Survivors of capsized cruise ship say ‘it was like a scene from Titanic’

HE cabaret was in full swing, glasses were clinking and in the luxurious two-storey Milano restaurant onboard the Costa Concordia ocean liner, passengers were sitting down to a six-course dinner when they were suddenly plunged into blackness.

“We heard this big bang,” said passenger Maria Marmegiano Alfonsi, one of 4,200 aboard the cruise ship when it ran aground off the coast of Tuscany on Friday night in a tragedy that has so far claimed three lives and left more than 70 missing at sea.

“There was a lot of panic, the tables overturned, glasses were flying all over the place and we ran for the decks where we put on our lifevests.”

It was, said another passenger, Mara Parmegiani, “like a scene from Titanic”. Dressed in their evening wear, diners abandoned their starters and rushed from their tables towards the exit.

In the ship’s main theatre, passengers watching the magic show felt an initial lurch, as if from a violent steering manoeuvre, followed a few seconds later by a “shudder” that tipped rubbish bins over. The subsequent listing of the ship made the theatre curtains seem like they were standing on their side.

“And then the magician disappeared,” said Canadian survivor Laurie Willits. Moments later, panicked audience members fled too.

Some passengers said that for almost 45 minutes they were told by crew the lights had gone off because of a simple “technical problem”. Seasoned cruisers, however, knew better and went to get their life jackets from their cabins and reported to their “muster stations,” the emergency stations each passenger is assigned to.

As the ship began to list, some were forced to crawl along upended hallways trying to reach safety. “We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life vest strobe flashing,” said American Georgia Ananias, 61. “We could hear plates and dishes crashing and people slamming against walls.”

But when they reached the muster stations, panic reigned. Passengers reported seeing crew members delaying lowering the lifeboats even thought the ship was listing badly.

“We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side,” said Mike van Dijk, 54, from South Africa. “We were standing in the corridors and they weren’t allowing us to get on to the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble.”

Some jumped into the sea. Others nearly fell. British cabaret dancer Rose Metcalf, 22, who was performing on the ship when the incident happened and was one of the last to be winched to safety by a helicopter, feared for her life.

Her father Philip Metcalf, who lives near Witchampton, in Dorset, said: “The ship rolled over on its side so they had to get a fire hose which they strung between the railings to stop them falling overboard.

“She thought she’d have to make a jump for it as it was dark and cold, like the sinking of the Titanic, but the helicopter then winched her off.”

Others were forced to shimmy along a rope down the exposed side of the ship to a waiting rescue vessel below.

But things didn’t improve for passengers once aboard the lifeboats or on land.

“No-one counted us, neither in the life boats nor on land,” said Ophelie Gondelle, 28, a French military officer from Marseille.

The rescue operation is said to have involved five helicopters, from the Italian coastguard, navy and air force, with many survivors taken to the tiny island of Giglio.

There, the number of survivors far outnumbered Giglio’s 1,500 residents, and island Mayor Sergio Ortelli asked “anyone with a roof” to open their homes to shelter the passengers. Survivors were also taking refuge in schools, hotels, and a church on the island, a popular holiday spot for Italians.

Passengers sat dazed in a school opened for them, wrapped in wool or aluminium blankets, with some wearing their life vests and their shoeless feet covered with aluminium foil. They were served them warm tea and bread, but confusion continued as they tried desperately to find the right bus to begin their journey home.

Those who did make it to the mainland made for a pitiful sight. Christine Hammer, from Germany, shivered near the harbour of Porto Santo Stefano, on the mainland, after stepping off a ferry from Giglio. She was wearing elegant dinner clothes with a large pair of hiking boots, given to her by a kind islander after she lost her shoes in the scramble to escape. Left behind in her cabin were her passport, credit cards and phone.

Now, the search to identify the dead and missing must begin. It is believed about 1,000 Italian passengers were onboard, as well as more than 500 Germans, about 160 French and 25 Britons, along with about 1,000 crew members, 12 of whom are British. Reports say one of the dead was a crew member from Peru, and the other were two passengers from France. All Britons have been accounted for.

Divers are searching the submerged half of the ship for the 70 people still missing.

A coastguard official said the missing might be trapped “in the belly of the ship”.

The Passenger Shipping Association released a statement saying: “While the focus should rightly be on attending to the immediate incident at hand there will, of course, be a full and thorough investigation into the causes of this event and the full cooperation of both the company and the wider industry is assured.”

The Concordia had a previous accident in Italian waters. In 2008, when winds buffeted Palermo, the ship banged against the Sicilian port’s dock, and suffered damage but no-one was injured.

Passengers onboard the ship’s final cruise said it was disorganised – 12 hours on from the accident, no roll call had yet been taken. They said there was a lax attitude towards evacuation drills. The ship’s evacuation drill was only scheduled for yesterday afternoon, even though some passengers had already been on board for several days.