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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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10 years later, Costa Concordia survivors share their stories from doomed cruise ship

Ten years after the deadly Costa Concordia cruise line disaster in Italy, survivors still vividly remember scenes of chaos they say were like something straight out of the movie "Titanic."

NBC News correspondent Kelly Cobiella caught up with a group of survivors on TODAY Wednesday, a decade after they escaped a maritime disaster that claimed the lives of 32 people. The Italian cruise ship ran aground off the tiny Italian island of Giglio after striking an underground rock and capsizing.

"I think it’s the panic, the feeling of panic, is what’s carried through over 10 years," Ian Donoff, who was on the cruise with his wife Janice for their honeymoon, told Cobiella. "And it’s just as strong now."

More than 4,000 passengers and crew were on board when the ship crashed into rocks in the dark in the Mediterranean Sea, sending seawater rushing into the vessel as people scrambled for their lives.

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.

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.

"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 lifeboats wouldn't drop down because the ship was tilted on its side, leaving hundreds of passengers stranded on the side of the ship for hours in the cold. People were left to clamber down a rope ladder over a distance equivalent to 11 stories.

"Everybody was rushing for the lifeboats," Nate Lukes said. "I felt like (my daughters) were going to get trampled, and putting my arms around them and just holding them together and letting the sea of people go by us."

Schettino was convicted of multiple manslaughter as well as abandoning ship after leaving before all the passengers had reached safety. He is now serving a 16-year prison sentence .

It took nearly two years for the damaged ship to be raised from its side before it was towed away to be scrapped.

The calamity caused changes in the cruise industry like carrying more lifejackets and holding emergency drills before leaving port.

A decade after that harrowing night, the survivors are grateful to have made it out alive. None of the survivors who spoke with Cobiella have been on a cruise since that day.

"I said that if we survive this, then our marriage will have to survive forever," Ian Donoff said.

Scott Stump is a trending reporter and the writer of the daily newsletter This is TODAY (which you should subscribe to here! ) that brings the day's news, health tips, parenting stories, recipes and a daily delight right to your inbox. He has been a regular contributor for TODAY.com since 2011, producing features and news for pop culture, parents, politics, health, style, food and pretty much everything else. 

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

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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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 Kevin Kwan

By Bess Levin

By Dan Adler

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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How the Wreck of a Cruise Liner Changed an Italian Island

Ten years ago the Costa Concordia ran aground off the Tuscan island of Giglio, killing 32 people and entwining the lives of others forever.

By Gaia Pianigiani

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.

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.

“Every one of us here has a tragic memory from then,” said Mario Pellegrini, 59, who was deputy mayor in 2012 and was the first civilian to climb onto the cruise ship after it struck the rocks near the lighthouses at the port entrance.

The hospitality of the tight-knit community of islanders kicked in, at first to give basic assistance to the 4,229 passengers and crew members who had to be evacuated from a listing vessel as high as a skyscraper. In no time, Giglio residents hosted thousands of journalists, law enforcement officers and rescue experts who descended on the port. In the months to come, salvage teams set up camp in the picturesque harbor to work on safely removing the ship, an operation that took more than two years to complete.

The people of Giglio felt like a family for those who spent long days at its port, waiting to receive word of their loved ones whose bodies remained trapped on the ship. On Thursday, 10 years to the day of the tragedy, the victims’ families, some passengers and Italian authorities attended a remembrance Mass and threw a crown of flowers onto the waters where the Costa Concordia had rested. At 9:45 p.m., the time when the ship ran aground, a candlelit procession illuminated the port’s quay while church bells rang and ship sirens blared.

What stands out now for many is how the wreck forever changed the lives of some of those whose paths crossed as a result. Friendships were made, business relations took shape and new families were even formed.

“It feels as if, since that tragic night, the lives of all the people involved were forever connected by an invisible thread,” Luana Gervasi, the niece of one of the shipwreck victims, said at the Mass on Thursday, her voice breaking.

Francesco Dietrich, 48, from the eastern city of Ancona, arrived on the island in February 2013 to work with the wreck divers, “a dream job,” he said, adding: “It was like offering someone who plays soccer for the parish team to join the Champions League with all the top teams in the business.”

