italian coast

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“You go on board! Is that clear? Do you hear me?” the Coast Guard officer shouted as the captain of the grounded Costa Concordia sat safe in a life raft and frantic passengers struggled to escape after the ship rammed into a reef off the Tuscan coast.

“It is an order. Don’t make any more excuses. You have declared ‘Abandon ship.’ Now I am in charge.”

The dramatic recording made public Tuesday shows Capt. Francesco Schettino resisted orders to return to his ship to direct the evacuation, saying it was too dark and the ship was tipping perilously.

The exchange came to light as the death toll nearly doubled to 11 after divers pulled the bodies of four men and a woman, all wearing life vests, from the wreckage. Some two dozen people remain missing.

The Costa Concordia had more than 4,200 passengers and crew on board when it slammed into the reef Friday off the tiny island of Giglio after Schettino made an unauthorized maneuver from the ship’s programmed course — apparently to show off the luxury liner to the island’s residents.

Schettino has insisted that he stayed aboard until the ship was evacuated. However, the recording of his conversation with Italian Coast Guard Capt. Gregorio De Falco makes clear he fled before all passengers were off — and then defied De Falco’s repeated orders to go back.

“Listen Schettino,” De Falco can be heard shouting in the audio tape. “There are people trapped on board. … You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are. Is that clear?”

But Schettino resisted, saying the ship was listing and he was with his second-in-command in the lifeboat.

“I am here with the rescue boats. I am here. I am not going anywhere. I am here,” he said. “I am here to coordinate the rescue.”

“What are you coordinating there? Go on board! Coordinate the rescue from aboard the ship. Are you refusing?” came the response.

Schettino said he was not refusing, but he still did not return to the ship, saying at one point: “Do you realize it is dark and here we can’t see anything?”

De Falco shouted back: “And so what? You want to go home, Schettino? It is dark and you want to go home? Get on that prow of the boat using the pilot ladder and tell me what can be done, how many people there are and what their needs are. Now!”

The exchange also indicates that Schettino did not know anyone had died, with De Falco telling him at one point: “There are already bodies now, Schettino.”

“How many bodies?” Schettino asks in a nervous tone.

“You are the one who has to tell me how many there are!” De Falco barks in response.

Schettino was finally heard on the tape agreeing to reboard. But the Coast Guard has said he never went back, and police arrested him on land several hours later.

The audio, first made available on the website of the Corriere della Sera newspaper and authenticated by the Coast Guard, was broadcast throughout the day on Italian television to a stunned nation.

Jailed since the accident, Schettino appeared Tuesday before a judge in Grosseto, where he was questioned for three hours. The judge ordered him held under house arrest, his lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, told reporters, and later Italian media said he had returned to his home near Naples.

Criminal charges including manslaughter and abandoning ship are expected to be filed by prosecutors in coming days. He faces 12 years in prison for the abandoning ship charge alone.

At the hearing, Leporatti said the captain gave his version of events, insisting that after the initial crash into the reefs he had maneuvered the ship close to shore in a way that “saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.”

The lawyer said urine and hair samples were taken from Schettino, apparently to determine if he might have consumed alcohol or used drugs before the accident.

Tanned and looking younger than his 52 years, Schettino has worked for 11 years for the ship’s Italian operator, Costa Crociere SpA, achieving the rank of captain in 2006. He hails from Meta di Sorrento in the Naples area, which produces many of Italy’s ferry and cruise boat captains. He attended the Nino Bixio merchant marine school near Sorrento.

The five bodies discovered Tuesday were adults in their 50s or 60s, each wearing the orange vests that passengers use, indicating they were not crew members, said a Coast Guard spokesman, Cmdr. Filippo Marini. Their nationalities were not immediately released.

They were discovered after Italian naval divers exploded holes in the hull of the grounded cruise ship, trying to speed up the search for the missing. Navy spokesman Alessandro Busonero told Sky TV 24 the holes would help divers enter the wreck more easily. “We are rushing against time,” he said.

Before the grim finding, authorities had said 25 passengers and four crew members were missing. They include Americans Jerry and Barbara Heil of White Bear Lake, Minn., as well as 14 Germans, six Italians, four French, a Hungarian, an Indian and a Peruvian.

Mediterranean waters in the area were relatively calm Tuesday with waves just a foot high, but they were expected to reach nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) Wednesday, according to meteorological forecasts.

