‘Jungle law prevailed’ on doomed ship
Survivors recount chaos, panic, fist fights aboard burning ferry as passengers awaited rescue
BARI, ITALY— It was, as one survivor described it, a nightmare out of Dante’s Inferno.
There were no fire alarms at first, no knocks on the door from the crew, just thick, acrid smoke filling cabins, terrifying the passengers as the deadly vapours awoke them on the overnight ferry from Greece to Italy.
In the chaos that followed, passengers sought safety on the open decks from the flames below, only to be drenched by cold rain and firefighting hoses while heat from the fire burned their feet. Pushing and shoving broke out, and passengers came to blows over space in lifeboats and helicopter baskets.
“Everyone there was trampling on each other to get onto the helicopter,” Greek truck driver Christos Perlis said by telephone from one of the rescue vessels summoned after the Norman Atlantic caught fire off Albania early Sunday.
“The jungle law prevailed,” said Greek passenger Irene Varsioti.
“There was no queue or order. No respect was shown for children.”
On Monday, Italian and Greek helicopter rescue crews evacuated the last of the known survivors aboard the Italian-flagged vessel, bringing the number rescued to 427.
But the death toll climbed to at least 10, and the search in the chilly Adriatic Sea for more possible victims continued amid serious discrepancies in the ship’s manifest and confusion over how many people were actually aboard. The vessel’s operator, Anek Lines, said there were 475 on the ferry.
“We cannot say how many people may be missing,” Transport Minister Maurizio Lupi said at an evening news conference.
Greek officials said one Canadian citizen was listed on the ferry’s manifest, The Canadian Press reported. The whereabouts of the man, identified only as N. Pejcinovksi, is unclear.
Italian officials said the names on the manifest may have represented just reservations, not actual passengers who boarded. Also, Italian navy Adm. Giovanni Pettorino said 80 of those rescued weren’t on the list at all, giving credence to suggestions from the Italian premier the ferry may have been carrying a number of illegal migrants trying to reach Italy.
The blaze broke out on the car deck of the ferry while it was travelling from the Greek port of Patras to Ancona in Italy. The cause of the fire was under investigation.
The Italian military congratulated itself for a remarkable around-theclock rescue operation in horrendous conditions: 75-km/h winds, high seas, choking smoke and the dark of the Adriatic night.
Hundreds of passengers and crew and two dogs were plucked from the rain-soaked ferry decks in helicopter baskets as the fire blazed below.
Some suffered hypothermia, others mild carbon monoxide poisoning, but the first big group to reach land — 49 people who came ashore in Bari just after dawn Monday — walked off their rescue ship on their own, exhausted and draped in blankets to ward off the cold.
Anek Lines said all inspections required by law had been carried out, and the ship had been issued all necessary safety certificates.
Passengers said the scene aboard the ship was chaos, with virtually no leadership from the mostly Italian crew. Several said they got out of their cabins only because other passengers banged on their doors or the smoke made it difficult to breathe.
“There was no alarm. This was the absolute tragedy,” Dimitra Theodossiou, a Greek soprano, told Italy’s La Repubblica. “They didn’t knock. They didn’t advise us. We woke from smoke that entered in the room.”
Perlis, the Greek truck driver, described the scene as “a chaos, a panic,” hampered by passengers whose feet were burning from the fire underneath them. “And from the feet up we were soaked.”
When rescue helicopters arrived, Perlis said, passengers jostled one another as they jockeyed for position.
“First children, then women and then men. But the men, they started hitting us so they could get on first. They didn’t take into consideration the women or the children, nothing,” Perlis said.
He said he reached safety after jumping into a helicopter basket carrying a girl.
Greek passenger Chrysostomos Apostolou, a civil engineer travelling with his wife and their two boys, ages 8 and 14, said: “I witnessed an image of hell as described by Dante, on a ship where the decks were melting and we were trying to find some place that was not burning to stand on.”