautical analyst. “It looks like he was able to steer into the hairpin turn, and wind and current did the rest.”

However it was done, the Concordia completed a hairpin turn to starboard, turning the ship completely around. At that point, it began drifting straight toward the rocks.

I larione Dell’Anna, the dapper admiral in charge of Coast Guard rescue operations in Livorno, meets me on a freezing evening outside a columned seaside mansion in the coastal city of La Spezia. Inside, waiters in white waistcoats are busy laying out long tables lined with antipasti and flutes of champagne for a naval officers’ reception. Dell’Anna, wearing a blue dress uniform with a star on each lapel, takes a seat on a corner sofa.

“I’ll tell you how it all started: It was a dark and stormy night,” he begins, then smiles. “No, seriously, it was a quiet night. I was in Rome. We got a call from a town outside Florence. The party, a carabinieri officer, had a call from a woman whose mother was on a ship, we don’t know where, who was putting on life jackets. Very unusual, needless to say, for us to get such a call from land. Ordinarily a ship calls us. In this case, we had to find the ship. We were the ones who triggered the entire operation.”

That first call, like hundreds of others in the coming hours, arrived at the Coast Guard’s rescue-coordination center, a cluster of red-brick buildings on the harbor in Livorno, about 90 miles north of Giglio. Three officers were on duty that night inside its small operations room, a 12-by-25-foot white box lined with computer screens. “At 2206, I received the call,” remembers one of the night’s unsung heroes, an energetic 37-year-old petty officer named Alessandro Tosi. The carabinieri “thought it was a ship going from Savona to Barcelona. I called Savona. They said no, no ship had left from there. I asked the carabinieri for more information. They called the passenger’s daughter, and she said it was the Costa Concordia. ”

Six minutes after that first call, at 10:12, Tosi located the Concordia on a radar screen just off Giglio. “So then we called the ship by radio, to ask if there was a problem,” Tosi recalls. An officer on the bridge answered. “He said it was just an electrical blackout,” Tosi continues. “I said, ‘But I’ve heard plates are falling off the dinner tables—why would that be? Why have passengers been ordered to put on life jackets?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s just a blackout.’ He said they would resolve it shortly.”

The Concordia crewman speaking with the Coast Guard was the ship’s navigation officer, a 26-year-old Italian named Simone Canessa. “The Captain ordered … Canessa to say that there was a blackout on board,” third mate Silvia Coronica later told prosecutors. “When asked if we needed assistance, he said, ‘At the moment, no.’ ” The first mate, Ciro Ambrosio, who was also on the bridge, confirmed to investigators that Schettino was fully aware that a blackout was the least of their problems. “The captain ordered us to say that everything was under control and that we were checking the damage, even though he knew that the ship was taking on water.”

Tosi put the radio down, suspicious. This wouldn’t be the first captain who downplayed his plight in hopes of avoiding public humiliation. Tosi telephoned his two superiors, both of whom arrived within a half-hour.

At 10:16, the captain of a Guardia di Finanza cutter—the equivalent of U.S. Customs—radioed Tosi to say he was off Giglio and offered to investigate. Tosi gave the go-ahead. “I got back to the [ Concordia ] and said, ‘Please keep us abreast of what is going on,’ ” says Tosi. “After about 10 minutes, they didn’t update us. Nothing. So we called them again, asking, ‘Can you please update us?’ At that point, they said they had water coming in. We asked what sort of help they needed, and how many people on board had been injured. They said there were no injured. They requested only one tugboat.” Tosi shakes his head. “One tugboat.”

Schettino’s apparent refusal to promptly admit the *Concordia’*s plight—to lie about it, according to the Coast Guard—not only was a violation of Italian maritime law but cost precious time, delaying the arrival of rescue workers by as much as 45 minutes. At 10:28 the Coast Guard center ordered every available ship in the area to head for the island of Giglio.

With the Concordia beginning to list, most of the 3,200 passengers had no clue what to do. A briefing on how to evacuate the ship wasn’t to take place until late the next day. Many, like the Aho family, streamed toward the lifeboats, which lined both sides of Deck 4, and opened lockers carrying orange life jackets. Already, some were panicking. “The life jacket I had, a woman was trying to rip it out of my arms. It actually ripped the thing—you could hear it,” Joan Fleser says. “We stayed right there by one of the lifeboats, No. 19. The whole time we were standing there I only saw one crew member walk by. I asked what was happening. He said he didn’t know. We heard two announcements, both the same, that it was an electrical problem with a generator, technicians were working on it, and everything was under control.”

Internet videos later showed crewmen exhorting passengers to return to their staterooms, which, while jarring in light of subsequent events, made sense at the time: There had been no order to abandon ship. When Addie King, a New Jersey graduate student, emerged from her room wearing a life jacket, a maintenance worker actually told her to put it away. Like most, she ignored the advice and headed to the starboard side of Deck 4, where hundreds of passengers were already lining the rails, waiting and worrying. The Massachusetts newlyweds, Benji Smith and Emily Lau, were among them. “Some people are already crying and screaming,” Smith recalls. “But most people were still pretty well collected. You could see some laughing.”

For the moment, the crowd remained calm.

The island of Giglio, for centuries a haven for vacationing Romans, has a long history of unexpected visitors. Once, they were buccaneers: in the 16th century, the legendary pirate Barbarossa carted off every person on the island to slavery. Today, Giglio’s harbor, ringed by a semicircular stone esplanade lined with cafés and snack shops, is home to a few dozen fishing boats and sailboats. In summer, when the tourists come, the population soars to 15,000. In winter barely 700 remain.

That night, on the far side of the island, a 49-year-old hotel manager, Mario Pellegrini, was pointing a remote control at his television, trying in vain to find something to watch. A handsome man with a mop of curly brown hair and sprays of wrinkles at his eyes, Pellegrini was exhausted. The day before, he and a pal had gone fishing, and when the motor on their boat died, they ended up spending the night at sea. “The sea is not for me,” he sighed to his friend afterward. “You can sell that damn boat.”

The phone rang. It was a policeman at the port. A big ship, he said, was in trouble, just outside the harbor. Pellegrini, the island’s deputy mayor, had no idea how serious the matter was, but the policeman sounded worried. He hopped in his car and began driving across the mountain toward the port, dialing others on Giglio’s island council as he went. He reached a tobacco-shop owner, Giovanni Rossi, who was at his home above the harbor watching his favorite movie, Ben-Hur. “There’s a ship in trouble out there,” Pellegrini told him. “You should get down there.”

“What do you mean, there’s a ship out there?” Rossi said, stepping to his window. Parting the curtains, he gasped. Then he threw on a coat and raced down the hill toward the port. A few moments later, Pellegrini rounded the mountainside. Far below, just a few hundred yards off Point Gabbianara, was the largest ship he had ever seen, every light ablaze, drifting straight toward the rocks alongside the peninsula.

“Oh my God,” Pellegrini breathed.

After completing its desperate hairpin turn away from the open sea, the Concordia struck ground a second time that night between 10:40 and 10:50, running onto the rocky underwater escarpment beside Point Gabbianara, facing the mouth of Giglio’s little harbor, a quarter-mile away. Its landing, such as it was, was fairly smooth; few passengers even remember a jolt. Later, Schettino would claim that this maneuver saved hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives.

In fact, according to John Konrad’s analysis, it was here that Schettino made the error that actually led to many of the deaths that night. The ship was already listing to starboard, toward the peninsula. In an attempt to prevent it from falling further—it eventually and famously flopped onto its right side—Schettino dropped the ship’s massive anchors. But photos taken later by divers show clearly that they were lying flat, with their flukes pointed upward; they never dug into the seabed, rendering them useless. What happened?

Konrad says it was a jaw-droppingly stupid mistake. “You can see they let out too much chain,” he says. “I don’t know the precise depths, but if it was 90 meters, they let out 120 meters of chain. So the anchors never caught. The ship then went in sideways, almost tripping over itself, which is why it listed. If he had dropped the anchors properly, the ship wouldn’t have listed so badly.”

What could explain so fundamental a blunder? Video of the chaos on the bridge that night later surfaced, and while it sheds little light on Schettino’s technical decisions, it says worlds about his state of mind. “From the video, you can tell he was stunned,” says Konrad. “The captain really froze. It doesn’t seem his brain was processing.”

Schettino did make efforts, however, to ensure that the ship was firmly grounded. As he told prosecutors, he left the bridge and went to Deck 9, near the top of the ship, to survey its position. He worried it was still afloat and thus still sinking; he asked for that tugboat, he said, with the thought it might push the ship onto solid ground. Eventually satisfied it already was, he finally gave the order to abandon ship at 10:58.

Lifeboats lined the railings on both sides of Deck 4. Because the Concordia was listing to starboard, it eventually became all but impossible to lower boats from the port side, the side facing open water; they would just bump against lower decks. As a result, the vast majority of those who evacuated the ship by lifeboat departed from the starboard side. Each boat was designed to hold 150 passengers. By the time Schettino called to abandon ship, roughly 2,000 people had been standing on Deck 4 for an hour or more, waiting. The moment crewmen began opening the lifeboat gates, chaos broke out.

“It was every man, woman, and child for themselves,” says Brian Aho, who crowded onto Lifeboat 19 with his wife, Joan Fleser, and their daughter.

“We had an officer in our lifeboat,” Fleser says. “That was the only thing that kept people from totally rioting. I ended up being first, then Brian and then Alana.”

“There was a man who was trying to elbow Alana out of the way,” Aho recalls, “and she pointed at me, yelling in Italian, ‘Mio papà! Mio papà!’ I saw her feet on the deck above me and I pulled her in by the ankles.”

“The thing I remember most is people’s screams. The cries of the women and children,” recalls Gianmaria Michelino, the hairdresser. “Children who couldn’t find their parents, women who wanted to find their husbands. Children were there on their own.”

Claudio Masia, a 49-year-old Italian, waiting with his wife, their two children, and his elderly parents, lost patience. “I am not ashamed to say that I pushed people and used my fists to secure a place” for his wife and children, he later told an Italian newspaper. Returning for his parents, Masia had to carry his mother, who was in her 80s, into a boat. When he returned for his father, Giovanni, an 85-year-old Sardinian, he had vanished. Masia ran up and down the deck, searching for him, but Giovanni Masia was never seen again.

‘Someone at our muster station called out, ‘Women and children first,’ ” recalls Benji Smith. “That really increased the panic level. The families who were sticking together, they’re being pulled apart. The women don’t want to go without their husbands, the husbands don’t want to lose their wives.”

After being momentarily separated from his wife, Smith pushed his way onto a lifeboat, which dangled about 60 feet above the water. Immediately, however, the crew had problems lowering it. “This is the first part where I thought my life was in danger,” Smith goes on. “The lifeboats have to be pushed out and lowered down. We weren’t being lowered down slowly and evenly from both directions. The stern side would fall suddenly by three feet, then the bow by two feet; port and starboard would tilt sharply to one side or the other. It was very jerky, very scary. The crew members were shouting at each other. They couldn’t figure out what they were doing.” Eventually, to Smith’s dismay, the crewmen simply gave up, cranked the lifeboat back up to the deck, and herded all the passengers back onto the ship.

Others, blocked or delayed in getting into lifeboats, threw themselves into the water and swam toward the rocks at Point Gabbianara, 100 yards way. One of these was a 72-year-old Argentinean judge named María Inés Lona de Avalos. Repeatedly turned away from crowded lifeboats, she sat on the deck amid the chaos. “I could feel the ship creaking, and we were already leaning halfway over,” she later told a Buenos Aires newspaper. A Spaniard beside her yelled, “There’s no other option! Let’s go!” And then he jumped.

A moment later Judge Lona, a fine swimmer in her youth, followed.

“I jumped feetfirst I couldn’t see much. I began swimming, but every 50 feet I would stop and look back. I could hear the ship creaking and was scared that it would fall on top of me if it capsized completely. I swam for a few minutes and reached the island.” She sat on a wet rock and exhaled.

A French couple, Francis and Nicole Servel, jumped as well, after Francis, who was 71, gave Nicole his life jacket because she couldn’t swim. As she struggled toward the rocks, she yelled, “Francis!,” and he replied, “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” Francis Servel was never seen again.

The first lifeboats limped into the harbor a few minutes after 11.

By the time Giglio’s deputy mayor, Mario Pellegrini, reached the harbor, townspeople had begun to collect on its stone esplanade. “We’re all looking at the ship, trying to figure out what happened,” he recalls. “We thought it must be an engine breakdown of some kind. Then we saw the lifeboats dropping down, and the first ones began to arrive in the port.” Local schools and the church were opened, and the first survivors were hustled inside and given blankets. Every free space began to fill.

“I looked at the mayor and said, ‘We’re such a small port—we should open the hotels,’ ” Pellegrini says. “Then I said, ‘Maybe it’s better for me to go on board to see what’s going on.’ I didn’t have a minute to think. I just jumped on a lifeboat, and before I knew it I was out on the water.”

Reaching the ship, Pellegrini grabbed a rope ladder dangling from a lower deck. “As soon as I got on board, I started looking for someone in charge. There were just crew members, standing and talking on Deck 4, with the lifeboats. They had no idea what was going on. I said, ‘I’m looking for the captain, or someone in charge. I’m the deputy mayor! Where’s the captain?’ Everyone goes, ‘I don’t know. There’s no one in charge.’ I was running around like that for 20 minutes. I ran through all the decks. I eventually emerged on top, where the swimming pool is. Finally I found the guy in charge of hospitality. He didn’t have any idea what was going on, either. At that point the ship wasn’t really tilting all that badly. It was easy to load people into the lifeboats. So I went down and started to help out there.”