A Dutch shipwreck salvage firm said it would take its engineers and divers two to four weeks to extract the 500,000 gallons of fuel aboard the ship. The safe removal of the fuel has become a priority second only to finding the missing, as the wreckage site lies in a maritime sanctuary for dolphins, porpoises and whales.

Preliminary phases of the fuel extraction could begin as early as Wednesday if approved by Italian officials, the company said.

Smit, based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, said no fuel had leaked and the ship’s tanks appeared intact. While there is a risk the ship could shift in larger waves, it has so far been relatively stable perched on top of rocks near Giglio’s port.

Smit’s operations manager, Kees van Essen, said the company was confident the fuel could safely be extracted using pumps and valves to vacuum the oil out to waiting tanks.

“But there are always environmental risks in these types of operations,” he told reporters.

The company said any discussion about the fate of the ship — whether it is removed in one piece or broken up — would be decided by Costa Crociere and its insurance companies.

Miami-based Carnival Corp., which owns the Italian operator, estimated that preliminary losses from having the Concordia out of commission through 2012 would be between $85 million and $95 million, along with other costs. The company’s share price slumped more than 16 percent Monday.

Carnival said its deductible on damage to the ship was approximately $30 million. In addition, the company faces a deductible of $10 million for third-party personal injury liability claims.

Carnival said other costs related to the grounding can’t yet be determined.

Source: AP
Edited: By Celebrity Gossip

The Italian coast guard angrily ordered the captain of the capsized Italian cruise ship to go back aboard to oversee the evacuation, but he stalled, according to an apparent recording of their radio exchange played on national television.

Captain Francesco Schettino is in jail, accused of multiple manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship. He denies all wrongdoing and was questioned by magistrates on Tuesday.

The audio recording, on newspaper Corriere della Sera’s website and played on national state television, reflected the chaos and confusion in the minutes after the Costa Concordia, carrying more than 4,000 passengers and crew, hit a rock off the Tuscany coast on Friday night and keeled over.

Schettino, who had already taken to a lifeboat, can be heard talking to a coast guard official based in the western Italian port of Livorno.

Eleven people have been confirmed killed and 24 are still missing.

A Coast Guard official on Giglio, the island where the ship hit a rock, said he could not confirm the authenticity of the tape and said the Coast Guard did not give it to the newspaper. There was no comment available from the captain’s lawyer.

The recording is full of background noises such as radio static, beeps and background noise of people and confusion.

Source: Reuters
Edited By Celebrity Gossip

Rescue squads used controlled explosions on Tuesday to enter a stricken Italian cruise liner in the increasingly despairing hunt for survivors as authorities almost doubled their estimate of the number missing to 29 people.

The Costa Concordia’s owners accused their captain of causing Friday’s disaster by veering the ship too close to shore, where it hit a rock, in a bravura “salute” to residents of a Tuscan island off Italy’s Mediterranean coast.

Captain Francesco Schettino was arrested on Saturday accused of manslaughter and abandoning the ship before all people were evacuated, and he was due to appear before magistrates for questioning on Tuesday morning.

Prosecutors say Schettino also refused to go back on board when requested by the coastguard.

The two explosions were carried out early on Tuesday morning to allow firefighters and scuba divers to enter parts of the ship that they had not yet been able to search.

The weather improved slightly from Monday but seas were still choppy.

The giant cruise liner slid a little on Monday, threatening to plunge 2,300 tonnes of fuel below the Mediterranean waters of the surrounding nature reserve.

The slippage forced rescuers to suspend efforts to find anyone still alive after three days in the capsized hull, resting on a jagged slope outside the picturesque harbor on the island of Giglio. Six bodies have been found. Most of the 4,200 passengers and crew survived, despite hours of chaos.

An Italian coastguard official told Reuters late on Monday that the number of people missing had been revised up to 29 – 25 passengers and four members of staff – from 16, showing how much uncertainty still surrounded the disaster.

Another maritime official said later that 10 Germans were thought to be among the missing passengers.

The 114,500-tonne ship, one of the biggest passenger vessels ever to be wrecked, foundered after striking a rock just as dinner was being served on Friday night. It quickly rolled on its side, revealing a long gouge below the waterline.

