Shipwreck terror lingers 10 years after catastrophe
GIGLIO, Italy — Italy honored the 32 victims of the Costa Concordia shipwreck on the 10th anniversary of the disaster with a commemoration Thursday on the Tuscan island of Giglio, which recalled the horror of the night the cruise ship struck a reef and capsized.
Some of the 4,200 survivors attended the events, which began with a Mass and were ending with a candlelit vigil marking the moment, 9:45 p.m. local time, that the Concordia hit the rocks that sliced a 230foot gash in its hull.
Bells rang in the same Giglio church that opened its doors and took in hundreds of passengers who abandoned ship and reached shore in lifeboats that freezing night. Some had climbed off the lopsided liner on rope ladders after it flipped onto its side; others were plucked from the decks by rescue helicopters.
“I invite you to have the courage to look forward,” Grosseto Bishop Giovanni Roncari told survivors, relatives of the dead and Coast Guard officials who had helped coordinate the rescue. “Hope doesn’t cancel the tragedy and pain, but it teaches us to look beyond the present moment without forgetting it.”
Under a brilliant sun and blue sky, survivors and relatives of the victims then set out on Coast Guard cutters to place a wreath in the choppy waters where the 115,000-ton, 1,000-foot liner finally came to rest.
Her captain, Francesco Schettino, is serving a 16-year prison sentence for manslaughter and other charges for having ordered the crew to steer the ship off course and closer to Giglio in a stunt. After
the ship hit the reef, the engine room flooded and generators failed, causing a power outage, while the vessel started to list. Evidence presented at the trial showed Schettino downplayed the severity of the situation in communications with the Coast Guard and delayed an evacuation order, then abandoned ship before all the passengers and crew were off.
Giglio’s vice mayor at the time, Mario Pellegrini, had
climbed on board the listing ship that night to help coordinate the rescue, and found sheer chaos in the absence of orders from the captain or crew. He recalled he finally climbed down after the last passengers and crew had been evacuated, at around 6 a.m. the following morning.
“The memories I have from that night inside the ship are terrible, of the tears and desperation of the people,” he said
Thursday.
The residents of Giglio took in the 4,200 surviving passengers and crew until day broke and they were ferried to the mainland. Giglio’s people then lived with the Concordia’s hulk for another two years until it was righted and hauled away for scrap.