For his work, Mr. Dietrich had to buy a lot of boat-repair supplies from the only hardware store in town. It was owned by a local family, and Mr. Dietrich now has a 6-year-old son, Pietro, with the family’s daughter.

“It was such a shock for us,” said Bruna Danei, 42, who until 2018 worked as a secretary for the consortium that salvaged the wreck. “The work on the Costa Concordia was a life-changing experience for me in many ways.”

A rendering of the Costa Concordia used by salvage teams to plan its recovery hung on the wall of the living room where her 22-month-old daughter, Arianna, played.

“She wouldn’t be here if Davide hadn’t come to work on the site,” Ms. Danei said, referring to Davide Cedioli, 52, an experienced diver from Turin who came to the island in May 2012 to help right the Costa Concordia — and who is also Arianna’s father.

From a barge, Mr. Cedioli monitored the unprecedented salvage operation that, in less than a day, was able to rotate the 951-foot vessel, partly smashed against the rocks, from the sea bottom to an upright position without further endangering the underwater ecosystem that it damaged when it ran aground.

“We jumped up and down in happiness when the parbuckling was completed,” Mr. Cedioli remembered. “We felt we were bringing some justice to this story. And I loved this small community and living on the island.”

The local council voted to make Jan. 13 a day of remembrance on Giglio, but after this year it will stop the public commemorations and “make it a more intimate moment, without the media,” Mr. Ortelli said during the mass.

“Being here ten years later brings back a lot of emotions,” said Kevin Rebello, 47, whose older brother, Russell, was a waiter on the Costa Concordia.

Russell Rebello’s remains were finally retrieved three years after the shipwreck, from under the furniture in a cabin, once the vessel was upright and being taken apart in Genoa.

“First, I feel close to my brother here,” Kevin Rebello said. “But it is also some sort of family reunion for me — I couldn’t wait to see the Giglio people.”

Mr. Rebello hugged and greeted residents on the streets of the port area, and recalled how the people there had shown affection for him at the time, buying him coffee and simply showing respect for his grief.

“Other victims’ families feel differently, but I am a Catholic and I have forgiven,” Mr. Rebello explained.

The Costa Concordia accident caused national shame when it became clear that the liner’s commander, Francesco Schettino, failed to immediately sound the general alarm and coordinate the evacuation, and instead abandoned the sinking vessel.

“Get back on board!” a Coast Guard officer shouted at Mr. Schettino when he understood that the captain was in a lifeboat watching people scramble to escape, audio recordings of their exchange later revealed. “Go up on the bow of the ship on a rope ladder, and tell me what you can do, how many people are there and what they need. Now!”

The officer has since pursued a successful career in politics, while Mr. Schettino is serving a 16-year sentence in a Roman prison for homicide and for abandoning the ship before the evacuation was completed. Other officials and crew members plea-bargained for lesser sentences.

During the trial, Mr. Schettino admitted that he had committed an “imprudence” when he decided to sail near the island of Giglio at high speed to greet the family of the ship’s headwaiter. The impact with the half-submerged rock near the island produced a gash in the hull more than 70 meters long, or about 76 yards, leading to blackouts on board and water pouring into the lower decks.

Mr. Schettino tried to steer the cruise ship toward the port to make evacuation easier, but the vessel was out of control and began to tip as it neared the harbor, making many lifeboats useless.

“I can’t forget the eyes of children, scared to death, and of their parents,” said Mr. Pellegrini, who had boarded the ship to speak with officials and organize the evacuation. “The metallic sound of the enormous ship tipping over and the gurgling of the sea up the endless corridors of the cruiser.”

Sergio Ortelli, who is still the mayor of Giglio ten years later, was similarly moved. “Nobody can go back and cancel those senseless deaths of innocent people, or the grief of their families,” he said. “The tragedy will always stay with us as a community. It was an apocalypse for us.”

Yet Mr. Ortelli said that the accident also told a different story, that of the skilled rescuers who managed to save thousands of lives, and of the engineers who righted the liner, refloated it and took it to the scrapyard.

While the global attention shifted away from Giglio, residents have stayed in touch with the outside world through the people who temporarily lived there.

For months, the Rev. Lorenzo Pasquotti, who was then a pastor in Giglio, kept receiving packages: dry-cleaned slippers, sweaters and tablecloths that were given to the cold, stranded passengers in his church that night, returned via courier.