Firefighters’ spokesman Luca Cari said there were still small movements of the vessel but they were not considered dangerous. Searches were suspended overnight before resuming on Tuesday morning.

Another senior firefighter, Luciano Roncalli, told Reuters that all the unsubmerged areas of the liner had been searched, indicating there was faint hope of finding more survivors in the flooded and upturned maze of luxurious state rooms and tennis courts, bars and spas now submerged beneath the sea.

Environment Minister Corrado Clini said he would declare a state of emergency because of the risk that the ship’s fuel would leak into the pristine Tuscan Archipelago National Park. No fuel spillage has been detected so far, he said on Italian television on Monday evening.

Should rougher seas dislodge the wreck and cause it to sink or break up, that could scupper any hopes for the owners, a unit of Florida’s Carnival Corp., of salvaging a liner which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build just six years ago.

Source: Reuters
Edited: By Celebrity Gossip

Italy’s cruise liner tragedy turned into an environmental crisis Monday, as rough seas battering the stricken mega-ship raised fears that fuel might leak into pristine waters off Tuscany that are part of a protected sanctuary for dolphins, porpoises and whales.

The ship’s owner accused the jailed captain of causing the wreck that left at least six dead and 29 missing, saying he made an “unapproved, unauthorized maneuver” to divert the vessel from its programmed course.

Earlier, authorities had said 16 people were missing. But an Italian Coast Guard official, Marco Brusco, said late Monday that 25 passengers and four crew members were unaccounted for three days after the Costa Concordia struck a reef and capsized off the coast of the tiny island of Giglio.

He didn’t explain the jump, but indicated 10 of the missing are Germans. Two Americans are also among the missing.

Brusco said there was still “a glimmer of hope” there could be survivors on parts of the vast cruise liner that have yet to be searched. The last survivor, a crewman who had broken his leg, was rescued on Sunday.

Waters that had remained calm for the first days of the rescue turned choppy Monday, shifting the wreckage and raising fears that any further movement could cause some of the 500,000 gallons of fuel on board to leak into the waters off Giglio, which are popular with scuba divers and form part of the protected Tuscan archipelago. Rescue operations were suspended for several hours because of the rough seas.

Italy’s environmental minister raised the alarm about a potential environmental catastrophe. “At the moment there haven’t been any fuel leaks, but we have to intervene quickly,” the minister, Corrado Clini, told RAI state radio.

Even before the accident there had been mounting calls from environmentalists to restrict passage of large ships in the area.

The ship’s operator, Costa Crociere SpA, has enlisted one of the world’s leading salvagers, Smit of Rotterdam, Netherlands, to handle the removal of the 1,000-foot (290-meter) cruise liner and extract the fuel safely. Smit has a long track record of dealing with wrecks and leaks, including refloating grounded bulk carriers and securing drilling platforms in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Meanwhile, the Italian cruise operator said Capt. Francesco Schettino intentionally strayed from the ship’s authorized course into waters too close to the perilous reef, causing it to crash late Friday and capsize.

The navigational version of a “fly by” was apparently made as a favor to the chief waiter who is from Giglio and whose parents live on the island, local media reported.

A judge on Tuesday is to decide whether Schettino should remain jailed.

“We are struck by the unscrupulousness of the reckless maneuver that the commander of the Costa Concordia made near the island of Giglio,” prosecutor Francesco Verusio told reporters. “It was inexcusable.”

The head of the U.N. agency on maritime safety said lessons must be learned from the Concordia disaster 100 years after the Titanic rammed into an iceberg, leading to the first international convention on sea safety.

“We should seriously consider the lessons to be learned and, if necessary, re-examine the regulations on the safety of large passenger ships in the light of the findings of the casualty investigation,” said Koji Sekimizu, secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization.

Miami-based Carnival Corp., which owns the Italian operator, estimated that preliminary losses from having the Concordia out of operation at least through 2012 would be between $85 million and $95 million, though it said there would be other costs as well. The company’s share price slumped more than 16 percent Monday.

Two of the missing are Americans, identified by their family as Jerry Heil, 69, and his wife Barbara, 70, from White Bear Lake, Minnesota.

Costa Crociere chairman and CEO Pier Luigi Foschi said the company would provide Schettino with legal assistance, but he disassociated Costa from his behavior, saying it broke all rules and regulations.