For the next half-hour or so, lifeboats shuttled people into the harbor. When a few returned to the starboard side, scores of passengers marooned on the port side sprinted through darkened passageways to cross the ship and reach them. Amanda Warrick, an 18-year-old Boston-area student, lost her footing on the slanting, slippery deck and fell down a small stairwell, where she found herself in knee-deep water. “The water was actually rising,” she says. “That was pretty scary.” Somehow, carrying a laptop computer and a bulky camera, she managed to scramble 50 feet across the deck and jump into a waiting boat.

While there was plenty of chaos aboard the Concordia that night, what few have noted is that, despite confused crew members and balky lifeboats, despite hundreds of passengers on the edge of panic, this first stage of the evacuation proceeded in a more-or-less orderly fashion. Between 11, when the first lifeboats dropped to the water, and about 12:15—a window of an hour and 15 minutes—roughly two-thirds of the people on board the ship, somewhere between 2,500 and 3,300 in all, made it to safety. Unfortunately, it went downhill from there.

Rescue at Sea

Ahelicopter arrived from the mainland at 11:45. It carried a doctor, a paramedic, and two rescue swimmers from the Vigili del Fuoco, Italy’s fire-and-rescue service. A van whisked them from Giglio’s airfield to the port, where the swimmers, Stefano Turchi, 49, and 37-year-old Paolo Scipioni, pushed through the crowds, boarded a police launch, and changed into orange wet suits. Before them, the Concordia, now listing at a 45-degree angle, was lit by spotlights from a dozen small boats bobbing at its side. The launch headed for the port bow, where people had been jumping into the water. As it approached, a Filipino crewman on a high deck suddenly leapt from the ship, falling nearly 30 feet into the sea. “Stefano and I swam about 30 meters to rescue him,” Scipioni says. “He was in shock, very tired, and freezing cold. We took him ashore and then went back to the ship.”

It was the first of six trips the two divers would make in the next two hours. On the second trip they pulled in a 60-year-old Frenchwoman floating in her life jacket near the bow. “Are you O.K.?” Turchi asked in French.

“I’m fine,” she said. Then she said, “I’m not fine.”

Next they pulled in a second Frenchwoman in an advanced state of hypothermia. “She was shaking uncontrollably,” Scipioni recalls. “She was conscious, but her face was violet and her hands were violet and her fingers were white. Her circulatory system was shutting down. She kept saying, ‘My husband, Jean-Pierre! My husband!’ We took her ashore and went back.”

On their fourth trip they lifted an unconscious man into the police launch; this was probably the woman’s husband, Jean-Pierre Micheaud, the night’s first confirmed death. He had died of hypothermia.

By 12:15 almost everyone on the *Concordia’*s starboard side had fled the ship. Among the last to go were Captain Schettino and a group of officers. After leaving the bridge, Schettino had gone to his cabin to grab some of his things, before rushing, he said, to help with the lifeboats. Minutes later, the Concordia began to roll slowly to starboard, falling almost onto its side. For a moment there was complete chaos as many of those still on the starboard side, including the second and third mates, were forced to dive into the water and swim for the rocks. It was at that point, Schettino famously claimed, that he lost his footing and fell onto the roof of a lifeboat. The captain later said his lifeboat plucked three or four people from the water.

Moments before the ship rolled, Giglio’s deputy mayor, Mario Pellegrini, scurried through a passageway, crossing the ship in an effort to help those still on the port side. “When we finished putting them on the boats, there was hardly anyone left on the right side of the boat,” Pellegrini recalls. “That’s when the ship started to tilt more. So I ran through a corridor, to the other side of the ship, and over there there were lots of people, hundreds, more than 500 probably.”

When the ship began to roll, “I couldn’t understand what was going on, the movement was so violent,” says Pellegrini. “Suddenly it was difficult to stand. It was very disorienting. If you took a step forward, you fell. You couldn’t tell which way was up or down. You couldn’t walk. All the people were forced against the walls. That’s when the panic hit, and the electricity went out as well. Lights winking out all over. And when the ship stopped moving, we were in the dark, just the moon, the light of the full moon. And everyone was screaming.” The ship’s chief doctor, a rotund Roman named Sandro Cinquini, was already on the port side. “The ship actually fell gently,” Cinquini recalls. “That was the worst time. People were trapped in the middle [of the ship] as it turned and the water began to rise.”

When the Concordia came to rest once more, its landscape was hopelessly skewed. With the ship lying almost on its right side, walls now became floors; hallways became vertical shafts. Pellegrini was on Deck 4, in a covered corridor with about 150 passengers; beyond was an open deck, where another 500 or so were struggling to regain their footing. When he was able to stand, Pellegrini glanced into the corridor behind—now below—him, and to his horror, he could see seawater surging toward him, as it was all across the starboard side of the ship, inundating the lowest decks and gushing into the restaurants on Deck 4. This was almost certainly the single deadliest moment of the night, when at least 15 people probably drowned. “That’s when I started getting afraid, for myself,” Pellegrini says. “And there were people still down there. You could hear them screaming.”

The screams seemed to be emanating from behind a single hatchway. Pellegrini, working with Dr. Cinquini and another crewman, threw his weight into lifting this door, which was now on the floor. When it came free, he looked down a near-vertical hallway 30 feet long. “There were people down there—it was like they were in a well filling up with water,” Pellegrini says. A crewman grabbed a rope and, swiftly making knots in it, dropped it down to those trapped below. “Four or five of us all began pulling people up from below. They came up one at a time. The first one who came out, a woman, she was so surprised, she came up feetfirst. I had to reach down and pull her out. We took out nine people in all. The first one had been in water up to her waist, the last one was in to his neck. The worst was an American guy, really fat, like 250 pounds, tall and obese; he was hard to get out. The last one was a waiter—his eyes were terrified. The water was freezing. The water was so cold, he couldn’t have survived much longer.”

“He told us there were others behind him,” says Dr. Cinquini, “but he could no longer see them.”

The ship’s roll trapped scores of passengers. Earlier, a Southern California family, Dean Ananias, his wife, Georgia, and their two daughters, aged 31 and 23, had boarded a lifeboat on the port side but were forced to return on board when the *Concordia’*s list rendered the port-side boats useless. Crossing to starboard, they were standing in a darkened hallway, inching forward near the end of a long line of people, when Dean heard the crash of plates and glasses and the ship started to roll.

People began to scream. The family fell to the floor. Dean felt sure the ship was turning completely over, as seen in The Poseidon Adventure. To his amazement, it didn’t. Once the ship settled, the Ananiases found themselves stomach-down on a steep incline; Dean realized they had to crawl upward, back to the port side, which was now above their heads. They grabbed a railing and managed to pull themselves almost all the way to the open deck at the top. But five feet short of the opening, the railing suddenly stopped.

“We started trying to pull ourselves up,” recalls Dean, a retired teacher. “We got up against the wall, and that’s when my daughter Cindy said, ‘I’m gonna launch myself up, push me up and I’ll grab a railing.’ She did it. So did the others. I knew they couldn’t pull me up because I’m larger, so I pulled myself into a frog position and jumped as high as I could.” He made it. But even then, with dozens of people slipping and sliding all around them and no officers in sight, Dean couldn’t see a way off the ship. “I knew we were going to die,” he recalls. “We all just started praying.”

Someone called from below. Turning, they saw a young Argentinean couple, clearly exhausted, holding a toddler. They hadn’t the energy to jump upward. The woman beseeched Georgia to take the child. “Here,” she pleaded, raising the three-year-old, “take my daughter.” Georgia did, then thought better of it. She handed the infant back, saying, “Here, take the child. She should be with you. If the end is going to happen, she should be with her parents.” (They evidently survived.)

While Dean Ananias pondered his next move, Benji Smith and his wife had already crossed to the port side amidships. A crewman urged them to go back. “No, that side is sinking!” Smith barked. “We can’t go there!”

After a few minutes, Smith was startled to see his in-laws approach; on a crewman’s order, they had returned to their rooms and, unable to understand the English-language announcements, had remained inside so long they missed the lifeboats. At that point, Smith recalls, “we were listing so severely the walls were slowly turning into floors, and we realized that if we don’t make a decisive move quickly, if we want to jump, we won’t be able to.” Boats were bobbing far below; at this point, anyone who leapt from a port railing would simply land further down the hull. Somehow, Smith saw, they had to get closer to the boats. The only obvious way down was along the outer hull, now tilted at a steep angle. It was like a giant slippery slide, but one Smith could see was far too dangerous to use.

Then he saw the rope. Hurriedly Smith tied a series of knots into it, then tied one end to the outer railing. He explained to his frightened relatives that their only option was to rappel down the hull. “We hugged each other and said our good-byes, and I told everyone, ‘I love you,’ ” Smith says. “We really felt, all of us, that dying was in the cards.”

Smith was among the first over the side. With the ship listing to starboard, the angle wasn’t that steep; in two bounds he made it to Deck 3 below. His family followed. Looking up, Smith saw worried faces staring down at them.

“The language barriers made it difficult to talk, but using our hands and waving, we got a bunch of people down to the third deck,” Smith says. “Then I re-tied the rope to the railing on Deck 3, thinking we could climb down this rope and position ourselves to jump in the water, or the boats. So we started climbing down the rope, all six of us. And then, up above us, a steady stream of people began to follow.”

Soon, Smith estimates, there were 40 people hanging on to his rope at the ship’s midsection, among them the Ananias family. What they should do next, no one had a clue.

A Huge Black Buffalo

The Coast Guard helicopter base responsible for operations in the Tyrrhenian Sea is a cluster of office buildings and hangars in the town of Sarzana, 130 miles northwest of Giglio. Its commander, a ruggedly handsome 49-year-old named Pietro Mele, had been asleep when the first call came in from the operations center. Not until a second call, at 10:35, just minutes before the Concordia ran aground, was he told that the ship in trouble carried 4,000 people. “Holy shit,” Mele said to himself. The largest rescue his unit had ever attempted was a dozen people plucked from a sinking freighter off the city of La Spezia in 2005.

Mele called in every available pilot. By the time he reached the base, at 11:20, the first helicopter, a slow-moving Agusta Bell 412 code-named “Koala 9,” was already rising from the tarmac for the hour-long flight south. A half-hour later a second helicopter, a faster model code-named “Nemo 1,” followed suit. “We expected to find something there all lit up, a floating Christmas tree, but instead what we found was this huge black buffalo lying on its side in the water,” Mele recalls.

Both helicopters were, figuratively and literally, operating in the dark. There was no chance of communication with anyone on board; the only way to assess the situation, in fact, was to lower a man onto the Concordia. The pilot of Nemo 1, Salvatore Cilona, slowly circled the ship, searching for a safe spot to try it. For several minutes he studied the midsection but determined that the helicopter’s downdraft, combined with the precarious angle of the ship, made this too dangerous.

“The ship was listing at 80 degrees, so there was incredible risk of slipping off,” recalls Nemo 1’s rescue diver, Marco Savastano.

Moving toward the bow, they saw clusters of people waving for help. Savastano, a slender Coast Guard veteran with a receding hairline, thought he could alight safely on a slanting passageway beside the bridge. At about 12:45, Savastano climbed into a “horse collar” harness and allowed himself to be winched down to the ship. Extricating himself, he dropped through an open door into the total blackness inside the bridge. To his surprise, he found 56 people clustered inside, most pressed against the far wall.

“What really struck me was the total silence of these 56 people,” he remembers, shaking his head. “The look on their faces was totally fixed, just an empty look. They were in a state of unreality. It was very dark. I asked if anyone was injured. No one was hurt seriously. I tried my best to calm them down.”

After Savastano radioed in the situation, a second diver, Marco Restivo, joined him on the bridge. It was clear the older passengers were in no shape to walk far. Savastano and Restivo decided to begin winching people up to the helicopters. Savastano chose an especially shaken Spanish woman, about 60, to go first. “She didn’t want to leave her husband,” he recalls. “I told her, ‘Don’t worry about it. As soon as I get you on board, I will come back for your husband.’ ”

By the time Savastano was ready to return to the Concordia, the pilot had spotted two passengers in a precarious position, sitting on an open door about 25 feet below the bridge. “We just saw flashing lights, so we followed the lights down,” Savastano recalls. Reaching the open door, he found two Asian crew members, begging for rescue. “Their faces, they were just so terrified,” he recalls. “They were in such a dangerous position, I had to give them priority. It was very tricky because the space was so tight. Every movement of the helo put us at risk. If it moved just a little, the passengers would strike the side of the ship and be crushed. Me too. I went down and began to try to rescue them, but I kept slipping. The floor was very slippery, and the ship was so tilted. The first guy, I got him into the strap, but he wouldn’t stay still. I had to keep pushing his arms down, so he wouldn’t fall out [of the horse collar]. When I finally got him up [to the helicopter], he just fainted.”

Savastano returned to the ship, and had just begun winching the second crew member aloft when, to his surprise, a porthole suddenly opened and a ghostly face appeared. “Fuck!” he shouted.

Savastano raised a clenched fist, signaling the winch operator to stop lifting him. The face belonged to one of five passengers who were stuck on a lower deck with no way out. “Then the pilot told me we only had two minutes left—we were running out of fuel—so I said to these people, ‘Don’t move! We will be right back!’ ” With three passengers now aboard, Nemo 1 wheeled into the night sky and headed to the town of Grosseto to refuel.

