Captain arrested in Italian cruise ship wreck
— -- Italian authorities have arrested the captain of a 3,200-passenger cruise ship that ran aground and tipped over late Friday, killing three people, injuring 20 and leaving up to 51 others still missing. Survivors, meanwhile, described a chaotic evacuation as plates and glasses crashed, and they crawled along upended hallways trying to reach safety.
CNN reports that the Italian captain, Francesco Schettino, was arrested late Saturday and is being investigated for manslaughter and abandoning ship. Authorities were looking at why the ship didn't hail a mayday during the accident near the Italian island of Giglio on Friday night. The ship is owned by Genoa-based Costa Cruises, a mass-market line that caters to an international clientele and whose parent comnpany is the industry giant Carnival Corporation.
Three bodies — two French tourists and a crew member from Peru — were recovered from the sea after Costa Cruises' 6-year-old Costa Concordia ran aground near the coast of Tuscany late Friday, tearing a 160-foot gash in its hull and sending in a rush of water.
The ANSA news agency, quoting the prefect's office in the province of Grosseto, said authorities have accounted for 4,165 of the 4,234 passengers and crew who had boarded the liner. Costa said about 1,000 Italian passengers were onboard, as well as more than 500 Germans, 250 North Americans, about 160 French and about 1,000 crew members.
By morning Saturday, the ship was lying virtually flat off Gigio's coast, its starboard side submerged in the water and the huge gash showing clearly on its upturned hull.
Passengers described a scene reminiscent of "Titanic" — which sank 100 years ago this April —complaining the crew failed to give instructions on how to evacuate and once the emergency became clear, delayed lowering the lifeboats until the ship was listing too heavily for many of them to be released.
Under U.S. Coast Guard and the International Maritime Organization's Safety of Life at Sea regulations, cruise ships must conduct a safety drill within 24 hours of sailing with instructions on the use of life jackets and how and where to muster in an emergency. But passengers are not required to attend, and cruise lines vary in how quickly they hold the drill and how stringently they enforce passenger participation.
Helicopters plucked to safety some people who were trapped on the ship, some survivors were rescued by boats in the area, and witnesses said some people jumped from the ship into the dark, cold sea. Coast guard rescuers were continuing to search the ship for passengers.
Authorities still hadn't counted all the survivors by the time they reached mainland 12 hours later.
"It was so unorganized, our evacuation drill was scheduled for 5 p.m." on Saturday, said Melissa Goduti, 28, of Wallingford, Connecticut, who had departed on the Mediterranean cruise on Friday. "We had joked 'What if something had happened today?'"
"Have you seen 'Titanic?' That's exactly what it was," said Valerie Ananias, 31, a schoolteacher from Los Angeles who was traveling with her sister and parents on the first of two cruises around the Mediterranean. 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 recounted the moment when an Argentine couple handed her their 3-year-old daughter, unable to keep their balance as the ship lurched to the side and the family found themselves standing on a wall. "He said 'take my baby,'" Mrs. Ananias said, covering her mouth with her hand as she teared up. "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.
"I thought that was the end and I thought they should be with their baby," she said.
"I wonder where they are," daughter Valerie whispered.
The family said they were some of the last off the ship, forced to shimmy along a rope down the exposed side of the ship to a waiting rescue vessel below.
Several passengers said crew members told passengers for a good 45 minutes there was a simple "technical problem" that had caused the lights to go off. Seasoned cruisers, however, knew better and went to get their life jackets from their cabins and report to their "muster stations," the emergency stations each passenger is assigned to, they said.
Once there, though, crew members delayed lowering the lifeboats even thought the ship was listing badly, they said.
"We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side," said Mike van Dijk, a 54-year-old from Pretoria, South Africa. "We were standing in the corridors and they weren't allowing us to get onto the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble."
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. Some passengers, apparently in panic, had jumped off the boat into the sea, witnesses said. 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 Giglio, a popular vacation isle about 18 miles off Italy's central west coast.
Passengers sat dazed in a middle school opened for them, wrapped in wool or aluminum blankets, with some wearing their life preservers and their shoeless feet covered with aluminum foil. Civil protection crews served them warm tea and bread, but confusion reigned supreme as passengers tried desperately to find the right bus to begin their journey home.
Survivors far outnumbered Giglio'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.
A coast guard official said the exact circumstances of the accident were still unclear, but that the first alarm went off about 10:30 p.m., 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.
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. The company's president, Gianni Onorato, said in a statement that "on the basis of the initial evidence — still preliminary — Costa Concordia, under the command of Master Francesco Schettino, was sailing its regularly scheduled itinerary when the ship struck a submerged rock.
"Captain Schettino, who was on the bridge at the time, performed a maneuver intended to protect both guests and crew, and initiated security procedures to prepare for an eventual ship evacuation. Unfortunately, that operation was complicated by a sudden tilting of the ship that made disembarkation difficult."
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. In Febraruy 2010, another Costa ship, the Europa, hit a pier in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, killing three crew members.
Despite the fact that Costa draws few American passengers, the fact that it is a modern, state-of-the-art vessel will impact cruise sales on this side of the Atlantic as well, at least temporarily, said Mike Driscoll, editor of the industry publication Cruise Week.
"From what travel agents are telling me, that horrifying image (of the massive ship on its side) is going to turn the cruise industry on its side, too," said Driscoll.
— USA TODAY's Laura Bly contributed to this report