One summer, Father Pasquotti ate German cookies with a German couple who were passengers on the ship. They still remembered the hot tea and leftovers from Christmas delicacies that they were given that night.

“So many nationalities — the world was at our door all of a sudden,” he said, remembering that night. “And we naturally opened it.”

Gaia Pianigiani is a reporter based in Italy for The New York Times.  More about Gaia Pianigiani

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

By Eliza Mackintosh and Kendall Trammell , CNN

Viking Sky passengers will begin flying home tonight

All passengers and crew aboard the Viking Sky cruise ship are safe in the port of Molde, in western Norway, and passengers will soon begin flying home, Viking Ocean Cruises said in a statement on Sunday afternoon.

With the safe arrival of the vessel in port, our live coverage has ended. For all of the harrowing details from passengers who were stranded at sea, read our story .

"We made it," passengers cheer

The Viking Sky cruise ship has docked at a quay in Molde harbor, western Norway, after a harrowing day stranded at sea.

Passengers onboard the vessel shouted, "We made it," as the ship arrived on Sunday afternoon, Norwegian state broadcaster NRK reported .

Cruise ship expected to dock at 4:30 p.m. local time

The Viking Sky cruise ship is expected to dock at 4:30 p.m. local time in Molde, a port town in western Norway, the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre of Southern Norway said on Twitter. Local people have been asked to stay away from the center of town as emergency services prepare for the vessel's arrival.

US Embassy consular team to assist American cruise passengers

The US Embassy in Oslo has sent a consular team to Molde, a coastal city in western Norway, to assist American citizens being evacuated from the Viking Sky cruise ship.

The embassy said it was in contact with Norwegian authorities leading the rescue effort.

"The safety and security of U.S. citizens is of the utmost importance, and we will provide more information as it becomes available," the embassy said in a statement .

Norwegian PM: "It has been a dramatic day"

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg thanked rescue workers and volunteers who had helped respond to what she called a "dramatic day" for passengers aboard the Viking Sky cruise ship.

"It has been a dramatic day for the passengers and rescue personnel on #VikingSky in #Hustadvika. Thank you to the talented rescuers, volunteers and others who have made an invaluable effort in demanding conditions," Soldberg said on Twitter.

Evacuation of passengers has ended as cruise ship travels to port

The evacuation of passengers from a cruise ship off the western coast of Norway has come to an end as the vessel safely makes its way to Molde harbor, Viking Ocean Cruises said in a statement.

Rescue teams airlifted 479 people from the vessel after it was stranded in stormy seas Saturday with 1,300 passengers and crew on board.

The Viking Sky cruise ship, which regained engine power on Sunday morning, is traveling to Molde accompanied by two supply ships and one tug assist vessel. There are 436 guests and 458 crew still remaining on the ship.

Twenty people sustained injuries on the vessel, which was being tossed about by wind and waves, Viking Ocean Cruises said. All are being treated at medical facilities in Norway, or have already been discharged.

"Throughout all of this, our first priority was for the safety and well-being of our passengers and our crew," Viking Ocean Cruises said in a statement, thanking Norwegian emergency services and local residents for their support.

The next sailing, which was scheduled to embark on March 27, has been canceled.

Evacuated passengers treated for bruising, broken bones, cuts

The Norwegian Red Cross, which was treating passengers from the stricken cruise ship at an evacuation center in Hustadvika, on Norway's western coast, said that they were seeing injuries including bruising, broken bones and cuts.

More than 400 people rescued from stranded cruise ship

From CNN's Zahid Mahmood

Rescuers have evacuated 418 people by helicopter from the Viking Sky cruise ship, a day after the vessel was stranded in rough seas off Norway with 1,300 passengers and crew on board.

“There are at least two or three helicopters still rescuing people from the cruise ship but there is only one helicopter in operation at one given time because of the weather,” a spokesperson from Norwegian rescue services (HRS Southern Norway) told CNN.

“They work in rotations because it is not possible to hoist people from two helicopters working at one time.”

Passengers aboard the stricken ship say the vessel is being tossed about by wind and waves as they continue to await rescue .

Three of the ship's four engines are now working, and tug boats are trying to move the ship to shore.

