凍結 天然氣 火車

Passengers Tell of Delayed, Then Panicked, Evacuation

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: January 14, 2012

PORTO SANTO STEFANO, Italy — Survivors who escaped a luxury cruise ship that ran aground and tipped over described a delayed and then a panicked evacuation, as plates and glasses crashed around them and as they crawled along upended hallways trying to reach safety.

Three bodies were recovered from the sea and news reports said that 69 people were still unaccounted for after the Costa Concordia ran aground off the tiny island of Giglio near the coast of Tuscany late Friday, tearing a 160-foot gash in its hull.

The ANSA news agency, quoting the prefect’s office in the province of Grosseto, reported that the authorities have accounted for 4,165 of the 4,234 people who had boarded the liner.

By morning Saturday, the ship was lying virtually flat off Giglio’s coast, its starboard side submerged.

Passengers complained that the crew failed to give instructions on how to evacuate and once the emergency became clear, delayed lowering the lifeboats until the ship was listing too heavily for many of the boats to be released. An evacuation drill was only scheduled for Saturday afternoon, even though some passengers had already been on board for several days.

Helicopters plucked to safety some 50 people who were trapped on the ship, some survivors were rescued by boats in the area, and an official said some people jumped from the ship. Coast guard rescuers were continuing to search the ship.

“It was so unorganized, our evacuation drill was scheduled for 5 p.m.,” said Melissa Goduti, 28, of Wallingford, Conn., who had set out on the cruise of the Mediterranean hours earlier. “We had joked ‘What if something had happened today?’ ”

Another passenger, said Valerie Ananias, said, “Have you seen ‘Titanic?’ That’s exactly what it was.” Ms. Ananias, a 31-year-old teacher from Los Angeles, was traveling with her sister and parents on the first of two cruises around the Mediterranean. They all had dark red bruises on their knees from crawling along hallways and stairwells that were nearly vertical, trying to reach rescue boats.

“We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life-vest strobe flashing,” her mother, Georgia Ananias, 61, said. “We could hear plates and dishes crashing, people slamming against walls.”

She choked up as she recounted the moment when an Argentine couple handed her their 3-year-old daughter, unable to keep their balance as the ship lurched to the side and the family found themselves standing on a wall.

“He said ‘take my baby,’ ” Mrs. Ananias said, covering her mouth with her hand as she teared up. “I grabbed the baby. But then I was being pushed down. I didn’t want the baby to fall down the stairs. I gave the baby back. I couldn’t hold her.

“I thought that was the end, and I thought they should be with their baby,” she said.

“I wonder where they are,” Valerie Ananias whispered.

The family said they were some of the last people off the ship, forced to shimmy along a rope down the exposed side of the ship to a waiting rescue vessel.

One survivor, Christine Hammer, from Bonn, Germany, shivered near the harbor of Porto Santo Stefano, on the mainland, after stepping off a ferry from Giglio. Ms. Hammer was wearing elegant dinner clothes — a cashmere sweater, a silk scarf — along with a large pair of hiking boots, which a kind islander gave her after she lost her shoes in the scramble to escape. Left behind were her passport, credit cards and phone.

Ms. Hammer, 65, told The Associated Press that she was eating her first course, an appetizer of cuttlefish, sauteed mushrooms and salad, on her first night aboard her first-ever cruise, which was a gift to her and her husband, Gert, from the local church where she volunteers.

Suddenly, “we heard a crash. Glasses and plates fell down and we went out of the dining room and we were told it wasn’t anything dangerous,” she said.

Several passengers said crew members for a good 45 minutes told passengers there was a simple “technical problem” that had caused the lights to go off. Seasoned cruisers, however, knew better and went to get their life jackets in their rooms and report to their “muster stations,” the emergency stations each passenger is assigned to, they said.

Once there, though, crew members delayed lowering the lifeboats even thought the ship was listing badly, they said.

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

Two other passengers, Alan and Laurie Willits, celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary, said they were watching a magic show in the ship’s main theater when they felt an initial lurch, as if from a severe steering maneuver, followed a few seconds later by a “shudder.”

“And then the magician disappeared,” Laurie Willits said, saying the magician left the stage and panicked audience members fled for their cabins as well.

Things did not improve for passengers once aboard life boats.

“No one counted us, neither in the life boats or on land,” said Ophelie Gondelle, 28, a French military officer from Marseille. Ms. Gondelle said there had been no evacuation drill since she boarded in France on Jan. 8.

