Fire brigade crews have found two people stranded alive on board the Costa Concordia. Rescuers have managed to speak to the man and woman but have not yet reached them as they are stranded two decks below on the half-submerged ship.
NEW ZEALANDER ON BOARD STRICKEN CRUISE SHIP
A New Zealander has been evacuated from the luxury cruise ship which ran aground off the coast of Tuscany yesterday.
A spokesperson from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said one New Zealander was aboard the Coast Concordia.
They are now safe and are being provided for by the New Zealand embassy, said the spokesperson.
'HAVE YOU SEEN THE TITANIC? THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS'
The first course had just been served in the Costa Concordia's dining room when the wine glasses, forks and plates of cuttlefish and mushrooms smashed to the ground. At the magic show in the theater, the rubbish bins tipped over and the theater curtains turned on their side. Then the hallways turned upside down, and passengers crawled on bruised knees through the dark. Others jumped alone into the cold Mediterranean Sea.
The terrifying, chaotic escape from the luxury liner was straight out of a scene from Titanic for many of the 4000-plus passengers and crew on the cruise ship, which ran aground off the Italian coast late Friday and flipped on its side with a 50 meter gash in its hull.
At least three bodies had been recovered and divers searched the underwater belly of the boat for a few dozen more who remained unaccounted for. By late Saturday, the number of missing had dwindled to about 40.
The Friday the 13th grounding of the Concordia was one of the most dramatic cruise ship accidents in recent memory. It immediately raised a host of questions: Why did it hit a reef so close to the Tuscan island of Giglio? Did a power failure cause the crew to lose control? And why did crew members tell passengers they weren't in danger until the boast was listing perilously to the side?
The delay made lifeboat rescue eventually impossible for some of the passengers, some of whom jumped into the sea while others waited to be plucked to safety by helicopters. Some boats had to be cut down with an axe.
"We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side," said Mike van Dijk, from Pretoria, South Africa. "It was a scramble, an absolute scramble."
Van Dijk said the boat he was on - on the upended port side - got stuck along the ship's wall as it came down.
"It was a hell of a sound, the crunching," he said.
Costa Crociera SpA, which is owned by the US-based cruise giant Carnival Corp., defended the actions of its crew and said it was cooperating with the investigation. The captain was detained for questioning by prosecutors, investigating him for suspected manslaughter, abandoning ship before all others, and causing a shipwreck, state TV and Sky TV said. Carnival Corp. issued a statement expressing sympathy that didn't address the allegations of delayed evacuation.
France said two of the victims were Frenchmen; a Peruvian diplomat identified the third victim as Tomas Alberto Costilla Mendoza, 42, a crewman from Peru. Some 30 people were injured, at least two seriously.
The ship began its lurch at the beginning of dinner service in the ship's two-story dining room, where passengers described a scene of frantic confusion.
Silverware, plates and glasses crashed down on them from the upper floor balcony, children wailed and darkened hallways upended themselves after the ship began its lurch. Panicked passengers slipped on broken glass as the lights went out while crew members insisted nothing serious was wrong.
"Have you seen Titanic? That's exactly what it was," said Valerie Ananias, 31, a teacher from Los Angeles who was traveling with her sister and parents. They all bore dark red bruises on their knees from the desperate crawl they endured along nearly vertical hallways and stairwells, trying to reach rescue boats.
"We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life vest strobe flashing," her mother, Georgia Ananias, 61 said.
"We could hear plates and dishes crashing, people slamming against walls."
She choked up as she remembered the moment when an Argentine couple handed her their three-year-old daughter, unable to keep their balance as the ship listed to the side.
"He said, 'Take my baby,'" Georgia Ananias said, covering her mouth with her hand. "I grabbed the baby. But then I was being pushed down. I didn't want the baby to fall down the stairs. I gave the baby back. I couldn't hold her."
Her daughter Valerie whispered: "I wonder where they are."
The Ananias family was among the last passengers off the ship, left standing on the upended port side. They were forced to exit from a still-attached lifeboat that became impossible to use once the ship began to tip over; so they climbed a ladder dropped too them off a deck and shimmied down a rope to a waiting rescue vessel.
"We thought we were dying four times," Valerie said, recounting the most terrifying moments in their escape.
A top Costa executive, Gianni Onorato, said the Concordia's captain had the liner on its regular, weekly route when it struck a reef. Italian coast guard officials said the circumstances were still unclear, but that the ship hit an unknown obstacle.