Americans airlifted from cruise ship describe frightening scenes on board

Two American passengers who were airlifted off the Norway cruise ship told CNN affiliate Dagbladet about the frightening scene on board.

"Furniture would slide across the room, slide back and with it came people and glass. It was a very dangerous situation frankly," Jan Terbruegen said.

Speaking at the Scandic Hotel Alexandra, where many of the evacuated passengers are staying, Terbruegen described seeing the ship drifting toward rocks before being evacuated.

"We could see that we were getting blown in toward some rocks. That was the most frightening thing I think. But luckily that wasn't our destiny," Terbruegen said.

Beth Clark, another American passenger, said she was hoisted 100 feet in the air onto a Coast Guard helicopter from the ship. She praised the Norwegian Coast Guard, Viking Sky crew and others for help with the evacuation efforts.

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Footage shows moment Royal Caribbean cruise ship was flooded during storm in the Gulf of Mexico

Water flowed into rooms and sunbeds were strewn across the deck as the vessel was battered by the fierce weather conditions.

Friday 2 February 2024 12:39, UK

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Footage has emerged of a cruise ship being flooded during a storm in the Gulf of Mexico - causing water to flow into people's cabins.

Travis Hair, a passenger on the Royal Caribbean vessel, filmed as the balcony of his room on the Voyager Of The Seas was swamped.

Mr Hair said he captured the video while the vessel was "sailing through a thunderstorm" on 26 January.

He added there were "high winds on the deck… platters of food crashing to the floor in the buffet, liquor and other glass breaking, water coming in through the balconies and flooding."

The footage also shows sunbeds piled up on the deck after being tossed around in the powerful storm.

The vessel was on its way back to Galveston, Texas, as part of a five-night trip to Cozumel, Mexico, according to USA Today.

Passenger Chelsea Ireland told the newspaper she felt the vessel tilt as it was battered by heavy winds.

She said: "When we tried to walk across our room, it felt like we were walking up a very steep hill."

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Fellow passenger Elaina Escobedo, 21, went to her grandparent's cabin to check on them during the storm. "There were just things flying all over the place," she said.

Ms Escobedo added that her grandmother was safe on the sofa, but her wheelchair had rolled across the room and cups of lemonade had been knocked over.

The footage emerged after another Royal Caribbean ship, Serenade of the Seas, reportedly flooded last month.

Sky News has contacted Royal Caribbean for comment.

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Exclusive first preview of 9-1-1 season 7: 'I'm on a cruise ship, there was an explosion'

We last saw Angela Bassett's Athena and Peter Krause's Bobby headed out on a cruise. Now the Fox-turned-ABC drama has one going down.

ABC/ Youtube

"I can't believe we're doing this!"

Athena ( Angela Bassett ) and Bobby ( Peter Krause ) were quite excited to head out on their delayed honeymoon cruise in the 9-1-1 season 6 finale in May — but now, in a season 7 preview clip exclusive to EW, the middle of the ocean appears to be the last place you'd want to be.

"I'm on a cruise ship, there was an explosion," a passenger tells a 9-1-1 operator in the first peek at the upcoming season of the first-responder drama, which makes the move from Fox to ABC when it returns March 14.

It's not yet clear if this is the same cruise ship that Athena and Bobby headed out on, but it doesn't bode well that the show made a point to tell viewers that the couple didn't inform anyone about their last-minute trip. (Classic 9-1-1 mistake!)

This cruise ship disaster has been a long time coming, with showrunner Kristen Reidel teasing a honeymoon hazard way back at the end of season 5 .

"I mean, dinners don't go well on  9-1-1 . Proposals don't go well on  9-1-1 . So I would expect that yes, at some point next season, you will definitely see some portion of that vacation and it will be very  9-1-1, " she told EW in May 2022.

And Reidel wasn't alone in predicting a cruise mishap.

"Bobby feels like, 'Hey, maybe it's finally time for us to go on a honeymoon.' And he chooses to surprise Athena with an idea for a vacation — and what could possibly go wrong if they get on a cruise ship?" Krause told EW a few weeks prior to the season 5 finale .

It may have taken them a season longer than we'd expected, but it seems the high seas are finally set for high drama.