Before his lifeboat had reached the rocks, Captain Schettino’s cell phone rang once more. This time it was one of the Coast Guard supervisors at Livorno, Gregorio De Falco. It was 12:42.

“We’ve abandoned ship,” Schettino told him.

De Falco was startled. “You’ve abandoned ship?” he asked.

Schettino, no doubt sensing De Falco’s dismay, said, “I did not abandon the ship … we were thrown into the water.”

When De Falco put down the phone, he stared at the officers beside him in amazement. This violated every tenet of maritime tradition, not to mention Italian law. “The captain had abandoned ship with hundreds of people on board, people who trusted him,” says De Falco’s boss, Cosma Scaramella. “This is an extremely serious thing, not just because it’s a crime.” For a moment he struggles to find a word. “This,” he goes on, “is an infamy. To abandon women and children, it’s like a doctor who abandons his patients.”

The lifeboat carrying Schettino and his officers did not head into the harbor. Instead, it disgorged its passengers at the nearest land, along the rocks at Point Gabbianara. A few dozen people were already there, most of them having swum. “I noticed the captain did not help, in any way,” a crewman told investigators, “neither in the recovery of people in the water, nor in coordinating rescue operations. He remained on the rocks watching the ship sink.”

Giglio’s rock-jawed police chief, Roberto Galli, had been among the first islanders to pull alongside the Concordia, in a police launch, just after it ran aground. At 12:15, having returned to the docks to coordinate rescue efforts, Galli glanced into the distance and noticed something strange: a set of twinkling lights—“like Christmas lights,” he recalls—on the rocks at Point Gabbianara. With a start, Galli realized the lights must be from life preservers, meaning there were survivors, probably cold and wet, out on the boulders at the water’s edge. He grabbed two of his men and drove two miles from the port to a roadside high above the Concordia. From there, navigating by the light of his cell phone, Galli and his officers stumbled down the barren slope. He fell twice. It took 20 minutes.

When he reached the rocks below, Galli was stunned to find 110 shivering survivors. There were women, children, and elderly, and few spoke any Italian. Galli and his men called for a bus and began herding them all up the rocky slope toward the road above. Returning to the water’s edge, he was surprised to find a group of four or five people who had remained behind. He glanced at the *Concordia’*s giant gold smokestack, which was looming toward them; he was worried it might explode.

“Come, come!” Galli announced. “It’s too dangerous to stay here.”

“We’re officers from the ship,” a voice replied.

Galli was startled to find himself talking to Captain Schettino and another officer, Dimitrios Christidis. As several people observed, the captain was not wet.

“I was shocked,” Galli recalls. “I could see on the ship there were major operations going on. I could see helicopters lifting passengers off the ship. I said, ‘Come with me. I’ll take you to the port, and then you can get back to the ship,’ because I thought that was their job. Schettino said, ‘No, I want to stay here, to verify conditions on the ship.’ For about 30 minutes, I stayed with them, watching. At one point, Schettino asked to use my telephone, because his was running out of juice. I wasn’t giving this guy my phone. Because, unlike him, I was trying to save people. Finally, when I was about to leave, they asked for a blanket and tea. I said, ‘If you come back with me, I’ll give you whatever you want.’ But he didn’t move. So I left.”

Not long after, at 1:46, the angry Coast Guard officer, De Falco, telephoned Schettino once more. The captain was still sitting on his rock, staring glumly at the Concordia. De Falco had heard there was a rope ladder hanging from the bow of the ship. “Schettino? Listen, Schettino,” he began. “There are people trapped on board. Now you go with your boat under the prow on the starboard side. There’s a rope ladder. You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are. Is that clear? I’m recording this conversation, Captain Schettino.”

Schettino tried to object, but De Falco wasn’t having it. “You go up that rope ladder, get on that ship, and tell me how many people are still on board, and what they need. Is that clear? … I’m going to make sure you get in trouble. I’m going to make you pay for this. Get the fuck on board!”

“Captain, please,” Schettino begged.

“No ‘please.’ You get moving and go on board now … ”

“I am here with the rescue boats. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“What are you doing, Captain?”

“I am here to coordinate the rescue … ”

“What are you coordinating there? Go on board! Are you refusing?”

They bickered another minute. “But you realize it’s dark and we can’t see anything,” Schettino pleaded.

“And so what?” De Falco demanded. “You want to go home, Schettino? It’s dark and you want to go home?”

Schettino offered more excuses. De Falco cut him off one last time.

“Go! Immediately!”

Later, I asked De Falco’s boss, Cosma Scaramella, whether he thought the captain was in shock. “I don’t know,” Scaramella told me. “He didn’t seem very lucid.”

A half-hour or so after his last call from the Coast Guard, a rescue boat plucked Schettino from his rock and ferried him to the harbor. He talked to the police for a bit, then found a priest, who later said the captain, in a daze, cried for a very long time.

By one A.M., with the Concordia now lying almost flat on its side, between 700 and 1,000 people remained on board. Clumps of people were scattered throughout the ship, many clinging to railings. About 40 were hanging on Benji Smith’s rope amidships. Almost everyone else had congregated in a panicky crowd of 500 or more toward the stern, on the port side of Deck 4, facing the sea. Many of these had taken refuge in a cramped passageway; others remained on the deck outside. Dozens of boats had gathered, about 60 feet below—the Coast Guard later counted 44 different craft in use by dawn—but there was no easy route to them.

To date, no one has identified exactly who found the long rope ladder and tossed it down to the water. One of the boatmen below, the tobacco-shop owner Giovanni Rossi, recalls a Filipino crewman who scaled up and down it several times, trying to coordinate a rescue. According to Mario Pellegrini, who was mired in the chaos above, two crewmen worked with him to supervise the aborning escape attempt: the doctor, Sandro Cinquini, and especially young Simone Canessa, the same officer who earlier in the evening told the Coast Guard the ship had suffered only a blackout. Canessa’s role in the evacuation has not been mentioned publicly; yet according to Pellegrini, he was the single most effective crewman still working to evacuate the ship during the long night’s most harrowing hours.

“When I got up there and saw Simone, he was the boss, he was the only one up there really helping,” says Pellegrini. “When he realized I was there to help, he saw we could work together. He was fantastic. Simone, I think, created this whole escape route. He was at the top. I did my best to help him.”

“I am not a hero: I did my job,” Canessa told VANITY FAIR in a brief telephone interview. “I did everything I could to save everyone I could.”

It was Canessa, Pellegrini believes, who found an aluminum ladder and leaned it skyward, onto the outer railing of Deck 4, which was now above their heads. A passenger could climb this ladder to the railing above, then, grabbing the rope ladder, scoot on his rear down the hull to the boats. It was risky, but doable. The problem was establishing an orderly procedure. “The only way out, for everyone, was this small aluminum ladder,” Pellegrini says. “When the ship fell and panic first hit, everyone threw themselves at this ladder. They had no regard for anyone else. It was horrible. I just remember all the children crying.”

“A crowd is an ugly monster if there is panic,” says Dr. Cinquini, who tried in vain to calm people. “No one was listening to me. They were running up and down, slipping, ready to throw themselves in There were a lot of children. You couldn’t convince them [to calm down]. People were out of their minds. The fathers, who are often more fragile than the mothers, were losing it, while the mothers were trying to maintain a certain level of calm.”

“There was a couple with a small child, a three-year-old in a life jacket,” Pellegrini recalls. “When the mother went on the ladder, the father tried to lift the child up. As he’s doing that, someone else shoves in front. The mother is pulling the life jacket; the father holds on; the kid is almost choking. It was horrible. I started yelling at people, ‘Don’t be animals! Stop being animals!’ I shouted this many times, to allow the children in. It had no effect.”

“People were shouting, crying; people were falling over; there was total panic,” recalls a 31-year-old advertising salesman named Gianluca Gabrielli, who managed to climb the ladder with his wife and their two small children. Outside, on the hull, “I felt alive,” Gabrielli says. “I had gotten out. I saw the patrol boats, the helicopters. People were somehow calmer up here. I felt better. I took one child, my eldest, Giorgia. My wife took the other. We started going down the rope ladder clutching each child in front of us as we went down on our bottoms. We were afraid the wood in between the rope ladder would break. I told the kids to think it was just like going down the ladder of their bunk beds, to think of it like an adventure. Me? I felt like Rambo on the Titanic. ”

The crowd began to calm only when Pellegrini and Cinquini managed to herd many of them out of the packed passageway onto the open deck alongside. “From there we could see the stars,” recalls Cinquini. “It was a beautiful night, calm and indifferent to the chaos. Once out in the open the people saw the land was close by and that calmed them.”

Slowly, order returned. Pellegrini took control of the line to the aluminum ladder, holding children while parents climbed, then handing them up. Somewhere fuel had spilled, however, and footing on the inclined deck had become treacherous. The hardest part came when passengers reached the top of the ladder and confronted the long, thin rope ladder descending to the sea. “It was incredibly difficult,” says Pellegrini. “The parents didn’t want to let go of the children. The kids didn’t want to let go of the parents. The most difficult were the elderly. They didn’t want to let go [of the railing] and descend. There was this one woman, it took 15 minutes to move her. She was so frightened, I had to physically pry her fingers free.”

One by one, people inched down the rope ladder, most scooting on their rear ends. Dozens of people were on the ladder at once. Infra-red footage from the helicopters shows the incredible scene, a long spray of tiny darkened figures on the outer hull, clinging to the rope ladder, looking for all the world like a line of desperate ants. “No one fell—not one,” Pellegrini says with a smile. “We didn’t lose a single person.”

At the bottom of the rope ladder, boats took turns picking up the exhausted passengers, helping them jump down the last five or six feet to safety. Giovanni Rossi and his crew alone managed to ferry at least 160 of them safely into the harbor.

Abandoning Ship

Not everyone made it to safety, however. Among those lending help on Deck 4 was the kindly 56-year-old hotel director, Manrico Giampedroni. As people shimmied down the hull, Giampedroni spied a group at the far end of the ship. “I wanted to go and rescue these people,” he told the Italian magazine Famiglia Cristiana, “because at times a word of comfort, the sight of a uniform, or a friendly person is enough to inspire courage. Staying in a group is one thing; alone is much more difficult. I headed to the bow, walking on the walls; the ship was so tilted you had to stay on the walls.”

As he walked, Giampedroni tapped on the doors now at his feet, listening for responses that never came. He didn’t bother trying any of them; they all opened from the inside. Or so he thought. He had just stepped on a door outside the Milano Restaurant when, to his dismay, it gave way. Suddenly he was falling into darkness. He slammed into a wall about 15 feet down, then tumbled down what felt like half the ship, finally landing, ominously, in seawater up to his neck. He felt a stabbing pain in his left leg; it was broken in two places. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized he was inside the restaurant, now a vast, freezing swimming pool jammed with floating tables and chairs. He realized the water was slowly rising.

Giampedroni managed to crawl atop the metal base of a table, balancing himself on one leg, as he shouted and shouted and shouted for help.

No one came.

The line of people on Benji Smith’s rope remained there for two solid hours, bathed in spotlights from the boats below. It was cold; their arms ached. When the helicopters hovered overhead, everyone shouted and waved their arms.

“The boats didn’t know what to do, how to get close,” Smith says. “Finally one of the lifeboats came back. The crew had to stabilize it, but with all the waves from the other boats, it kept crashing into the ship. Crash crash crash crash. It had this little gate, like three feet wide. We needed to jump down three or four feet into the gate, but the boat is moving back and forth, crashing into the hull. Someone could easily lose their legs if they don’t jump just right.” The crewmen below tried holding on to the end of Smith’s rope, but when the boat lurched, so did the rope, triggering panicked shouts up and down its length. Finally, Smith and his wife, along with several others, decided to leap onto the lifeboat’s roof. “We heard this crunching noise when we landed,” he says. “But we made it.”

When the lifeboat was finally stabilized, the crewmen slowly helped the others off the rope. In this way about 120 more people escaped unharmed.

By five o’clock almost all of the 4,200 passengers and crew had made it off the ship, by lifeboat, jumping into the water, or scuttling down ropes and ladders on the port side. Rescue divers had returned and winched 15 more into helicopters; the last passengers on the bridge were slowly led down to the rope ladder. Fire-rescue teams had begun climbing onto the ship, looking for stragglers. As they searched, the only people they found were Mario Pellegrini; Simone Canessa; the doctor, Sandro Cinquini; and a Korean hostess who had slipped and broken her ankle. “I put it in plaster,” says Cinquini. “I hugged her the whole time because she was shaking. Then a short time later everything was done. The four of us could go down. But the deputy mayor stayed.”

“Once everything was done, there was a bit of calm,” says Pellegrini. “[Canessa and I] took a megaphone and [started] calling to see if anyone was still on board. Up and down Deck 4, we did this twice. We opened all the doors, shouting, ‘Is anyone there?’ We didn’t hear any response.”

They were among the last to leave the Concordia. Pellegrini climbed down the rope ladder and a few minutes later found himself standing safely on the harbor’s stone esplanade. As the sun began to rise, he turned to Cinquini. “Come on, Doctor, I’ll buy you a beer,” he said, and that is what he did.