“Capt. Schettino took an initiative of his own will which is contrary to our written rules of conduct,” Foschi said in his first public comments since the grounding.

At a news conference in Genoa, the company’s home base, Foschi said that Costa ships’ routes are programmed into their navigational systems, and alarms go off when they deviate. Those alarms are disabled if the ship’s course is manually altered, he said.

“This route was put in correctly upon departure from Civitavecchia,” Foschi said, referring to the port outside Rome. “The fact that it left from this course is due solely to a maneuver by the commander that was unapproved, unauthorized and unknown to Costa.”

Foschi said only once before had the company approved a “fly by” of this sort off Giglio — last year on the night of Aug. 9-10. In that case, the port and company had approved it.

Residents, however, said such displays have occurred several times in the past, though always in the summer when the island is full of tourists.

Foschi didn’t respond directly to prosecutors’ and passengers’ accusations that Schettino abandoned ship before all passengers had been evacuated, but he suggested his conduct wasn’t as bad in the hours of the evacuation as has been portrayed. He didn’t elaborate.

The Italian coast guard says Schettino defied their entreaties for him to return to his ship as the chaotic evacuation of the more than 4,200 people aboard was in full progress. After the ship’s tilt put many life rafts out of service, helicopters had to pluck to safety dozens of people remaining aboard, hours after Schettino was seen leaving the vessel.

The captain has insisted in an interview before his jailing that he stayed with the vessel to the end.

Foschi defended the conduct of the crew, while acknowledging that passengers had described a chaotic evacuation where crew members consistently downplayed the seriousness of the situation as the ship lurched to the side.

“All our crew members behaved like heroes. All of them,” he said.

He noted that 4,200 people managed to evacuate a listing ship at night within two hours. In addition, the ship’s evacuation procedures had been reviewed last November by an outside firm and port authorities and no faults were found, he said.

Once on land, the survivors complained that Costa was stingy with assistance.

Blake Miller, who was on the ship to celebrate his partner’s 50th birthday, said Costa representatives rebuffed his efforts to get reimbursement so he could buy a change of clothing.

“The Costa representative at our hotel told me, ‘You might want to get a lawyer when you get back to the States,’” Miller told The Associated Press from his hotel in Rome, where he was staying at his own expense.

Only passengers who had paid for special insurance to cover lost belongings would receive compensation to buy replacements, he said they were told.

Costa Crociere didn’t immediately respond to a phone message or an emailed request for a response.

Miller, of Austin, Texas, said survivors were taken to a hotel near Rome’s airport and told Costa would pay for a single night’s stay and their plane fare home only “if we pack up and leave the country” Sunday morning.

Miller, who is director of business travel for Intercontinental Hotels, said Costa representatives spoke to passengers about potential refunds or free cruise vouchers. But in addition to the cost of the cruise, he said he had paid hundreds of dollars for excursions during port calls and other expenses.

Foschi, the Costa CEO, said he was certain “we’ll be able to find a material solution that will make them happy.”

Class action suits are rare in Italy, but Italian consumer advocacy organization Codacons said more than 70 passengers had indicated that they wanted to join a class-action approach to winning compensation from Costa.

“Our aim is to make every passenger obtain an indemnity of at least €10,000 (more than $12,500) for the material damage suffered and for moral damage, such as the terror suffered, ruined vacations and the grave risks that they ran,” said Codacons president Carlo Rienzi.

Source: Associated Press
Edited: By Celebrity Gossip

Divers found the bodies of two elderly men inside a capsized cruiseliner on Sunday, raising to five the death toll after the luxury vessel foundered and dramatically keeled over off Italy’s coast.

Teams were painstakingly checking the interior spaces of the partly submerged Italian liner Costa Concordia for 15 people still unaccounted for after the huge ship, with 4,229 passengers and crew on board, was holed by a rock Friday night.

A day after the disaster, rescuers plucked a South Korean honeymoon couple and an injured crewmember alive from the wreck, lying on its side close to the beautiful island of Giglio off Italy’s west coast.

The captain of the 114,500-tonne ship, Francesco Schettino, was arrested on charges of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship, Italian police said. Some 64 people were injured in the accident.

Investigators were working through evidence from the equivalent of the “black boxes” carried on aeroplanes, to try to establish the precise sequence of events behind the accident, which occurred in calm seas and shallow waters.

