The Wrecked Costa Concordia Cruise Ship Is Finally Being Towed Away Smart News

Table Of Content

• Major Supreme Court case could upend California’s homelessness policies
• Costa Cruises and its parent companies
• Escape: The Wreck of the Costa Concordia
• Israeli airstrike in Gaza’s south kills at least 9 Palestinians, including 6 children
• Costa Concordia captain given 16 year sentence
• Costa Concordia disaster

Prosecutors blamed a delayed evacuation order and conflicting instructions given by crew for the chaos that ensued as passengers scrambled to get off the ship. Passengers struggled to escape in the darkness, clambering to get to the life boats. Alaska resident Nate Lukes was with his wife, Cary, and their four daughters aboard the ship and remembers the chaos that ensued as the ship started to sink. GIGLIO PORTO, Italy — The curvy granite rocks of the Tuscan island of Giglio lay bare in the winter sun, no longer hidden by the ominous, stricken cruise liner that ran aground in the turquoise waters of this marine sanctuary ten years ago. 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.

Major Supreme Court case could upend California’s homelessness policies

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.

Costa Cruises and its parent companies

He stayed there all day Saturday, his broken leg throbbing, sipping from cans of Coke and a bottle of Cognac he found floating by. Airlifted to a mainland hospital, Giampedroni was the last person taken off the ship alive. As he walked, Giampedroni tapped on the doors now at his feet, listening for responses that never came.

Escape: The Wreck of the Costa Concordia

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. The vessel immediately started to take in water and tilt.

Israeli airstrike in Gaza’s south kills at least 9 Palestinians, including 6 children

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.

Escape: The Wreck of the Costa Concordia, Part 9

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. 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. There was a 230-foot-long horizontal gash below the waterline.

"Everybody was trying to get on the boats at the same time. When people had to get on the lifeboats they were pushing each other. It was a bit chaotic. We were trying to keep passengers calm but it was just impossible. Nobody knew what was going on." Monica, a German passenger who was in the cruise liner's theatre when the ship began to suffer problems, said it was hard to reach the lifeboats. Almost immediately questions were raised concerning the conduct of Schettino and other crew officers. In July 2013 four crew members and Costa Crociere’s crisis coordinator pled guilty to various charges, including manslaughter.

“Come on, Doctor, I’ll buy you a beer,” he said, and that is what he did. 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. Soon, Smith estimates, there were 40 people hanging on to his rope at the ship’s midsection, among them the Ananias family.

Costa Concordia disaster

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. 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. By the time Giglio’s deputy mayor, Mario Pellegrini, reached the harbor, townspeople had begun to collect on its stone esplanade.

That night, after dining with Cemortan, Schettino invited her to the bridge of the cruise liner, where he took command of the vessel. 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. Pellegrini climbed down the rope ladder and a few minutes later found himself standing safely on the harbor’s stone esplanade.

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. 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. At least six people died after a cruise ship capsized off the coast of Italy Friday.

Costa Concordia: How cruise ship tragedy transformed an island paradise - CNN

Costa Concordia: How cruise ship tragedy transformed an island paradise.

Posted: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 07:00:00 GMT [source]

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.

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!

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. 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.

Italian ministers are set to discuss measures designed to keep large cruise ships out of Venice. The arrival of a cruise ship led to protests last month, with residents claiming the vessels damage and pollute the city. The chief executive of the ship’s owners, Costa Cruises, on Monday blamed human error by Schettino for the disaster.

"There was really a melee there is the best way to describe it," he told Cobiella. "It's very similar to the movie 'Titanic.' People were jumping onto the top of the lifeboats and pushing down women and children to try to get to them." The ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, had been performing a sail-past salute of Giglio when he steered the ship too close to the island and hit the jagged reef, opening a 230-foot gash in the side of the cruise liner. The blackout after the ship's engine room flooded and its generators failed. Few of the 500-odd residents of the fishermen’s village will ever forget the freezing night of Jan. 13, 2012, when the Costa Concordia shipwrecked, killing 32 people and upending life on the island for years. 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.