All that night and into the dawn, hundreds of exhausted passengers stood along the harbor or huddled inside Giglio’s church and the adjacent Hotel Bahamas, where the owner, Paolo Fanciulli, emptied every bottle in his bar—for free—and fielded calls from reporters all over the world.

By midmorning passengers began boarding ferries for the long road home. It was then, around 11:30, that Captain Schettino materialized at the hotel, alone, asking for a pair of dry socks. A TV crew spotted him and had just stuck a microphone in his face when a woman, apparently a cruise-line official, appeared and herded him away.

All day Saturday, rescue workers fanned out across the ship, looking for survivors. Sunday morning they found a pair of South Korean newlyweds still in their stateroom; safe but shivering, they had slept through the impact, waking to find the hallway so steeply inclined that they couldn’t safely navigate it. Somehow, though, no one found poor Manrico Giampedroni, the hotel director, who remained perched on a table above the water in the Milano Restaurant. He could hear the emergency crews and banged a saucepan to get their attention, but it was no use. When the water rose, he managed to crawl to a dry wall. He stayed there all day Saturday, his broken leg throbbing, sipping from cans of Coke and a bottle of Cognac he found floating by. Finally, around four A.M. Sunday, a fireman heard his shouts. It took three hours to lift him from his watery perch. He hugged the fireman for all he was worth. Airlifted to a mainland hospital, Giampedroni was the last person taken off the ship alive.

The toll of the dead and missing climbed to 32. By mid-March, all but two of their bodies had been found. A few, it appears, perhaps seven or eight, died after jumping into the water, either from drowning or hypothermia. Most, however, were found inside the ship, suggesting they had drowned when the Concordia rolled a little after midnight.

A Hungarian violinist, Sandor Feher, helped several children put on life jackets before heading back to his cabin to pack his instrument; he drowned. One of the most heartbreaking stories involved the only child to die, a five-year-old Italian girl named Dayana Arlotti, who drowned with her father, William. He had severe diabetes, and the two may have gone back to their cabin to retrieve medicine. Mario Pellegrini thought they might be the panicked father and daughter he saw late that night, running back and forth on Deck 4, asking for help.

Three months after the disaster, investigations into the wreck of the Concordia plod onward. Captain Schettino, who remains under house arrest at his home near Naples, could face multiple charges of manslaughter and illegally abandoning his ship once formally indicted. Persistent leaks suggest that another half-dozen officers, as well as officials at Costa Cruises, could eventually face charges. In March, a dozen survivors and their families filed into a theater in the coastal city of Grosseto to give testimony. Outside, the streets were jammed with reporters. Few believed they would see justice for those who died aboard the Concordia, at least not anytime soon. “At the end of all this,” one man predicted, “it will all be for nothing. You wait and see.”

The Concordia itself remains where it fell that night, on the rocks at Point Gabbianara. Salvage workers finally managed to drain its fuel tanks in March, lessening the possibility of environmental damage. But the ship will take an estimated 10 to 12 months to remove. If you study it today from the harbor at Giglio, there is something unearthly about the ship, a sense, however slight, that it has suddenly appeared from a bygone era, when ships still sank and people died. This was something that several survivors remarked on afterward, that amazingly, in a world of satellites and laser-guided weapons and instant communication almost anywhere on earth, ships could still sink. As the Italian survivor Gianluca Gabrielli said, “I never believed this could still happen in 2012.”

Bryan Burrough

Bryan burrough is a special correspondent at *vanity fair.*, cocktail hour.

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By Chris Murphy

10 years later, Costa Concordia disaster is still vivid for survivors

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Ten years have passed since the Costa Concordia cruise ship slammed into a reef and capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio . But for the passengers on board and the residents who welcomed them ashore, the memories of that harrowing, freezing night remain vividly etched into their minds.

The dinner plates that flew off the tables when the rocks first gashed the hull. The blackout after the ship’s engine room flooded and its generators failed. The final mad scramble to evacuate the listing liner and then the extraordinary generosity of Giglio islanders who offered shoes, sweatshirts and shelter until the sun rose and passengers were ferried to the mainland.

Italy on Thursday is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration that will end with a candlelit vigil near the moment the ship hit the reef: 9:45 p.m. on Jan. 13, 2012. The events will honor the 32 people who died that night, the 4,200 survivors, but also the residents of Giglio, who took in passengers and crew and then lived with the Concordia’s wrecked carcass off their shore for another two years until it was righted and hauled away for scrap.

“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.

“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.

The sad anniversary comes as the cruise industry, shut down in much of the world for months because of the coronavirus pandemic, is once again in the spotlight because of COVID-19 outbreaks that threaten passenger safety. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control last month warned people across-the-board not to go on cruises , regardless of their vaccination status, because of the risks of infection.

A dozen passengers on cruise ship test positive for coronavirus

The passengers, whose infections were found through random testing, were asymptomatic or had mild symptoms, according to the Port of San Francisco.

Jan. 7, 2022

For Concordia survivor Georgia Ananias, the COVID-19 infections are just the latest evidence that passenger safety still isn’t a top priority for the cruise ship industry. Passengers aboard the Concordia were largely left on their own to find life jackets and a functioning lifeboat after the captain steered the ship close too shore in a stunt. He then delayed an evacuation order until it was too late, with lifeboats unable to lower because the ship was listing too heavily.

“I always said this will not define me, but you have no choice,” Ananias said in an interview from her home in Los Angeles. “We all suffer from PTSD. We had a lot of guilt that we survived and 32 other people died.”

Prosecutors blamed the delayed evacuation order and conflicting instructions given by crew for the chaos that ensued as passengers scrambled to get off the ship. The captain, Francesco Schettino, is serving a 16-year prison sentence for manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning a ship before all the passengers and crew had evacuated.

Ananias and her family declined Costa’s initial $14,500 compensation offered to each passenger and sued Costa, a unit of U.S.-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 U.S. and then Italian court system, they lost their case.

“I think people need to be aware that when you go on a cruise, that if there is a problem, you will not have the justice that you may be used to in the country in which you are living,” said Ananias, who went onto become a top official in the International Cruise Victims association, an advocacy group that lobbies to improve safety aboard ships and increase transparency and accountability in the industry.

Costa didn’t respond to emails seeking comment on the anniversary.

Cruise Lines International Assn., the world’s largest cruise industry trade association, stressed in a statement to the Associated Press that passenger and crew safety were the industry’s top priority, and that cruising remains one of the safest vacation experiences available.

“Our thoughts continue to be with the victims of the Concordia tragedy and their families on this sad anniversary,” CLIA said. It said it has worked over the past 10 years with the International Maritime Organization and the maritime industry to “drive a safety culture that is based on continuous improvement.”

For Giglio Mayor Sergio Ortelli, the memories of that night run the gamut: the horror of seeing the capsized ship, the scramble to coordinate rescue services on shore, the recovery of the first bodies and then the pride that islanders rose to the occasion to tend to the survivors.

Ortelli was later on hand when, in September 2013, the 115,000-ton, 1,000-foot long cruise ship was righted vertical off its seabed graveyard in an extraordinary feat of engineering. But the night of the disaster, a Friday the 13th, remains seared in his memory.

“It was a night that, in addition to being a tragedy, had a beautiful side because the response of the people was a spontaneous gesture that was appreciated around the world,” Ortelli said.

It seemed the natural thing to do at the time. “But then we realized that on that night, in just a few hours, we did something incredible.”

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The Costa Concordia Disaster: How Human Error Made It Worse

By: Becky Little

Updated: August 10, 2023 | Original: June 23, 2021

Many famous naval disasters happen far out at sea, but on January 13, 2012, the Costa Concordia wrecked just off the coast of an Italian island in relatively shallow water. The avoidable disaster killed 32 people and seriously injured many others, and left investigators wondering: Why was the luxury cruise ship sailing so close to the shore in the first place?

During the ensuing trial, prosecutors came up with a tabloid-ready explanation : The married ship captain had sailed it so close to the island to impress a much younger Moldovan dancer with whom he was having an affair.

Whether or not Captain Francesco Schettino was trying to impress his girlfriend is debatable. (Schettino insisted the ship sailed close to shore to salute other mariners and give passengers a good view.) But whatever the reason for getting too close, the Italian courts found the captain, four crew members and one official from the ship’s company, Costa Crociere (part of Carnival Corporation), to be at fault for causing the disaster and preventing a safe evacuation. The wreck was not the fault of unexpected weather or ship malfunction—it was a disaster caused entirely by a series of human errors.

“At any time when you have an incident similar to Concordia, there is never…a single causal factor,” says Brad Schoenwald, a senior marine inspector at the United States Coast Guard. “It is generally a sequence of events, things that line up in a bad way that ultimately create that incident.”

Wrecking Near the Shore

The Concordia was supposed to take passengers on a seven-day Italian cruise from Civitavecchia to Savona. But when it deviated from its planned path to sail closer to the island of Giglio, the ship struck a reef known as the Scole Rocks. The impact damaged the ship, allowing water to seep in and putting the 4,229 people on board in danger.

Sailing close to shore to give passengers a nice view or salute other sailors is known as a “sail-by,” and it’s unclear how often cruise ships perform these maneuvers. Some consider them to be dangerous deviations from planned routes. In its investigative report on the 2012 disaster, Italy’s Ministry of Infrastructures and Transports found that the Concordia “was sailing too close to the coastline, in a poorly lit shore area…at an unsafe distance at night time and at high speed (15.5 kts).”

In his trial, Captain Schettino blamed the shipwreck on Helmsman Jacob Rusli Bin, who he claimed reacted incorrectly to his order; and argued that if the helmsman had reacted correctly and quickly, the ship wouldn’t have wrecked. However, an Italian naval admiral testified in court that even though the helmsman was late in executing the captain’s orders, “the crash would’ve happened anyway.” (The helmsman was one of the four crew members convicted in court for contributing to the disaster.)

A Questionable Evacuation

Evidence introduced in Schettino’s trial suggests that the safety of his passengers and crew wasn’t his number one priority as he assessed the damage to the Concordia. The impact and water leakage caused an electrical blackout on the ship, and a recorded phone call with Costa Crociere’s crisis coordinator, Roberto Ferrarini, shows he tried to downplay and cover up his actions by saying the blackout was what actually caused the accident.

“I have made a mess and practically the whole ship is flooding,” Schettino told Ferrarini while the ship was sinking. “What should I say to the media?… To the port authorities I have said that we had…a blackout.” (Ferrarini was later convicted for contributing to the disaster by delaying rescue operations.)

Schettino also didn’t immediately alert the Italian Search and Rescue Authority about the accident. The impact on the Scole Rocks occurred at about 9:45 p.m. local time, and the first person to contact rescue officials about the ship was someone on the shore, according to the investigative report. Search and Rescue contacted the ship a few minutes after 10:00 p.m., but Schettino didn’t tell them what had happened for about 20 more minutes.

A little more than an hour after impact, the crew began to evacuate the ship. But the report noted that some passengers testified that they didn’t hear the alarm to proceed to the lifeboats. Evacuation was made even more chaotic by the ship listing so far to starboard, making walking inside very difficult and lowering the lifeboats on one side, near to impossible. Making things worse, the crew had dropped the anchor incorrectly, causing the ship to flop over even more dramatically.

Through the confusion, the captain somehow made it into a lifeboat before everyone else had made it off. A coast guard member angrily told him on the phone to “Get back on board, damn it!” —a recorded sound bite that turned into a T-shirt slogan in Italy.

Schettino argued that he fell into a lifeboat because of how the ship was listing to one side, but this argument proved unconvincing. In 2015, a court found Schettino guilty of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck, abandoning ship before passengers and crew were evacuated and lying to authorities about the disaster. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison. In addition to Schettino, Ferrarini and Rusli Bin, the other people who received convictions for their role in the disaster were Cabin Service Director Manrico Giampedroni, First Officer Ciro Ambrosio and Third Officer Silvia Coronica.