Searching the vast ship for survivors was like combing through a small town – but one tilted on its side, largely in darkness, partly underwater and full of floating debris.

In the early afternoon, scuba divers looking for survivors found the bodies of two men at an evacuation assembly point in the submerged part of the ship, coastguard officials said.

The bodies of two French tourists and a Peruvian crew member were found Saturday.

The discovery of the bodies Sunday dampened earlier euphoria when a helicopter lifted off injured chief purser Manrico Gianpetroni, hours after rescuers made voice contact with him deep inside the stricken, multi-storey vessel.

Gianpetroni, who had a broken leg, was winched up from the ship on a stretcher and taken to hospital.

“I never lost hope of being saved. It was a 36-hour nightmare,” he told reporters.

TITANIC

Passengers compared the disaster to the sinking of the Titanic, and described people leaping into the sea and fighting over lifejackets in panic when the ship hit a rock and ran aground as they sat down for dinner Friday night.

The vast hulk of the 290-metre-long ship loomed over the little port of Giglio, a picturesque island in a maritime nature reserve off the Tuscan coast. There was large gash in its side and divers were able to swim into the wreck through the hole.

The specialist diving teams faced a complex task as they worked their way through the warren of cabins on the ship – a floating resort that boasted a huge spa, seven restaurants, bars, cinemas and discotheques.

“Getting inside the ship is really difficult and dangerous,” said Majko Aldone, a one of the specialist team of divers who have been entering cabins through open portholes or by smashing through the glass.

“There are various obstacles, sheets, mattresses, nets which have broken free and are spread out all over the areas we’re searching,” he said.

Paolo Tronca, a local fire department official, said the search would go on “for 24 hours a day as long as we have to” and that rescue workers were using sniffer dogs in the section of the ship above water.

As the search continued, there were demands for explanations of why the vessel had come so close to the shore and bitter complaints about how long it took to evacuate the terrified passengers.

State prosecutor Francesco Verusio said investigations might go beyond the captain.

“We are investigating the possible responsibility of other people for such a dangerous maneuver,” he told SkyTG24 television. “Command systems did not function as they should.”

He said the ship had come within 150 metres (yards) of the coast, which he called “incredibly close.”

Agnese Stella, a 72-year-old housewife who has lived on Giglio for 50 years told Reuters: “It came much too close (to shore), it never comes this close normally.”

“UNMARKED” ROCK

Magistrates said Schettino abandoned the vessel not long after midnight, well before all the passengers were taken off.

The vessel’s operator, Costa Crociere, a unit of Carnival Corp & Plc, the world’s largest cruise company, said the Costa Concordia had been sailing on its regular course when it struck a submerged rock.

In a television interview, Schettino said the rock was not marked on any maritime charts of the area.

After an massive rescue operation throughout the weekend, involving helicopters, ships and lifeboats, many passengers had already left the area and returned home and attention began to turn to the cleanup.

Local officials expressed concern the ship’s fuel, at full load as it had just begun the cruise, could spill into pristine waters off Giglio. So far there was no sign of pollution. Dutch maritime services company SMIT said it had been hired to pump fuel off the ship once the rescue was over.

The coast guard says the removal of the 2,380 tonnes of fuel cannot begin until the rescue is complete because the operation could cause the vessel to move or sink further into the water.

Source: Reuters
Edited By Celebrity Gossip

Passengers leapt into the sea and fought over lifejackets in panic when an Italian cruise ship ran aground and keeled over, killing at least three and leaving dozens missing.

In the chaotic aftermath of the Friday evening accident near the island of Giglio off the coast of Tuscany, Italian officials could still not say how many of the 4,229 passengers and crew on board the 114,500-tonne Edited By were missing.

“I was sure I was going to die. We were in the lifeboats for two hours, crying and holding on to each other,” said Antonietta Sintolli, 65, breaking down in tears as she recounted the event.

“People were trying to steal lifejackets from each other. We could only gets ones for children.”

An official involved in the rescue operation said two French tourists and a Peruvian crew member were dead. Around 40 people were injured, two seriously.

“We are not sure of the numbers, we cannot exclude that some people are missing, in fact it is very probable,” said Ennio Aquilini, head of the fire service rescue operation.

“It could be 10, 20 up to 40 but I cannot give anything more precise. There is a possibility that no one is missing.”