As dawn neared, a painstaking search of the 950-foot long ship’s interior was being conducted to see if anyone might have been trapped inside, Cmdr. Francesco Paolillo of the coast guard said.

“There are some 2,000 cabins, and the ship isn’t straight,” Commander Paolillo said, referring to the Concordia’s dramatic tilt on its right side. “I’ll leave it to your imagination to understand how they (the rescuers) are working as they move through it.”

Some Concordia crew members were still aboard to help the coast guard rescuers, he said.

It was not immediately known if the dead were passengers or crew, nor were the nationalities of the victims immediately known, Commander Paolillo said by telephone from the Tuscan port city of Livorno. It was not clear how they died.

Some 30 people were reported injured, most of them suffering only bruises, but at least two people were reported in grave condition.

Some passengers, apparently in panic, had jumped off the boat into the sea, a Tuscany-based government official, Giuseppe Linardi, a Grosseto prefect, was quoted as saying.

The evacuees were taking refuge in schools, hotels, and a church on the tiny island of Giglio, a popular vacation isle about 18 miles off Italy’s central west coast. Those evacuated by helicopter were flown to Grosseto, while others, rescued by local ferries pressed into emergency service, were brought here.

Passengers sat dazed in a middle school opened for them, wrapped in woolen blankets with some wearing their life preservers and their shoeless feet covered with aluminum foil.

Survivors far outnumbered Giglio’s 1,500 residents, and island Mayor Sergio Ortelli issued an appeal for islanders — “anyone with a roof” — to open their homes to shelter the evacuees.

Commander Paolillo said the exact circumstances of the accident were still unclear, but that the first alarm went off about 10:30 p.m., about three hours after the Concordia had begun its voyage from the port of Civitavecchia, en route to its first port of call, Savona, in northwestern Italy.

He said the vessel “hit an obstacle” — it was not clear if it might have hit a rocky reef in the waters off Giglio — “ripping a gash 50 meters across” in the side of the ship, and started taking on water.

The cruise liner’s captain, Commander Paolillo said, then tried to steer his ship toward shallow waters, near Giglio’s small port, to make evacuation by lifeboat easier.

But after the ship started listing badly, lifeboat evacuation was no longer feasible, Commander Paolillo said.

Costa Cruises said the Costa Concordia was sailing on a cruise across the Mediterranean Sea, starting from Civitavecchia, Italy, with scheduled stops in Savona, Italy; Marseille, France; Barcelona, Spain; Palma de Mallorca in Spain; and Cagliari and Palermo in Italy.

Cruise ship aground: Captain detained

Cruise ship aground: Captain detained

by Nicole Winfield - Jan. 14, 2012 03:02 PM

Associated Press

PORTO SANTO STEFANO, Italy -- The first course had just been served in the Costa Concordia's dining room when the wine glasses, forks and plates of cuttlefish and mushrooms smashed to the ground. At the magic show in the theater, the trash cans tipped over and the theater curtains turned on their side. Then the hallways turned upside down, and passengers crawled on bruised knees through the dark. Others jumped alone into the cold Mediterranean Sea.

The terrifying, chaotic escape from the luxury liner was straight out of a scene from "Titanic" for many of the 4,000-plus passengers and crew on the cruise ship, which ran aground off the Italian coast late Friday and flipped on its side with a 160-foot gash in its hull. At least three bodies had been recovered and divers searched the underwater belly of the boat for a few dozen more who remained unaccounted for. By late Saturday, the number of missing had dwindled to about 40.

The Friday the 13th grounding of the Concordia was one of the most dramatic cruise ship accidents in recent memory. It immediately raised a host of questions: Why did it hit a reef so close to the the Tuscan island of Giglio? Did a power failure cause the crew to lose control? And why did crew members tell passengers they weren't in danger until the boast was listing perilously to the side?

The delay made lifeboat rescue eventually impossible for some of the passengers, some of whom jumped into the sea while others waited to be plucked to safety by helicopters. Some boats had to be cut down with an axe.

"We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side," said Mike van Dijk, from Pretoria, South Africa. "It was a scramble, an absolute scramble."

Van Dijk said the boat he was on -- on the upended port side -- got stuck along the ship's wall as it came down.

"It was a hell of a sound, the crunching," he said.