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Costa Concordia is gone, but horror lingers 10 years later

Firefighters walk on a pier of the port of the tiny Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, as a ferry boat enters it, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022. Italy on Thursday is marking the 10th anniversary of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

FILE— Oil removal ships near the cruise ship Costa Concordia leaning on its side Monday, Jan. 16, 2012, after running aground near the tiny Tuscan island of Giglio, Italy, last Friday night. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

FILE— A view of the previously submerged side of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, off the coast of the Tuscan Island of Giglio, Italy, Monday, Jan. 13, 2014. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

FILE— A passenger from South Korea, center, walks with Italian Firefighters, Sunday, Jan. 15, 2012, after being rescued from the luxury cruise ship Costa Concordia which ran aground on the tiny Italian island of Isola del Giglio. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

FILE— A woman hangs her laundry as the grounded cruise ship Costa Concordia is seen in the background, off the Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap.(AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito)

FILE— In this photo taken on Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012, Francesco Schettino, right, the captain of the luxury cruise ship Costa Concordia, which ran aground off the tiny Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, is taken into custody by Carabinieri in Porto Santo Stefano, Italy. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Giacomo Aprili)

This two-photo combo shows from top, part of the harbor of the Tuscan tiny island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022, and the same spot on Friday, Jan. 10, 2014, with the shipwrecked hulk of the cruise ship Costa Concordia. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/ Andrew Medichini and Gregorio Borgia)

This two-photo combo shows from top, part of the harbor of the Tuscan tiny island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022, and the same spot on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012, with the shipwrecked hulk of the cruise ship Costa Concordia. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/ Andrew Medichini and Gregorio Borgia)

This two-photo combo shows from top, the stretch of sea in front of the harbor of the Tuscan tiny island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022, and the same spot on Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012, with the shipwrecked hulk of the cruise ship Costa Concordia. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/ Andrew Medichini and Pier Paolo Cito)

This two-photo combo shows from the top, part of the harbor of the Tuscan tiny island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022, and the same spot on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2012, with the shipwrecked hulk of the cruise ship Costa Concordia. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/ Andrew Medichini and Pier Paolo Cito)

This two-photo combo shows at top, amateur photographer Giuseppe Modesti standing in the port of the Tuscan tiny island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022, holding a tablet with the iconic photograph he took of the passengers leaving the cruise ship Costa Concordia the night it crashed off the island, and below, Modesti standing on the same spot on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012, and holding the same photograph with the shipwrecked hulk of the cruise ship Costa Concordia in the background. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/ Andrew Medichini and Pier Paolo Cito)

Kevin Rebello, brother of Russel Rebello, a waiter who died in the shipwreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, arrives in the tiny Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

FILE — The luxury cruise ship Costa Concordia lays on its starboard side after it ran aground off the coast of the Isola del Giglio island, Italy on Jan. 13, 2012. Italy is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Giuseppe Modesti)

FILE— Seagulls fly in front of the grounded cruise ship Costa Concordia off the Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, Monday, Jan. 30, 2012. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito)

FILE— Italian firefighters conduct search operations on the luxury cruise ship Costa Concordia that ran aground the tiny Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, Sunday, Jan. 15, 2012. Italy on Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, is marking the 10th anniversary of the Concordia disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

A fishing boat enters the port of the tiny Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022. Italy on Thursday is marking the 10th anniversary of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

A ferry boat enters the port of the tiny Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022. Italy on Thursday is marking the 10th anniversary of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

A man stand on a pier of the port of the tiny Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022. Italy on Thursday is marking the 10th anniversary of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Coast Guard officers raise the Italian flag in the port of the tiny Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022. Italy on Thursday is marking the 10th anniversary of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

A television crew films in the port of the tiny Tuscan island of Isola del Giglio, Italy, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022. Italy on Thursday is marking the 10th anniversary of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster with a daylong commemoration, honoring the 32 people who died but also the extraordinary response by the residents of Giglio who took in the 4,200 passengers and crew from the ship on that rainy Friday night and then lived with the Concordia carcass for another two years before it was hauled away for scrap. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

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GIGLIO, Italy (AP) — Fog horns wailed and church bells tolled Thursday as Italy honored the 32 victims of the Costa Concordia shipwreck on the 10th anniversary of the disaster, with a commemoration that recalled the moment the cruise ship struck a reef and capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio.

Some of the 4,200 survivors attended the anniversary events, which began with a noontime Mass and ended with a candlelit procession to Giglio’s dock at the exact moment, 9:45 p.m. local time, that the Concordia hit the rocks that sliced a 70-meter (230-foot) gash in its hull.

Coast guardsmen placed a wreath of flowers on the dock, and the parish priest led the small group in a moment silent prayer pierced only by fog horns and church bells commemorating the absurdity of the disaster: a stunt ordered up by the captain that ended with 32 people dead and a mammoth cruise ship flopped on its side.

Bells rang out earlier Thurday in the same Giglio church that opened its doors that freezing night and took in hundreds of passengers who abandoned ship and reached shore in lifeboats. Some had climbed off the lopsided liner on rope ladders after it flipped onto its side; others were plucked from the decks by rescue helicopters.

“I invite you to have the courage to look forward,” Grosseto Bishop Giovanni Roncari told survivors, relatives of the dead and Coast Guard officials who had helped coordinate the rescue. “Hope doesn’t cancel the tragedy and pain, but it teaches us to look beyond the present moment without forgetting it.”

The Concordia captain, Francesco Schettino, is serving a 16-year prison sentence for manslaughter and other charges for having ordered the crew to steer the ship off course and closer to Giglio in a stunt known as “tourist navigation” to give passengers and those on shore a thrill.

After the ship hit the reef, the engine room flooded and generators failed, causing a power outage that sent the ship adrift until it eventually crashed offshore and capsized. Evidence presented at the trial showed Schettino downplayed the severity of the situation in communications with the Coast Guard and delayed an evacuation order, then abandoned ship before all the passengers and crew were off.

Giglio’s vice mayor at the time, Mario Pellegrini, had climbed on board the listing ship that night to help coordinate the rescue, and found sheer chaos in the absence of orders from the captain or crew. He recalled he finally climbed down after the last passengers and crew had been evacuated, at around 6 a.m. the following morning.

“The memories I have from that night inside the ship are terrible, of the tears and desperation of the people,” he said Thursday. “I would have wanted to save everyone, but thinking about it again, everything I could do, I did.”

The 10th anniversary is also recalling how the residents of Giglio took in the 4,200 surviving passengers and crew, giving them food, blankets and a place to rest until day broke and they were ferried to the mainland. Giglio’s people then lived with the Concordia’s 115,000-ton, 300-meter (1,000-foot) carcass for another two years until it was righted and hauled away for scrap.

“It was right to be here, to pay tribute to those victims, but the primary motivation is to thank and greet the people who helped me that night, from Giglio,” said survivor Luciano Castro.

Giglio’s residents for their part warmly welcomed Kevin Rebello, whose brother Russel, a Concordia waiter, was the last person unaccounted-for until crews discovered his remains while dismantling the ship in 2014 in a Genoa shipyard.

Kevin Rebello had become close to many Giglio residents and rescuers during the months that divers searched for his brother. And on Thursday, as he arrived for the commemorative Mass, he received an award from the Civil Protection Agency.

“This is for (Russel),” Rebello told reporters as he clutched the plaque. “He would be proud of it.”

The anniversary comes as the cruise ship industry, shut down in much of the world for months because of the coronavirus pandemic, is again in the spotlight because of COVID-19 outbreaks that threaten passenger safety. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control last month warned people to avoid cruises, regardless of their vaccination status, because of the infection risk.

For Concordia survivors, the COVID-19 infections on cruise ships are just another indication that passenger safety still isn’t a top industry priority. Concordia passengers were largely left on their own to find life jackets and a functioning lifeboat. Because of the delayed evacuation order, many lifeboats couldn’t be lowered because the ship was already on its side.

Ester Percossi recalled being thrown to the ground in the dining room by the initial impact of the reef gashing into the hull “like an earthquake.” The lights went out, and bottles, glasses and plates flew off the tables.

“We got up and with great effort went out on deck and there we got the life vests — those that we could find, because everyone was grabbing them from each other — to save themselves,” she recalled. “There was no law. Just survival and that is it.”

Former Coast Guard Cmdr. Gregorio De Falco returned for the commemorations, 10 years after he became something of a national hero when audio emerged of his expletive-laden communications with Schettino in the hours after impact, ordering him to get back on board and coordinate the rescue.

“You prepare all your life for these mass rescue operations with the hope that you never have to do one,” De Falco said Thursday. “But it happened to us.”

Costa sent representatives to the ceremonies and issued a statement saying the company’s thoughts were with the victims and their relatives. Costa noted that since the disaster, it undertaken the massive operation to right the ship, remove it, and restore the damaged seabed.

The cruise line, a unit of U.S.-based Carnival Corp., thanked the rescue crews and residents of Giglio as well as the Costa employees “who gave their assistance and worked restlessly that night and in the following phases with generosity and courage.”

Winfield reported from Rome.

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The world’s worst cruise ship disasters

Tragedies aboard cruise ships live on in infamy as the sinking of RMS Titanic, the biggest cruise disaster in history, bears witness. Ship-technology.com lists the worst ever cruise ship disasters.

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RMS Titanic

The sinking of RMS Titanic in April 1912 remains the worst, and the most infamous, cruise ship disaster in history. The sinking of the biggest passenger ship ever built at the time resulted in the death of more than 1,500 of the 2,208 people onboard.

The accident occurred when the ship hit an iceberg while cruising at its maximum speed of 23k on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. The massive loss of life in the North Atlantic Ocean resulted mainly from hypothermia.

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RMS Titanic was the second of three Olympic-class ocean liners operated by White Star Line. It was constructed by the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast in three years and was designed by the naval architect Thomas Andrews.

RMS Titanic measured 269.11m in length, 28.042m in breadth, had a gross tonnage of 46,328t and comprised nine decks. The cruise ship was equipped with 20 lifeboats for 1,178 people.

The steamship’s three propellers were driven by two four-cylinder, triple-expansion, inverted reciprocating steam engines and one four-blade low-pressure Parsons turbine.

RMS Lusitania

The sinking of RMS Lusitania in May 1915, after being hit by the German military submarine U-20, caused 1,201 deaths during a voyage from New York to Liverpool. She was considered the largest, fastest and most luxurious ship in the world at the time of her launch in June 1906.

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The Lusitania disaster resulted in the death of many Americans and became one of the major reasons behind the US entering World War I.

The German submarine targeted the submarine as a naval ship, as it was also carrying war weapons for the British.

RMS Lusitania was built by John Brown and Co. of Scotland and completed its maiden voyage in September 1907. The steamship was owned and operated by Cunard Company; a rival of White Star Line, which owned the Titanic.

RMS Lusitania had an overall length of 239.8m, beam of 26.7m, draft of 10.2m, depth of 18.4m, gross tonnage of 31,550t and ten decks. It was designed to accmmodate 2,165 passengers and 827 crew members. It was equipped with four 375kW generator sets and possessed a service speed of 25k and a maximum speed of 26.35k.

RMS Empress of Ireland

RMS Empress of Ireland, which sank in the Saint Lawrence River in May 1914, claimed the lives of 1,012 people out of the 1,477 people onboard. It was the second major cruise ship disaster after the Titanic disaster. The Ocean Liner operated on the North Atlantic route between Quebec and Liverpool in England.

The passenger steamship collided with the 6,000t Norwegian collier, the Storstad, following a thick fog which engulfed the river. Just five of the 42 lifeboats could be launched into the water due to the listing of the vessel on her starboard side. The accident was aggravated by the cold conditions, failure to close the ship’s watertight doors and failure to close all portholes aboard.

RMS Empress of Ireland was owned by Canadian Pacific Steamship Company. It was designed by Francis Elgar and built by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering. The ocean liner was launched in January 1906 and completed her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Montreal in June 1906.

The cruise ship was 168m long, its beam measured 20m and gross tonnage was 14,191t. The ship was equipped with two steam engines and two quadruple expansion propellers, which provided a maximum operating speed of 20k.

MS Estonia, formerly known as Viking Sally, Silja Star and Wasa King during different periods from 1980 to 1993, sank in September 1994 during its voyage from Tallinn to Stockholm, resulting in 852 deaths, while 137 people were saved through rescue operations.

The cruise ferry accident was caused by rough sea conditions in the Baltic Sea, when wind speeds ranged from 35mph to 45mph. The bad sea conditions forced the ship to initially list on the starboard side and later sink completely.

The ferry was constructed by Meyer Werft at its shipyard in Papenburg, Germany, in 1980. The ferry, initially named Viking Sally, was delivered in June 1980 to its first owner Rederi Ab Sally. The vessel was operated by EstLine from 1993 to 1994.

MS Estonia measured 155.43m in length, 24.21m in breadth, had a draught of 5.55m, a gross tonnage of 15,598t and featured nine decks and ten lifeboats. The vessel was equipped with four 4,400kW diesel engines connected to two propeller shafts, and had an operational speed of 21k. The cruise ferry had capacity to accommodate 2,000 passengers and 460 cars.

SS Eastland

The SS Eastland disaster in July 1915 claimed more than 844 lives out of the 2,500 people onboard. The disaster occurred when the ship listed while being still tied to a dock in the Chicago River during preparations to cruise to Michigan City.

The probable causes of the disaster are believed to be the flaws in its design and construction, inadequacy of its ballast tanks and overloading. The accident occurred when the passengers embarked the ship. The ship initially listed to the starboard side and further to portside, throwing off passengers and trapping some in the interior cabins.

SS Eastland was owned by Michigan Transportation Company and operated by Chicago-South Haven Line. It was constructed by Jenks Ship Building Company, which specialised in constructing freighters but had no prior experience in construction of passenger vessels. The vessel was launched in May 1903.

The cruise ship had an overall length of 275m, width of 38m and gross tonnage of 1,961t. It was equipped with two triple expansion steam engines, four scotch boilers and two shafts. The vessel was designed for a top speed of 16.5k. It was equipped with 11 life boats and 37 life rafts.

Saint-Philibert Cruise Ship

Saint-Philibert was a twin screw-propelled small cruise ship that met with disaster in June 1931 resulting in the loss of about 500 lives, sparing just eight passengers while on its homeward run on the Loire Estuary in France.

The disaster was induced by harsh storms driving the passengers to take shelter behind the machinery casings, which caused the ship to list over. It was further struck by a wave causing her to sink. The ship, which carried approximately 500 people during the voyage, exceeded the normal carrying capacity by about 80%.

The inadequacy of the ship’s speed to face such waves, lack of coverings for shelter and absence of communication equipment further aggravated the situation. Besides, the captain and crew were considered unqualified.

Saint-Philibert cruise ship measured 32m in length and 6.4m in breadth, and had a draft of 2.74m and gross tonnage of 189t.