The vessel was left capsized on its side in water 15-20 metres deep, with decks partly submerged, not far from the shore. A large gash was visible on its side.

Passengers had just sat down to dinner, a few hours after leaving the port of Civitavecchia near Rome on a week-long cruise to Barcelona and Majorca, when a loud bang interrupted the piano player. As the ship listed, crockery flew across the room.

“It seemed like the end of the world,” said 18-year-old student Lucrezia Ranchelli.

The ship, a vast floating resort with spas, theatres, swimming pools, a casino and discotheque, was carrying mainly Italian passengers, with some British, Germans and Russians. Many were elderly; some in wheelchairs.

Passengers crowded into lifeboats, but the mainly Asian staff, few of them able to speak Italian, struggled to bring order to the evacuation.

“It was complete panic. People were behaving like animals. We had to wait too long in the lifeboats,” said 47-year-old Patrizia Perilli.

“We thought we wouldn’t make it. I saw the lighthouse but I knew I couldn’t swim that far but lots of people threw themselves into the sea. I think they are some of the dead.”

Angel Holgado, 50, a guitarist who had been performing when the ship foundered, said he got into a lifeboat but decided to abandon it after it became dangerously overcrowded.

“There was terrible panic and fear and I jumped into the water and swam to the shore,” he said.

SUBMERGED ROCK

Officials said rescue efforts were continuing on Saturday after a night-time operation involving helicopters, ships and lifeboats. The picturesque harbour of Porto Santo Stefano was lined with ambulances and green tents for the victims.

“We have about 40 men at work and we’re expecting specialist diving teams to arrive to check all the interior spaces of the ship,” said fire services spokesman Luca Cari.

“We don’t rule out the possibility that more people will be lost,” he said.

Officials said however there was confusion over the numbers of missing and on identifying all the passengers transferred from Giglio to Porto Santo Stefano on the mainland.

“To have a more precise idea we are still waiting for a full list of the people identified in Porto Santo Stefano to make a comparison with the passenger list,” said Giuseppe Linardi, police chief in the nearby town of Grosseto.

An official from the ship’s operator Costa Crociere, said that the vessel appeared to have struck a submerged rock.

Authorities said they had launched investigations and declined to comment on the possible causes of the accident.

“We’ll be able to say at the end of the investigation. It would be premature to speculate on this,” coastguard spokesman Filippo Marini told SkyTG24 television.

The website of the ship’s operator, Genoa-based Costa Crociere, had apparently collapsed under the volume of searches but the company set up a helpline to answer public enquiries. Costa said it would cooperate fully with authorities.

Costa is a brand of cruise operator London-listed Carnival Corp & Plc.

“We are going through the list of passengers at a reception centre that’s been set up but most of the passengers didn’t have their papers with them of course, so it’s been difficult to get full identification,” an official said.

The ship was built in 2004-2005 at a cost of 450 million euros at the Fincantieri Sestri shipyard in Italy.

Source: Reuters
Edited By Celebrity Gossip

A luxury cruise ship ran aground off the coast of Tuscany, gashing open the hull and taking on water, forcing some 4,200 people aboard to evacuate aboard lifeboats to a nearby island early Saturday. At least three were dead, the Italian coast guard said.

Three bodies were recovered from the sea, said Coast Guard Cmdr. Francesco Paolillo. There were reports that three others had died after the accident late Friday night, but as the hours passed, those reports were not yet confirmed, he said.

Helicopters plucked to safety some 50 people who were trapped on the Costa Concordia after the liner listed so badly they couldn’t launch lifeboats, Paolillo told The Associated Press in Rome by telephone from his command in the Tuscan port city of Livorno.

“We were having dinner aboard when we heard a loud noise, like that of the keel being dragged over something,” passenger Luciano Castro, who is a journalist, told Italian state radio early Saturday. The lights went out “and there were scenes of panic, glasses falling to the floor,” Castro said.

Another passenger on what set out to be an eight-day pleasure cruise around Mediterranean ports, Mara Parmegiani, also a journalist, told the ANSA news agency that “it was like a scene from the Titanic.”

Castro said some passengers told them that some people jumped into the sea to try to swim to safety on the reefs of nearby Giglio island, although he didn’t see anybody do that. He did say he met one survivor on land, a a young crewman from Asia, who told him he swam to the reefs.