Courtesy ABC

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Related content:

• 9-1-1 's Oliver Stark on season 6 finale, Buck's new romance, Lucy's return, and that couch
• 9-1-1 's Maddie and Chimney romance: Kenneth Choi says he 'owes everything' to Jennifer Love Hewitt
• 9-1-1 's Ravi returns! Actor Anirudh Pisharody explains where he's been and how his character has changed
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Killer whales bang into 50-foot yacht off morocco, forcing 2 on board to abandon ship before it sinks.

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A pack of killer whales sank a 50-foot yacht in Moroccan waters Sunday when the massive sea mammals slammed into the vessel and forced two sailors aboard to flee, officials said.

Spanish authorities said the crew members were rescued by a passing oil tanker that was alerted to the desperate situation after the boat sprang a leak during the orca encounter in the Strait of Gibraltar.

The two people were customers, and the vessel belonged to Spanish company Alboran Charter, according to the Washington Post .  

The yacht, which was 14 miles from the Cape Spartel coast, later sunk to the bottom of the ocean in the latest orca attack that has prompted experts to warn other sailors of danger in the area.

Last October, a Polish tour agency’s yacht was relentlessly hit by a herd of orcas for 45 minutes that led to “major damage and leakage,” the agency said. The boat ended up sinking.

Orcas also interfered with a sailing race last year when a boat traveling from the Netherlands to Italy had a 15-minute showdown with the animals. The crew was forced to drop its sails and make a ruckus to repel them.

Since 2020, hundreds of boats sailing in waters near Spain, Morocco and Portugal have encountered at least 15 orcas that led to some of the vessels sinking, the Washington Post reported.

Spain’s ministries for transport and the environment warned sailors of sailing boats and small motorboats that orca activity is at its peak between May and August between the Strait of Gibraltar and the Gulf of Cadiz. Officials encouraged boaters to sail near the coast.

A team of Spanish and Portuguese marine life scientists, called the Atlantic Orca Working Group, said there were 197 interactions between boats and killer whales in 2021 and 207 more in 2022. 

With Post wires

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Boats still aren't safe from orcas as the Mediterranean yachting season kicks off and killer whales sink another yacht

• Killer whales took down another yacht on Monday as the Mediterranean yachting season begins.
• It's the latest incident of orcas clashing with boats, which has been on the rise in recent years.
• Marine biologists say the orcas are likely playing and may be learning the behavior from each other.

The Mediterranean yachting season has kicked off for the summer — and it didn't take long for another yacht to fall victim to a killer whale encounter .

A group of orcas sank a 50-foot sailing yacht in Moroccan waters on Sunday in the latest of several similar incidents involving the highly social species that have occurred over the past four years.

An unknown number of orcas were involved in the incident, which took place in the Strait of Gibraltar, Spain's maritime rescue service said Monday, according to Reuters .

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The incident is the most recent in a spate of bizarre orca encounters with boats that have been on the rise in recent years, primarily in Mediterranean waters south of Spain, where many yachts cruise during the summer months.

Two passengers were on board the Alboran Cognac around 9 a.m. local time on Sunday when they felt sudden hits to the hull and rudder, Reuters reported, citing the maritime service. Water soon started to pour into the yacht.

A nearby oil tanker came to the people's rescue, saving them from the waterlogged ship and delivering them to land.

But the yacht wasn't as lucky. The Alboran Cognac stayed adrift for a time until it ultimately sank.

Since 2020, hundreds of similar encounters between boats and orcas have been documented off the southern coasts of Spain and Portugal, often near the Strait of Gibraltar. And it's not just yachts. The orcas have also rammed into sailboats, and some mariners have even created heavy-metal playlists in hopes of deterring the killer whales — though experts say it'll do little to help .

Researchers say the clashes typically follow a similar pattern, with a killer whale repeatedly ramming into the rudder of a ship, often until it breaks and the boat is stranded. Most of the time, the ships are able to escape with minimal damage, but several boats have sunk .

While the so-called orca "attacks" may appear violent, marine biologists have said it's unlikely the encounters are actually malicious. Several experts told Business Insider last year that the orcas are probably just playing .

Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia in Canada, said ramming into the boats may simply be a "playful activity that's gotten way out of hand."

Researchers have also said the killer whales may be learning the behavior from each other through simple imitation.

Watch: Billionaire's $20 million plan to send orca home after 50 years in captivity

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