Costa Crociera SpA, which is owned by the U.S.-based cruise giant Carnival Corp., defended the actions of its crew and said it was cooperating with the investigation. The captain was detained for questioning by prosecutors, investigating him for suspected manslaughter, abandoning ship before all others, and causing a shipwreck, state TV and Sky TV said. Carnival Corp. issued a statement expressing sympathy that didn't address the allegations of delayed evacuation.

France said two of the victims were Frenchmen; a Peruvian diplomat identified the third victim as Tomas Alberto Costilla Mendoza, 42, a crewman from Peru. Some 30 people were injured, at least two seriously.

The ship began its lurch at the beginning of dinner service in the ship's two-story dining room, where passengers described a scene of frantic confusion.

Silverware, plates and glasses crashed down on them from the upper floor balcony, children wailed and darkened hallways upended themselves after the ship began its lurch. Panicked passengers slipped on broken glass as the lights went out while crew members insisted nothing serious was wrong.

"Have you seen 'Titanic'? That's exactly what it was," said Valerie Ananias, 31, a schoolteacher from Los Angeles who was traveling with her sister and parents. They all bore dark red bruises on their knees from the desperate crawl they endured along nearly vertical hallways and stairwells, trying to reach rescue boats.

"We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life vest strobe flashing," her mother, Georgia Ananias, 61 said. "We could hear plates and dishes crashing, people slamming against walls."

She choked up as she remembered the moment when an Argentine couple handed her their 3-year-old daughter, unable to keep their balance as the ship listed to the side.

"He said,'Take my baby,'" Georgia Ananias said, covering her mouth with her hand. "I grabbed the baby. But then I was being pushed down. I didn't want the baby to fall down the stairs. I gave the baby back. I couldn't hold her."

Whispered her daughter Valerie: "I wonder where they are."

The Ananias family was among the last passengers off the ship, left standing on the upended port side. They were forced to exit from a still-attached lifeboat that became impossible to use once the ship began to tip over; so they climbed a ladder dropped too them off a deck and shimmied down a rope to a waiting rescue vessel.

"We thought we were dying four times," Valerie said, recounting the most terrifying moments in their escape.

A top Costa executive, Gianni Onorato, said Saturday the Concordia's captain had the liner on its regular, weekly route when it struck a reef. Italian coast guard officials said the circumstances were still unclear, but that the ship hit an unknown obstacle.

Despite some early reports that the captain was dining with passengers when his ship crashed into the reef, he was on the bridge, Onorato said.

"The ship was doing what it does 52 times a year, going along the route between Civitavecchia and Savona," a shaken-looking Onorato told reporters on Giglio, a popular vacation isle off Italy's central west coast.

He said the captain was an 11-year Costa veteran and that the cruise line was cooperating with Italian investigators to find out what went wrong.

Malcolm Latarche, editor of maritime magazine IHS Fairplay Solutions, said a loss of power coupled with a failure of backup systems could have caused the crew to lose control.

"I would say power failure caused by harmonic interference and then it can't propel straight or navigate and it hit rocks," Latarche said.

There were no firm indications that anyone was trapped. Rescuers carried out extensive searches of the waters near the ship for hours and "we would have seen bodies," said Coast Guard Capt. Cosimo Nicastro.

Many passengers complained the crew didn't give them good directions on how to evacuate and once the emergency became clear, delayed lowering the lifeboats until the ship was listing too heavily for many to be released.

Several other passengers said crew members told passengers for 45 minutes that there was a simple "technical problem" that had caused the lights to go off.

Seasoned cruisers knew better and went to get their life jackets from their cabins and report to their "muster stations," the emergency stations each passenger is assigned to, they said.

Passengers said they had never participated in an evacuation drill, although one had been scheduled for Saturday. The cruise began on Jan. 7.

Miriam Vitale, a hostess on the cruise liner who disembarked earlier this week in Palermo, told SkyTG24 the ship conducts a drill every 15 days. She said that since passengers on the Concordia embark or disembark every day, some passengers could miss it depending on which day they begin the trip.

Surviving passengers huddled under woolen or aluminum blankets in a middle school on the Italian mainland of Porto Santo Stefano, where passengers were ferried early Saturday from Giglio. Some wore their life preservers, their shoeless feet were covered with aluminum foil.