SS Admiral Nakhimov

The SS Admiral Nakhimov disaster in August 1986 resulted in the death of 423 people, mostly Ukranians, out of the 1,234 people onboard. The accident occurred in the Tsemes Bay near the port of Novorossiysk enroute Sochi.

The cruise ship collided with the large bulk carrier Pyotr Vasev at a speed of five knots, causing it to sink within a few minutes. The accident was caused by negligence of the captains of the two ships. The captain of Pyotr Vasev failed to heed the warning announced from SS Admiral Nakhimov, while the captain of Admiral Nakhimov was absent on the bridge at the time of the tragedy.

The passenger liner was originally named SS Berlin III and operated on the Crimean-Caucasian line. It was owned by Norddeutscher Lloyd and constructed by Bremer Vulkan.

SS Admiral Nakhimov had an overall length of 174m, beam of 21.02m and gross tonnage of 17,053t. It had a capacity to accommodate 1,125 passengers and 354 crew, and a cruise speed of 16k.

Aleksandr Suvorov

Aleksandr Suvorov, a river cruise ship of the Valerian Kuybyshev-class, met with disaster in June 1983 resulting in the death of 176 people out of the 415 people onboard, while cruising on the Volga-Don basin in Russia. The blame for the accident was placed on the captain who failed to prevent the accident and had not provided a proper order.

Just prior to the accident, an auction to be held at the cinema hall was announced, leading the passengers to the upper deck of the ship. The ship, which was cruising at a speed of about 13.5k at the time, crashed onto a bridge, failing to pass through the second span of the bridge. A freight train passing through the bridge was also affected by the crash, causing some cars to derail and fall on the ship.

Volga-Don Shipping Company was the operator of the ship at the time. Slovenské Lodenice constructed the vessel in Komárno, Czechoslovakia. The ship was restored after the accident and is currently operated by Vodohod.

Aleksander Suvorov has an overall length of 135.75m and width of 16.8m, and is comprised of four decks. It can accommodate 400 passengers and 83 crew, and runs on a 6CHRN36/45 (EG70 -5) diesel engine.

SS Morro Castle

The SS Morro Castle disaster in September 1934 resulted in the loss of more than 137 passengers and crew out of the 318 passengers and 240 crew onboard. The cruise ship was on its 174th return voyage to New York City from Havana.

The disaster was caused by a fire, which emanated from the cruise ship’s library and engulfed the entire ship. The fire was worsened by bad weather, inadequate crew and the ship’s design, which incorporated easily flammable interior materials. Just 12 lifeboats were launched out of the many lifeboats capable of rescuing 408 people.

The ship was owned by Agwi Navigation Co. and operated by Ward Line. It was constructed in 1930 at a cost of approximately $5m by Newport News Shipbuilding. The vessel completed her maiden voyage in August 1930 and served Ward Line along with its sister vessel SS Oriente for four years.

SS Morro Castle was 155m long, 21.6m wide and 11.9m deep, and had a capacity to carry 489 passengers and 240 crew. The steam turbo-electric liner was propelled by two turbines and sailed at a speed of 20k.

SS Andrea Doria

The SS Andrea Doria collided with the eastbound Swedish passenger liner Stockholm due to poor visibility caused by a thick fog. The disaster took place in July 1956 near the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, while cruising towards New York City resulting in the death of 52 people, while 1,660 people were rescued.

It is considered the world’s first major radar-assisted collision at sea, as the cause of the accident is assumed to be from the misreading of the radar. It was struck just aft and below the starboard bridge, and sank after 11 hours.

The ocean liner was owned by Italian Line and constructed by Ansaldo Shipyards of Genoa, Italy, at a cost of approximately $30m. It was launched in June 1951 and set out on its maiden voyage in January 1953.

SS Andrea Doria measured 212m in length, had a beam of 27m and a gross tonnage of 29,100t. It featured ten decks and was equipped with two steam turbines providing a top speed of 23k.

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MTS Oceanos: When vigilante action saved 220 souls from tragedy

Guest writer: daniel thomas.

Travellers usually relax knowing that cruise companies operate with stringent safety measures. But what if staff don’t follow protocol when disaster strikes? This is the story of MTS Oceanos. Brace yourselves

When Moss and Tracy Hills noticed the crew of MTS Oceanos hastily packing up their personal effects and slinging on their lifejackets, something was clearly – and seriously – wrong. The married couple, both musicians from Zimbabwe, had embarked upon the MTS Oceanos as cruise entertainers several days prior, where the start of an ill-fated final voyage to Durban, South Africa, had unravelled like a bad omen. An anonymous bomb threat had delayed departure from the UK’s East London port, while a seasick organist had disrupted a wedding ceremony held onboard. The bride very nearly didn’t wear white.

However, worst of all was the weather. Conditions had been grim for days, significantly worsening by August 3, with 40-knot winds and 30-foot swells assailing the French-built, Greek-owned luxury cruise liner as it put to sea. The sail-away party was moved from the open deck to the cruise lounge, while progressively harsher weather caused several accidents during dinner service. As diners grimaced upon watching their meal disappear from the waiter’s grasp and onto the thick carpet, many felt the voyage was cursed. Still, at first, it seemed that there was no cause for alarm.

The Oceanos had weathered similar conditions before and had a 250-strong crew to support its complement of 581 passengers. Yiannis Avranas, the ship’s captain, had thirty years of experience at sea, twenty of which serving as an officer.

Nobody could have predicted that it would be the Hills, among others, who would help save the lives of everyone onboard.

MTS Oceanos: Prelude to disaster

Night fell, and as the ship moved along the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape Province, south of Coffee Bay, the Hills began noticing signs of flooding and panicked behaviour from the crew around 8.45pm.

Other eyewitnesses reported similar incidents across the ship in the subsequent half hour. Finally, at approximately 9.30pm, a muffled explosion was heard in the engine room.

In later investigations, a general condition of neglect and unaddressed technical issues emerged. More seriously, non-return valves in the waste disposal system had been scrapped but not replaced.

Worryingly, a 10-inch hole had been left in the bulkhead between the engine room and the sewerage tank. This led to rapid flooding when an unfitted pipe burst from the impact of a strong wave. The engine room flooded, and the generators shorted out, cutting power to the ship.

Worse was to come. Sea water coursed uncontrollably through the gap in the bulkhead, filling the waste tank and the lack of non-return valves sent the water up the main drainage pipes, flooding every outlet connected to the system. The ship was stricken and, once the engines stopped, she began to list alarmingly.

Passengers had by this time gathered in the lounge for the evening show, but they soon began to realise that something was dangerously amiss. Ships often churn about in choppy seas, but a constant slant to one side could only spell trouble. Yet, the crew were largely mute about what was going on.

Thank God for entertainment

The crew and officers began their preparations to abandon ship, starting as they meant to continue – sloppily. Their conduct provided evidence showcasing a blatant disregard for maritime procedure. Lower deck portholes were left unsecured while many passengers were left uninformed of the flooding several hours after the ship’s doomsday had started.

In the face of this abdication of responsibility, salvation for the vessel’s passengers would come from an unlikely source – the ship’s musicians and entertainers.

Moss and Tracy began to investigate any suspected flooding, along with Julian Butler; a stage magician and comedian. Butler and Moss entered the lower decks, below the waterline, to find a sealed bulkhead door and further signs of serious flooding.

Informing Lorraine Betts, the cruise director, of what they’d seen, they watched the crew organise lifeboat departures of women, children and themselves.

Senior officers were frantically piling onto the boats, after failing to issue a general alarm. The captain maintained that the ship was not in danger of sinking.

The Hills confirmed with video evidence that the captain and officers were lying about the condition of the Oceanos, but they had no time to confront anyone. Evacuation of the lifeboats had begun while the Hills, Betts, Butler, comedian Robin Boltman, and other entertainers and cruise staff (including the primarily Filipino kitchen and cabin crew), pitched in to assist.

Amid the exodus of the crew and the absence of effective on-deck leadership, the entertainers and cooks worked hard to minimise panic and maintain order among passengers.

Leaving passengers stranded onboard

Boltman played music in the lounge to calm the passengers, alongside cabaret performer Alvin Collinson. In Collinson’s telling, at one point, he began playing “American Pie”, only to realise that his next line would be “this’ll be the day that I die” – and, with this, he hastily switched to a different song.

The evacuation proved difficult and unsafe. Besides dealing with unsecured lifeboats, the dark and the hazardous conditions hampered progress, while jammed emergency exits and a lack of trained personnel onboard made for rough going.

To make matters worse, the lifeboats that had been launched by the officers - only partially full in their hurry to abandon ship – left 220 people stranded onboard after the last boat had departed.

By this point, Betts, the Hills, and several other passengers had virtually assumed total authority on-deck. They decided to try and access the bridge. With no assistance from onboard maritime professionals, 220 souls now depended on the vigilante action of the ship’s entertainers.

Operating the radio phone, Moss managed to successfully contact nearby vessels, and a rescue effort began. Passing ships broadcast the MTS Oceanos' coordinates far and wide, while Moss coordinated with Captain Detmar of a nearby container ship - Nedlloyd Mauritius.

Upon telling Captain Detmar that he was a guitarist with zero maritime experience, Moss recalls hearing a short pause on the phone before the “extremely supportive” captain came back, relaying technical advice.

The captain bails

Three hours after trouble kicked-off, a flight of helicopters - 13 Pumas from the South African Defence Force – arrived to commence an airlift operation. Multiple eyewitnesses, including the Hills, report Captain Avranas boarding one of the first choppers, long before the vast majority of the passengers had been rescued.

The captain would later insist he’d only left to better plan the evacuation. Naturally, his claims were met with an uproar of criticism and scathing judgement.

Even with the assistance of two South African naval divers, the airlifts were no easier for the Hills than loading the lifeboats. Passengers were sent sliding across the steeply pitched deck, or worse still, injured in collisions with the ship’s hull. All the while, the Oceanos was sinking lower and lower.

At one point, an inflatable boat – crewed by Butler and a diver – was dispatched to rescue a number of frightened people who, out of sheer desperation, had jumped into the ocean. But Moss and Tracy met the task, setting up evacuation stations on both the fore and aft decks, tying ropes to make improvised handrails, strapping passengers into harnesses and organising them into queues.

Somehow, eventually, they made it. Every single passenger and crew member was evacuated by either air or sea. Despite the calamity, the Oceanos did not suffer a single casualty.

Moss and Tracy Hills were among the last to be evacuated from the ship, alongside the Filipino cooks, following one of modern maritime history’s most successful rescue operations.

The MTS Oceanos finally flounders

At 3.30pm on August 4, having been abandoned to her fate following the rescue of her passengers, the MTS Oceanos finally sank beneath the waves. Her stern turned to the sky amid a crucible of pounding waves and turquoise waters, coming to rest nearly 100 metres beneath the raging Agulhas Current.

Exhausted and disorientated, survivors of the doomed cruise ship stepped out blinking into the spotlight of the international press. An American news crew had captured the dramatic final moments of the Oceanos while the sinking was reported from Johannesburg to Baltimore.

The Hills were reunited with their 15-year-old daughter, Amber, and hailed by passengers and their fellow entertainers for their efforts.

Moss would briefly become something of a minor regional celebrity, the civilian musician who had helped save hundreds of lives at sea. A South African newspaper ran an editorial cartoon depicting the sinking, captioned: “Attention, attention- this is your lead guitarist speaking”.

The Hills eventually moved to Liverpool, where Moss would later become a cruise director himself.

The aftermath

Avranas, on the other hand, would be pilloried – condemned as the captain who abandoned his crew, his passengers and his ship – on the testimony of multiple unrelated eyewitnesses.

Investigated by the South African Ministry of Transport and found negligent by a Greek inquiry, the captain was never held personally liable for the disaster or charged with any crime. His employer, Epirotiki Line, later assigned him as captain of a ferry until his retirement.

The sinking of the Oceanos was certainly a disaster – but not a tragedy. For those passengers abandoned by Captain and crew , profound gratitude was offered to the South African authorities for their prompt rescue – but the heroes were undoubtedly the band of quick-thinking entertainers.

As they say, not all heroes wear capes, or – in this case – cruise uniforms.

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OCEANOS SINKING

When a passenger cruise liner sinks, most people imagine it will be women and children first into the ship's lifeboats, and that the captain and crew will be the last to leave. Onboard the sinking Oceanos this did not happen. Instead, the cruise staff & entertainers suddenly found themselves running the rescue on their own... during a terrible storm... in the middle of the night........

The Oceanos was a Greek cruise liner, sailing the South African coast from Cape Town to Durban, passing Coffee Bay off the Wild Coast, an area known for treacherous currents and ship wrecks. On board were 581 passengers and crew, sailing into a storm which would soon claim another ship.

The Oceanos cruise staff & entertainers ran the successful rescue of every one of the 581 passengers and crew. In the dark they launched the lifeboats and then as dawn broke, they helped the amazing helicopter crews to airlift the last 200 to safety.

Viking Sky cruise timeline: A breakdown of what we know happened

A Viking cruise ship needed to be evacuated over the weekend as engine trouble and stormy weather caused the ship to take on water and endanger the 1,373 passengers and crew aboard. What played out was a chaotic 48-hour nightmare. 

 All the important details have yet to emerge about what happened on the Viking Sky cruise ship that carried 1,373 passengers and crew, like  why the ship was traveling in dangerous weather , and Norway officials have begun investigating. We now know that low oil levels caused the engine to fail.

Accounts from passengers , a crew member and officials have provided further details as to how it all unfolded. 