Despite some early reports that the captain was dining with passengers when his ship crashed into the reef, he was on the bridge, Onorato said.
"The ship was doing what it does 52 times a year, going along the route between Civitavecchia and Savona," a shaken-looking Onorato told reporters on Giglio, a popular vacation isle off Italy's central west coast.
He said the captain was an 11-year Costa veteran and that the cruise line was cooperating with Italian investigators to find out what went wrong.
Malcolm Latarche, editor of maritime magazine IHS Fairplay Solutions, said a loss of power coupled with a failure of backup systems could have caused the crew to lose control.
"I would say power failure caused by harmonic interference and then it can't propel straight or navigate and it hit rocks," Latarche said.
There were no firm indications that anyone was trapped. Rescuers carried out extensive searches of the waters near the ship for hours and "we would have seen bodies," said Coast Guard Captain Cosimo Nicastro.
Many passengers complained the crew didn't give them good directions on how to evacuate and once the emergency became clear, delayed lowering the lifeboats until the ship was listing too heavily for many to be released.
Several other passengers said crew members told passengers for 45 minutes that there was a simple "technical problem" that had caused the lights to go off.
Seasoned cruisers knew better and went to get their life jackets from their cabins and report to their "muster stations," the emergency stations each passenger is assigned to, they said.
Passengers said they had never participated in an evacuation drill, although one had been scheduled for Saturday.
Miriam Vitale, a hostess on the cruise liner who disembarked earlier this week in Palermo, told SkyTG24 the ship conducts a drill every 15 days. She said that since passengers on the Concordia embark or disembark every day, some passengers could miss it depending on which day they begin the trip.
Surviving passengers huddled under woolen or aluminum blankets in a middle school on the Italian mainland of Porto Santo Stefano, where passengers were ferried early Saturday from Giglio. Some wore their life preservers, their shoeless feet were covered with aluminum foil.
Costa Cruises said about 1000 Italian passengers were onboard, as well as more than 500 Germans, about 160 French and about 1000 crew members. New Zealand officals said there was no Kiwis on board.
Coast guard Commander Francesco Paolillo said the exact circumstances of the accident were still unclear, but that the first alarm aboard went off about 10:30 pm, about three hours after the Concordia had begun its voyage from the port of Civitavecchia to Savona, in northwestern Italy. No SOS was sent, he said.
The vessel "hit an obstacle," that tore the side of the ship and started taking on water, Paolillo said. It wasn't clear if the obstacle was a jagged, rocky reef or something else, he said.
The captain, Paolillo said, he then tried to steer his ship toward shallow waters, near Giglio's small port, to make evacuation by lifeboat easier.
Five helicopters from the coast guard, navy and air force took turns airlifting survivors still aboard and ferrying them to safely.
Costa Cruises said the Costa Concordia was sailing on a weeklong cruise across the Mediterranean Sea in Savona, setting off on January 7 with stops at Civitavecchia, Marseille, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Cagliari and Palermo.
The Concordia had a previous accident in Italian waters, ANSA reported. In 2008, when strong winds buffeted Palermo, the cruise ship banged against the Sicilian port's dock, and suffered damage but no one was injured, ANSA said.
What the passengers said:
"The lifeboats were all full. We wanted to give him [her 15-month-old son, Filippo] to someone because we couldn't get on. No one would take him. They told us to go to the next boat, the next boat. It was Titanic. Identical." - Anna Veroni finally found a lifeboat that would take her whole family.
"It was so unorganized, our evacuation drill was scheduled for 5pm. We had joked 'What if something had happened today? I will never go on a boat again. We didn't even get to see Italy, nor do we know how we're going to get home." - Melissa Goduti, 28, Connecticut.
"Have you seen Titanic? That's exactly what it was." - Valerie Ananias, 31, Los Angeles.
"We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life vest strobe flashing. We could hear plates and dishes crashing, people slamming against walls" - Georgia Ananias, 61, Los Angeles.
"We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side. We were standing in the corridors and they weren't allowing us to get onto the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble." - Mike van Dijk, 54, Pretoria, South Africa.
"No one counted us, neither in the life boats nor on land." - Ophelie Gondelle, 28, Marseille, France. She said there had been no evacuation drill since she boarded in Marseille, France on January 8.