Christine Hammer, from Bonn, Germany, shivered near the harbor as she waited for a bus to take her somewhere -- she didn't know where. She wore her gray cashmere sweater and a silk scarf with a large pair of hiking boats loaned to her by an islander after she lost her shoes in the scramble. Her passport, credit cards and phone were left in her cabin.

Hammer, 65, said the ship lurched to the side as she ate an appetizer of cuttlefish, sauteed mushrooms and salad on her first night aboard her first-ever cruise, a gift to her and her husband, Gert, from her local church where she volunteers.

"We heard a crash. Glasses and plates fell down and we went out of the dining room and we were told it wasn't anything dangerous," she said.

Alan and Laurie Willits from Wingham, Ontario, celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary, said they were watching the magic show in the ship's main theater when they felt an initial lurch, as if from a severe steering maneuver. That was followed a few seconds later by a "shudder" that tipped trash cans over.

The subsequent listing of the ship made the theater curtains seem like they were standing on their side.

"And then the magician disappeared," Laurie Willits said.

Florida-based Carnival Corp. issued a brief statement Saturday.

"Our hearts go out to everyone affected by the grounding of the Costa Concordia and especially the loved ones of those who lost their lives. They will remain in our thoughts and prayers in the wake of this tragic event."

Costa Cruises said about 1,000 Italian passengers were onboard, as well as more than 500 Germans, about 160 French and about 1,000 crew members. The State Department said about 126 U.S. citizens were onboard.

Coast guard Cmdr. Francesco Paolillo said the exact circumstances of the accident were still unclear, but that the first alarm aboard went off about 10:30 p.m., about three hours after the Concordia had begun its voyage from the port of Civitavecchia to Savona, in northwestern Italy. No SOS was sent, he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

The vessel "hit an obstacle," that tore a 160-foot gash in the side of the ship and started taking on water, Paolillo said. It wasn't clear if the obstacle was a jagged, rocky reef or something else, he said.

The captain, Paolillo said, then tried to steer his ship toward shallow waters, near Giglio's small port, to make evacuation by lifeboat easier.

Five helicopters from the coast guard, navy and air force took turns airlifting survivors still aboard and ferrying them to safely.

Costa Cruises said the Costa Concordia was sailing on a weeklong cruise across the Mediterranean Sea that began Jan. 7 in Savona with stops at Civitavecchia, Marseille, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Cagliari and Palermo.

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

Cruise ship passengers recount capsizing off Italy

Cruise ship passengers recount capsizing off Italy

By Gregorio Borgia, AP

How could a leisurely cruise off Italy's Tuscany coast go so terribly wrong?

That's the question passengers, maritime experts and would-be vacationers are asking after the weekend's deadly capsize and chaotic evacuation of the ultramodern cruise ship Costa Concordia.

The ship, which is 5 years old, cost $570 million to build and has state-of-the-art navigation equipment. It struck a rock and keeled over in shallow water late Friday near Giglio, a tiny island about 18 miles off Italy's Tuscan coast, with more than 3,000 passengers — 120 Americans among them — and more than 1,000 crewmembers aboard. The ship had navigated near the dangerous reefs and rocks that jut off Giglio's eastern coast.

In the panicked evacuation that followed, five people died, including two French tourists, a Peruvian crewmember and two elderly men found inside the ship Sunday, still in their life jackets. No Americans were seriously injured, but two remain among the 15 missing.

Survivors say the scene was eerily evocative of the Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank a century ago this April.

"Have you seen Titanic? That's exactly what it was," said Valerie Ananias, 31, a schoolteacher from Los Angeles who was traveling with her sister and parents on the first of two cruises around the Mediterranean.

"We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life vest strobe flashing," her mother, Georgia Ananias, 61, said. "We could hear plates and dishes crashing, people slamming against walls."

But this is 100 years after the Titanic disaster. Ships such as the Costa Concordia carried roughly 16 million passengers last year. Crews are trained in evacuation, and passengers are shown how to abandon ship. The company, Italy's Costa, is a mass-market line that caters to an international clientele. It is owned by Miami-based Carnival, the world's largest cruise company.

In a statement issued Sunday, Costa said, "Preliminary indications are that there may have been significant human error on the part of the ship's master, Captain Francesco Schettino, which resulted in these grave consequences."

The company said, "The route of the vessel appears to have been too close to the shore, and in handling the emergency, the captain appears not to have followed standard Costa procedures."

Italian prosecutors have seized the ship and its VDR (voyage data recorder) — the "black box" containing all navigation information — and held Schettino for questioning on possible charges of manslaughter and abandoning ship before all passsengers were off.