Here's everything we know so far about the Viking Sky cruise incident:

What was the Viking Sky's plan?

The Viking Sky, a vessel with gross tonnage of 47,800, was on a 12-day trip that began March 14 in the western Norwegian city of Bergen, according to cruisemapper.com .

The ship was visiting the Norwegian towns and cities of Narvik, Alta, Tromso, Bodo and Stavanger before its scheduled arrival Tuesday in the London-area port of Tilbury on the River Thames.

The ship started listing dangerously

The Viking Sky sailed from the northern city of Tromso bound over the weekend for Stavanger in southern Norway when the ship began struggling with engine failure, started listing dangerously, then took in water. Norwegian media reported gusts up to 43 mph and waves over 26 feet. 

According to a crew member's account , exclusive to USA TODAY, the ship's four engines began shutting down in the midst of a storm that started late Friday. .

The crew member requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

More on our exclusive: Crew member recounts what happened on that stranded, storm-tossed Viking Sky cruise ship

The crisis began Saturday morning. As the ship drifted without power, the crew threw out anchors to keep it in place, fearing it would be smashed on treacherous offshore rocks. The crew member said the ship started to list, and the crew rushed to grab life jackets and distribute them to the passengers, some of them elderly.

Cellphone footage from the ship shows furniture sliding across rooms as the boat rocks.

"Everything was broken: plates, glasses, furniture," the crew member said. He said he saw a heavy grand piano go flying upside down inside a lounge. 

Carolyn Savikas of Pennsylvania described the terror aboard the Viking Sky to  Norway's VG newspaper , saying she heard a "terrible crash," after which the ship rocked, and water raced in.

"We were in the restaurant when a really huge wave came and shattered a door and flooded the entire restaurant," she said. "All I saw were bones, arms, water and tables. It was like the Titanic – just like the pictures you have seen from the Titanic."

Although the crew member described the crew as well-trained for emergencies, he said he called his family at one point when the Wi-Fi was working "to say goodbye. I was thinking it was going to sink when we listed."

What first reports looked like: Cruise ship off Norway issues mayday, begins evacuating 1,300 passengers and crew

Passengers took to social media and have given interviews about what they were witnessing onboard as they waited to be rescued.

Alexus Sheppard posted a video on Twitter of severe tilting due to the rough waters. "We're waiting for evacuation by helicopter," she wrote with the hashtags #VikingSky and #Mayday.

"You could feel the ship climbing the waves and then just plummeting on the other side. Waves were rocking the sides of the ship too, and it was kind of pitching back and forth as well," Jamey Kennedy, 64, of Clinton, Tennessee, said.

'This can't be real': 'This can't be real': Tennessee couple rescued from Viking Sky cruise ship in dramatic airlift

How the Viking Sky rescue mission developed

After the order to evacuate came, rescuers worked all night Saturday and into Sunday to airlift more than 400 passengers (about half the total) to shore by a fleet of five helicopters flying in the dark, slowly winching people up one-by-one from the heaving ship as the waves crashed and the winds shrieked.  

Despite the danger, the crew member said some passengers rushed to be airlifted, fearing the ship would sink before rescue.

To get to the life jackets, the crew member said employees had to open doors onto open decks and into the wind and form human chains to distribute the life jackets while the ship was leaning perilously close to the frigid water below.

Those involved in the rescue mission hadn't experienced a rescue this intense before . 

The CHC, a helicopter service, was called to assist the rescue effort at 2 p.m. local time on Saturday. The company's mission involved 12 pilots, seven rescue swimmers, six hoist operators, two ground support engineers and a system operator.

By the numbers: Five helicopters, 28 rescuers, 464 saved: Inside the Viking Sky cruise ship rescue

Its first helicopter arrived within 30 minutes after being called, and a second one later joined to assist.

"The two helicopters worked seamlessly together in a rescue pattern that ensured one aircraft was hoisting passengers at all times," according to a post on CHC's website. "During each mission, 15 to 20 passengers were hoisted and subsequently transported to safety." Two more CHC aircraft were later sent to support the evacuations, and a fifth government-contracted aircraft arrived, as well. A total of 464 passengers were lifted off the cruise ship, per CHC's latest numbers.

Ship makes it to safety

The ship, aided by tow vessels, finally limped into the Norwegian port of Molde on Sunday, freeing the remaining 436 passengers and crew of 458.

Mission complete: Cruise ship from Norway reaches port with remaining passengers after mayday, air rescues

"All passengers and crew are safe, and passengers will be flying home starting tonight," the cruise line said  in a statement  on its website Sunday at 4:30 p.m. Norwegian time. "Throughout all of this, our first priority was for the safety and well-being of our passengers and our crew. We would like to thank the Norwegian Redningssentral and the Norwegian emergency services for their support and skill displayed in managing the situation in very challenging weather conditions."

“When we got the engine running again, we realized we were going to save ourselves," Inge Lockert, a Norwegian pilot on the ship, told the Vesteraalen newspaper. 

Lockert was one of two pilots from the Norwegian Coastal Administration who boarded the ship on Saturday to help the crew take the ship into port, the Vesteraalen daily said. Only Lockert has spoken publicly.

More from the pilot: Viking Sky cruise ship woes off Norway started with engine snags, pilot says

The Viking Sky investigation begins; why the engine failed

Norwegian authorities on Monday began investigating why the cruise ship was sailing in stormy weather.

"We don't know the reason why the ship sailed, knowing such bad weather was forecast," Kurt Olsen, acting director for Norway's Accident Investigations Board, told USA TODAY. "We have a very good weather service in this country, so I would guess the crew knew everything about the forecast. How they responded will definitely be part of the investigation."

Lars Alvestad, the head of Norway's Maritime Authority, said Wednesday that low oil levels were the "direct cause" of the engine failure that stranded the Viking Sky on Saturday.

More details: Viking Sky cruise ship engines failed because of low oil levels, maritime official says

The NMA indicated in a press release that while oil in the tanks was relatively low, it was within set limits. But as the ship crossed rocky seas, movement of oil in the tanks triggered an alarm.

Olsen would not speculate why the Viking Sky captain decided to sail despite the weather warning. He said ship operations were one part of the investigation, along with a technical study of why the engines failed and a third review of how the rescue was handled.

The ultimate question: Norway wants to know why cruise ship sailed in stormy weather, forcing air evacuation

Yngve Skovly, a police inspector in the Molde region, told the  Verdens Gang  tabloid there was no suspicion of criminal behavior and the ship was too new to suspect maintenance problems. He said crucial information could be obtained from the ship's computer logs.

Torstein Hagen, chairman of ship owner Viking Ocean Cruises, said his company would conduct its own investigation and support government agencies reviewing the mishap. Police expected all passengers to be flown out of Norway by Monday night. 

"The last few days have been both dramatic and hectic for guests and crew on board Viking Sky," Hagen said in the statement. "I would like to apologize for all our guests have been through."

A total of 36 people were admitted in local hospitals and as of Tuesday, one person was in critical but stable condition in an intensive care ward. Seven others were expected to be discharged later Tuesday, hospital officials said.

Despite the Viking Sky incident, cruising is one of the safest ways to travel, according to the trade group Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA).

Citing a 2017 study , CLIA says that although the cruise industry's capacity has grown by 48 percent, the overall number of operational incidents has declined by 38 percent.

As expected: After Viking cruise ship rescue, passengers concerned about cruising safety

Contributing: Sara Moniuszko, John Bacon, Maria Puente, Julia Thompson, Brittany Crocker (Knoxville News Sentinel) and Associated Press

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Evacuation of passengers has ended as cruise ship travels to Norway port

By Eliza Mackintosh and Kendall Trammell , CNN

What we know about the Viking Sky cruise ship

Here's what we know so far about the Viking Sky cruise ship that is evacuating 1,300 passengers and crew:

• It's owned by Viking Ocean Cruises
• It was built in 2017
• It can hold maximum of 1,443 passengers and crew
• It has six engines, four diesel and two electric

Here are the phone numbers for questions about any passengers

The Joint Rescue Centre says the evacuation from the Viking Sky cruise ship is proceeding with caution.

Rescuers are facing waves of about 6-8 meters (roughly 19-26 feet) high, a spokesperson said .

If you're trying to reach someone on the ship, here are the phone numbers:

• US/AU booked guests: 1-888-889-8837
• UK booked guests: 07585 779 853 or 0208 780 7900

This is the scene onboard after a wave crashed into the ship

Passenger Ryan Flynn shared a video on Twitter showing the aftermath of a door being blown in on the Viking Sky.

The Viking Sky ship, owned by Viking Ocean Cruises, was built in 2017 and can hold 930 guests, according to the company's  website .

Norway's Red Cross is starting a "massive" operation to help evacuees

From CNN's Susanna Capelouto

Norway’s Red Cross has started a "massive" operation and mobilized all units in the region to an area close to where a cruise ship is being evacuated, a spokesperson told CNN.

The spokesperson said more than a hundred Red Cross volunteers are working with evacuees. The Red Cross has counselors and other staff available at a gym in the community of Fraena where the evacuees are being taken by helicopter.

He said volunteers are there “for a shoulder to cry on” or for “hand holding” for people from the cruise ship after the evacuations.

From there, the evacuees are being transferred to hotels in nearby towns, the spokesperson said. 

Passenger says she's been waiting almost 6 hours to be evacuated

From CNN's Kay Guerrero

Passenger Alexus Sheppard from Northern California says she has been waiting almost six hours to be evacuated. Most people were fairly calm, she said, and they were being served food and water.

Passengers are getting airlifted one by one

From CNN's Nicole Chavez

Helicopters are airlifting passengers and crew members one person at a time, and the process could continue overnight and through Sunday. 

"We can't say how long it would take," said Borghild Eldoen, a spokeswoman for the Joint Rescue Centre for Southern Norway.

The cruise ship was flooding as passengers waited to be evacuated

People on board the stranded cruise ship tell CNN the evacuation has been slow. Passengers have waited for hours to get off the boat as it was taking on water from the rough sea.  

"Crew is doing a good job. Evacuation is slow. Seas rough," tweeted David Hernandez, who is a passenger on the ship. "One muster station had a door blow in, injure pax and flood. Moved to midship."

Rough sea winds are making the rescue difficult

The ship is in rough seas in the Hustadvika area on the western coast of Norway. The Joint Rescue Centre said on Twitter it is working to get more than one of the ship's engines running.

Flightradar24 is tracking the helicopter rescues.

Five helicopters and a number of vessels are included in the rescue operation.

Rescuers are trying to ensure the ship stays secure and doesn't drift as they try to get the engines working again. Right now, the ship is secured with one anchor.

115 people have been rescued so far

Norwegian rescue officials said 115 passengers have so far been rescued by helicopter from a stranded Viking cruise ship off the coast of Norway.

The Joint Rescue Centre for Southern Norway told CNN the rescue operations will continue throughout the night and into Sunday as the ship had 1,300 people on board when it first sent a distress signal due to “engine problems in bad weather.”

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Anatomy Of A Near-Disaster: Examining The Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident Of 2023

On May 27, 2023, the Carnival Sunshine cruise ship encountered a violent storm off the coast of North Carolina, sending shockwaves through the cruise industry and raising concerns about passenger safety.

While the ship eventually made it back to port safely, the incident served as a stark reminder of the unpredictable nature of the open sea and the importance of robust safety measures.

This article delves into the details of the Carnival Sunshine storm incident, providing a comprehensive analysis of the events that unfolded, the potential risks involved, and the lessons learned from this near-disaster.

From examining the storm’s intensity and the ship’s response to exploring the impact on passengers and the cruise industry, this in-depth exploration sheds light on the complexities of maritime safety and the importance of preparedness.

Whether you’re an avid cruiser seeking insights into safety protocols or simply intrigued by the intricacies of maritime operations, this guide serves as your one-stop resource for understanding the Carnival Sunshine storm incident and its broader implications.

The Storm’s Fury: Reconstructing the Events of May 27, 2023

The brewing storm: weather forecasts and initial warnings.

The Carnival Sunshine storm incident of 2023 was a harrowing experience for passengers and crew alike. It all began with the brewing storm that was forecasted days before the ship set sail. Weather experts had issued warnings about a developing tropical disturbance in the region.

However, the severity of the storm was initially underestimated, leading to a false sense of security among those onboard the ship.

As the ship embarked on its journey, the storm slowly gained strength. Passengers were informed of the worsening weather conditions, and the captain and crew closely monitored the situation. Despite the looming threat, the ship continued its course, hoping to navigate through the storm without incident.

Encountering the Storm’s Wrath: The Carnival Sunshine’s Ordeal

On May 27, 2023, the Carnival Sunshine found itself in the midst of a powerful storm. The ship was rocked by strong winds, towering waves, and torrential rain. Passengers and crew members were advised to stay in their cabins and secure any loose objects.

During this time, the ship faced significant challenges, battling against the relentless forces of nature. The crew worked tirelessly to ensure the safety and well-being of everyone onboard. Despite the chaos and fear that engulfed the ship, acts of bravery and kindness were witnessed as passengers supported each other through this ordeal.

Navigating the Tempest: The Ship’s Response and Rescue Efforts

The Carnival Sunshine’s crew swiftly activated emergency protocols to ensure the safety of passengers. They communicated with onshore rescue teams, providing updates on the ship’s location and conditions. Efforts were made to stabilize the ship and minimize the impact of the storm.