As dawn neared, a painstaking search of the 290-meter (9.570 foot) long ship’s interior was being conducted to see if any one might have been trapped inside, Paolillo said. “No one is leaning out, shouting, calling that they need help, but until the inspection is completed, we won’t know.”

“There are some 2,000 cabins, and the ship isn’t straight,” Paolillo said, referring to the Concordia’s dramatic 20-degree tilt on its right side. “I’ll leave it to your imagination to understand how they (the rescuers) are working as they move through it.”

Some Concordia crew members were still aboard to help the coast guard rescuers inspect “every millimeter” of the ship, he said.

Authorities said

Paolillo said it wasn’t immediately known if the dead were passengers or crew, nor were the nationalities of the victims immediately known. It wasn’t clear how they died.

Some 30 people were reported injured, most of them suffering only bruises, but at least two people were reported in grave condition.

Paolillo said the Concordia was believed to have set sail with 3,206 passengers and 1,023 crew members.

Some passengers, apparently in panic, had jumped off the boat into the sea, a Tuscany-based government official, Grosseto prefect Giuseppe Linardi, was quoted as saying. Authorities were trying to obtain a full passenger and crew list from Costa, so they could do a roll call to determine who might be missing.

The evacuees were taking refuge in schools, hotels, and a church on the tiny Tuscan island of Giglio, a popular vacation isle about 18 miles (25 kilometers) off Italy’s central west coast. Those evacuated by helicopter were flown to Grosseto, while others, rescued by local ferries pressed into emergency service, took survivors to the port of Porto Santo Stefano on the nearby mainland.

Survivors far outnumbered the island’s 1,500 residents, and island Mayor Sergio Ortelli issued an appeal for islanders — “anyone with a roof” to open their homes to shelter the evacuees.

Paolillo said the exact circumstances of the accident were still unclear, but that the first alarm went off about 10:30 p.m. (2130 GMT), about three hours after the Concordia had begun its voyage from the port of Civitavecchia, en route to its first port of call, Savona, in northwestern Italy.

The coast guard official, speaking from the port captain’s office in the Tuscan port of Livorno, said the vessel “hit an obstacle” — it wasn’t clear if it might have hit a rocky reef in the waters off Giglio — “ripping a gash 50 meters (165 feet) across” on the left side of the ship, and started taking on water.

The cruise liner’s captain, Paolillo said, then tried to steer his ship toward shallow waters, near Giglio’s small port, to make evacuation by lifeboat easier.

But after the ship started listing badly onto its right side, lifeboat evacuation was no longer feasible, Paolillo said.

Five helicopters, from the coast guard, navy and air force, were taking turns airlifting survivors still aboard and ferrying them to safely. A Coast guard member was airlifted aboard the vessel to help people get aboard a small basket so they could be hoisted up to the helicopter, said Capt. Cosimo Nicastro, another Coast Guard official.

A statement from Costa Cruises, the company that runs the ship, confirmed that the evacuation of the 3,200 passengers and 1,000 crew had begun, “but the position of the ship, which is worsening, is making more difficult the last part of the evacuation.”

Costa Cruises’ statement did not mention any casualties, and said it had not yet determined the cause of the problem.

Costa Cruises said the Costa Concordia was sailing on a cruise across the Mediterranean Sea, starting from Civitavecchia with scheduled calls to Savona, Marseille, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Cagliari and Palermo.

It said about 1,000 Italian passengers were onboard, as well as more than 500 Germans, about 160 French and about 1,000 crew members.

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.

The Costa Concordia’s tragedy is far from the worst cruise ship accident of recent years.

In July 2011, a Russian cruise boat sank on the Volga River, killing at 113 people and leaving 16 missing from the 208 aboard.

In February 2011 a Vietnamese cruise boat sank in Ha Long Bay, killing 12 sleeping passengers.

Three freak waves hit the Louis Majesty in the Mediterranean Sea in March 2010, killing two passengers and injuring 14 among the 1,350 passengers and 580 crew.

In February 2010, the Costa Europa cruise ship hit a pier while docking in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, killing three crew members and injuring four passengers.

A boiler room explosion on the S.S. Norway killed three crew members and critically injured 13 in May 2003, as it was docked in Miami. No passengers were hurt.

Source: Associated Press

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italian coast

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