Meanwhile, rescue vessels were dispatched to assist in the evacuation of passengers if necessary. The crew’s training and preparedness were put to the test as they worked diligently to keep everyone safe.

Their swift response and coordination were crucial in managing the situation and preventing further harm.

It is important to note that despite the challenging circumstances, the majority of passengers and crew members were able to safely disembark the Carnival Sunshine once the storm had passed. The incident served as a reminder of the unpredictable nature of weather and the importance of preparedness and quick action in such situations.

For more information on cruise ship safety protocols and emergency response procedures, you can visit https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/vsp/cruiseship/what_is_vsp_cruising.htm .

Assessing the Risks: Understanding the Potential Dangers of the Storm

When it comes to cruising, one cannot ignore the potential dangers that can arise from adverse weather conditions. The Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident of 2023 serves as a reminder of the importance of assessing the risks associated with storms and understanding their potential dangers.

By examining the storm’s intensity and impact, the ship’s design and structural integrity, as well as the human factors and safety procedures, we can gain valuable insights into how to improve safety measures and better protect passengers in the future.

The Power of the Sea: Analyzing the Storm’s Intensity and Impact

The Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident involved a powerful storm that put the ship and its passengers in a precarious situation. It is crucial to understand the intensity and impact of such storms to accurately assess the risks involved.

Meteorological data and expert analysis can provide valuable insights into the strength of the storm, including wind speeds, wave heights, and rainfall amounts. By studying these factors, cruise lines can better determine whether it is safe to set sail or make necessary adjustments to their routes to avoid potentially dangerous weather conditions.

In the case of the Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident, it is important to note that storms can be unpredictable and can escalate rapidly. While cruise ships are equipped with advanced weather monitoring systems, unexpected changes in weather patterns can still pose a significant risk.

Therefore, it is vital for cruise lines to have contingency plans in place to ensure the safety of their passengers and crew when faced with severe weather conditions.

Ship Design and Structural Integrity: Evaluating the Carnival Sunshine’s Resilience

The design and structural integrity of a cruise ship play a crucial role in determining its ability to withstand the forces of a storm. Cruise lines invest heavily in ensuring their vessels are built to withstand adverse weather conditions.

From reinforced hulls to stabilizers that counteract the motion of the ship, various measures are taken to enhance the ship’s stability and safety.

It is imperative for cruise lines to regularly assess and update their fleet to meet the latest safety standards. By conducting thorough inspections and implementing necessary upgrades, cruise ships can better withstand storms and minimize potential risks to passengers and crew.

The Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident serves as a reminder of the importance of continuously evaluating and improving ship design to enhance safety measures.

Human Factors and Safety Procedures: Assessing Passenger Response and Crew Actions

During the Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident, the response of both passengers and crew members played a crucial role in ensuring the safety of everyone on board. It is essential to assess how human factors and safety procedures come into play during such incidents.

Adequate training for crew members in emergency response protocols, as well as clear communication with passengers, are key factors in ensuring a safe and orderly evacuation, if necessary.

Passenger education and awareness are also crucial in promoting a culture of safety on board cruise ships. Informing passengers about safety measures, emergency procedures, and the importance of following instructions can help reduce panic and improve overall response during a crisis.

Additionally, implementing advanced technologies, such as improved communication systems and emergency evacuation drills, can further enhance passenger safety during storms.

The Aftermath: Passenger Experiences and Industry Repercussions

Passengers’ tales: first-hand accounts of the storm’s impact.

The Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident of 2023 left a lasting impact on the passengers who were on board the ill-fated cruise ship. Many passengers have shared their harrowing experiences of the storm, recounting the terrifying moments when the ship was tossed around by powerful waves and buffeted by strong winds.

Some described feeling a sense of helplessness as they were confined to their cabins for hours on end, unsure of when the storm would subside.

Passengers reported scenes of chaos and confusion as the ship’s crew worked tirelessly to ensure their safety. Some praised the crew for their professionalism and quick thinking, while others expressed frustration at the lack of communication and organization during the crisis.

Despite the challenging circumstances, many passengers also shared stories of camaraderie and support among fellow travelers, highlighting the resilience of the human spirit even in the face of adversity.

These first-hand accounts serve as a reminder of the unpredictable nature of the sea and the importance of preparedness in the cruise industry. Cruise lines must continually evaluate and enhance their safety protocols to ensure the well-being of their passengers in the event of a similar incident in the future.

Industry Response: Cruise Lines’ Actions and Safety Reviews

In the wake of the Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident, cruise lines across the industry have taken proactive steps to address safety concerns and reassure passengers of their commitment to their well-being.

Carnival Cruise Line, in particular, undertook a comprehensive review of their emergency response procedures and made several improvements based on lessons learned from the incident.

Other major cruise lines followed suit, conducting safety audits and implementing new measures to enhance passenger safety during extreme weather conditions. These measures include the installation of advanced weather tracking systems, improved communication protocols, and enhanced training for crew members.

Cruise lines have also increased their collaboration with meteorological agencies to receive real-time weather updates and make informed decisions regarding itinerary changes or ship rerouting.

The industry’s response to the Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident demonstrates its dedication to learning from past mistakes and prioritizing passenger safety. Cruise lines are continually striving to ensure that incidents like this are minimized, if not completely avoided, in the future.

Regulatory Scrutiny: Assessing Compliance and Potential Changes

Following any major incident in the cruise industry, regulatory bodies conduct thorough investigations to assess compliance with safety regulations and identify areas for improvement. The Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident prompted a comprehensive review of the cruise ship’s compliance with international safety standards and guidelines.

The investigation led to recommendations for industry-wide changes, including stricter guidelines for ship stability in adverse weather conditions and enhanced training for crew members on emergency response procedures.

Additionally, regulatory bodies have called for increased transparency and accountability from cruise lines regarding their safety protocols and contingency plans.

These regulatory measures aim to establish a more robust framework for ensuring the safety of passengers and crew members on board cruise ships. By holding cruise lines accountable and implementing necessary changes, regulatory bodies contribute to the overall improvement of safety standards in the industry.

Lessons Learned: Gleaning Valuable Insights from the Incident

The Carnival Sunshine Storm Incident of 2023 served as a wake-up call for the cruise industry, highlighting the importance of preparedness and safety measures. By examining the incident, valuable insights can be gained to prevent similar situations in the future. Here are some key lessons learned:

Enhancing Weather Monitoring and Forecasting Systems

One of the crucial aspects that emerged from the incident was the need for enhanced weather monitoring and forecasting systems. Cruise ships operate in unpredictable environments, and accurate and timely weather information is vital for ensuring passenger safety.

By investing in advanced technology and collaborating with meteorological agencies, cruise lines can better anticipate and navigate through adverse weather conditions. Additionally, developing onboard systems that provide real-time weather updates to both crew and passengers can greatly enhance situational awareness.

Improving Ship Design and Safety Features

The incident shed light on the importance of ship design and safety features in mitigating the impact of extreme weather events. Cruise ships should be built with reinforced structures and improved stability to withstand rough seas and high winds.

The installation of advanced propulsion systems and stabilizers can help maintain ship stability during adverse weather conditions. Moreover, the implementation of comprehensive safety measures, such as improved emergency lighting, backup power systems, and resilient communication channels, can ensure effective response and evacuation procedures in the event of a storm or any other emergency situation.

Strengthening Passenger Education and Emergency Preparedness

Passenger education and emergency preparedness play a vital role in ensuring the safety and well-being of everyone on board. The incident highlighted the need for comprehensive safety drills and training programs for passengers, enabling them to respond effectively to emergencies.

Cruise lines should provide clear and concise instructions on emergency procedures, including evacuation routes, life jacket usage, and communication protocols. Additionally, enhancing communication channels to reach passengers quickly and efficiently during critical situations can help minimize panic and ensure a swift response.

By implementing these lessons learned, the cruise industry can significantly enhance the safety and preparedness of its ships, ultimately ensuring a more secure and enjoyable experience for passengers.

It is imperative for cruise lines to prioritize the well-being of their guests and constantly strive for innovation and improvement in all aspects of ship operations.

Moving Forward: Embracing Safety Culture and Continuous Improvement

Following the Carnival Sunshine storm incident of 2023, it has become imperative for the cruise industry to reevaluate and strengthen its approach to safety. Embracing a safety culture and continuous improvement is crucial in ensuring the well-being of passengers and crew members.

The Importance of Safety Culture: Embedding Safety as a Core Value

A safety culture goes beyond mere compliance with regulations; it involves instilling safety as a core value within an organization. This means that safety is prioritized at all levels and becomes an integral part of the company’s identity.

By embedding safety as a core value, cruise lines can create an environment where every employee feels responsible for safety and takes proactive measures to prevent accidents and incidents.

One way to reinforce safety culture is through comprehensive training programs that address potential risks and provide employees with the necessary skills and knowledge to handle emergencies. These programs can include simulated scenarios, hands-on training, and regular drills to ensure that staff members are well-prepared to respond effectively in any situation.

Furthermore, fostering open communication channels is vital for a strong safety culture. Employees should feel comfortable reporting safety concerns or near-miss incidents without fear of retribution. This allows for timely identification and resolution of potential hazards, preventing them from escalating into full-blown emergencies.

Continuous Improvement and Risk Mitigation: Fostering a Learning Organization

Continuous improvement is a key aspect of maintaining and enhancing safety standards in the cruise industry. By adopting a mindset of constant learning, organizations can identify areas for improvement and implement measures to mitigate risks.

Regular safety audits and inspections play a critical role in identifying potential weaknesses and areas of improvement within a cruise ship’s operation. These assessments should be carried out by independent third-party organizations to ensure objectivity and adherence to industry best practices.

The findings from these audits should be used as a basis for implementing corrective actions and enhancing safety protocols.

Another important aspect of continuous improvement is the analysis of near-miss incidents and accidents. By examining the root causes and underlying factors, cruise lines can identify trends and patterns that may indicate systemic issues.

This analysis can then inform the development and implementation of targeted interventions to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.

Regulator-Industry Collaboration: Ensuring Effective Oversight and Shared Responsibility

Effective oversight and regulation are essential in maintaining safety standards within the cruise industry. Regulators and industry stakeholders must work together to establish and enforce robust safety requirements.

Collaboration between regulators and cruise lines can take the form of regular meetings, sharing of information, and joint initiatives aimed at addressing safety concerns. By working together, they can identify emerging risks and develop proactive measures to mitigate them.

Transparency and accountability are also crucial in this collaboration. Cruise lines should be open and transparent about their safety practices, making information easily accessible to both regulators and the public.

This fosters trust and ensures that all parties are working towards a common goal of ensuring passenger and crew safety.

In conclusion, the Carnival Sunshine storm incident of 2023 serves as a poignant reminder of the challenges and responsibilities inherent in maritime operations. While the incident unfolded without serious injuries or loss of life, it underscored the importance of preparedness, vigilance, and a commitment to safety at all levels.

By examining the incident’s details, understanding the potential risks, and learning from the lessons it imparts, the cruise industry can continue to strive for excellence in safety practices, ensuring that passengers can embark on their voyages with confidence and peace of mind.

As maritime technology evolves and the demand for cruise experiences continues to grow, the industry must remain at the forefront of safety innovation, embracing new advancements and continuously refining existing protocols.

By doing so, the cruise industry can foster a culture of safety that prioritizes the well-being of passengers and crew, transforming every voyage into an adventure marked by both enjoyment and unwavering safety.

Jennifer Morris is an avid solo travel adventurer who founded Solo Traveller after many years of journeying on her own around the world. She has backpacked through over 50 countries across 6 continents over the past decade, striking up conversations with locals along railway platforms, learning to cook regional dishes in home kitchens, and absorbing a global perspective while volunteering with various community initiatives.

With a Masters in Tourism and Hospitality, Jennifer is passionate about responsible and meaningful travel that fosters cultural exchange. Whether trekking through the Atlas Mountains, sailing to Komodo National Park, or taking an overnight train across Eastern Europe - she is always seeking her next epic destination.

When not globetrotting, Jennifer calls Vancouver, Canada home. There she enjoys kayaking local waters, curling up with books on faraway places, and gearing up for her next solo backpacking trip. As the founder of SoloTraveller, she hopes to motivate and inform fellow solo explorers from all walks of life to take the leap into their own adventures.

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Sinking Ship

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Gameplay [ ]

Players choose the locations they want to spawn in, and then the cruise ship will hit a rock beside it, it will then either start to sink from the stern or bow, so you have to move or else you will end up in the water. There are life boats on the LB Deck, anyone can ride on the Life Boats, but only Captains and Crew Members can launch them, and only players with the Driver's game pass can drive them. In kni0002's game, you get a special boat that is like a life boat.

Gamepasses [ ]

These are permanent upgrades that do various things in-game.

Criticism [ ]

Some users have criticized the game claiming the terrain was "poorly built" and that the game "lacks key features". Other users oppose the criticism citing the game is "not about the terrain". Kni0002 has not responded to these comments.

Users have also complained about a certain glitch that occurs sporadically. A user with the tugboat pass will sit in the vehicle seat and begin driving. A user with an explosive tools uses the gear and causes a portion of the boat to become unanchored and render the boat useless. This has yet to be fixed due to its rarity.

This section is a trivia section . Please relocate any relevant information into other sections of the article.

• It was also featured in Live-Ops from June 6th through the 13th.
• 2 Jandel's Road Trip/a dusty trip
• 3 LSPLASH/DOORS