Costa hired a salvage company to help establish an environmental protection perimeter around the ship.

Progress since Titanic

Maritime experts say incidents such as this are extremely rare and although it's the worst cruise line accident in recent memory, they stress it could have been far worse. Timeline of events

How the events of the capsizing of the cruise ship Costa Concordia unfolded:

Friday

10 p.m. Central European Time (4 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time). The Costa Concordia, About three hours after departing the Italian port of Civitavecchia near Rome with about 3,200 passengers and 1,000 crewmembers on a seven-day voyage, the Costa Concordia strikes a rock off the coast of Isola del Giglio. Passengers are sitting down to dinner when the rumble knocks wine glasses and plates of cuttlefish off the tables. The lights go off, and the ship begins to list. The ship had 3,200 passengers and 1,000 crewmembers.

10:30 p.m. The first alarm sounds, warning passengers about an electrical problem crewmembers are trying to fix. Officials say the captain, Francesco Schettino, initially tries to maneuver the ship into the port as water pours into huge gashes in the ship before ordering an evacuation.

10:45 p.m. Passengers become incredulous about the electrical problem as the ship tilts in the water, making it more difficult to abandon ship. Passengers begin panicking because few crewmembers speak Italian to offer instructions. Some crawl on bruised knees as hallways turn sideways.

Midnight. Some passengers wait two hours in the cold for their turn to be lowered in crowded lifeboats to the water as water creeps up to their ankles. Perhaps 100 passengers jump from the ship into the cold water and try swimming to shore. Island residents greet them with blankets and hot drinks.

A French couple say they see the captain in a lifeboat, covered by a blanket before all the passengers are off the ship. Police later detain Schettino on suspicion that he abandoned ship.

Saturday

A 160-foot gash is visible in the side of the ship as it lie on its side in the rocky water. The Italian coast guard recovers the “black box” of navigational recordings.

Throughout the day, rescue crews in dinghies circle the wreckage, looking for survivors. About 40 people are believed to be missing.

Late Saturday evening, a South Korean couple honeymooning on the cruise are rescued from the unsubmerged portion of the ship, after firefighters hear their screams.

Sunday

10 a.m. (4 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time). A helicopter airlifts a third survivor from the capsized ship 36 hours after it ran aground. Police divers and rescue crews continue circling the wreckage for survivors, placing their hands on the sides of the hull.

Italian coast guard divers find two more bodies aboard the ship – elderly people found in the dining room — bringing the total to five dead. Fifteen people remain missing.

"We have made tremendous progress since the sinking of the Titanic," said Chris B. McKesson, a former ship designer and adjunct professor at the School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the University of New Orleans. "The ship did everything she was supposed to do, and human error seems to be the major factor.

"Are we going to learn from this event and make changes? Certainly," McKesson said.

"But this ship had 4,200 people on board, which is the equivalent of 20 Boeing 737s," he said. "If this were an aviation disaster, the fact that there were only five fatalities would be remarkable."

Nonetheless, the disaster is raising questions about ship seaworthiness, the captain's behavior, the crew preparedness and evacuation procedures.

Nautilus International, a Britain-based maritime employees trade union, called the accident a "wake-up call" to regulators as cruise ships get ever larger.

"Nautilus is concerned about the rapid recent increases in the size of passenger ships — with the average tonnage doubling over the past decade," Nautilus General Secretary Mark Dickinson said in a statement. "Many ships are now effectively small towns at sea, and the sheer number of people onboard raises serious questions about evacuation."

Survivors of the Costa Concordia disaster described trying to reach safety in a panic-filled evacuation through darkened, upended hallways.

There was no lifeboat drill after the ship's departure from Citavecchia, the port for Rome. Passengers complained that the crew failed to give instructions on how to evacuate and delayed lowering lifeboats until the ship was listing too heavily for many of them to be released.

Some passengers jumped into the sea while others waited to be plucked to safety by helicopters. Some lifeboats had to be cut down with an ax. About 30 people were injured, most of them suffering only bruises, but at least two people were in grave condition.

"It was so unorganized. Our evacuation drill was scheduled for 5 p.m." Saturday, said Melissa Goduti, 28, of Wallingford, Conn., who had departed on the cruise Friday. "We had joked, 'What if something had happened today?' "

Under U.S. Coast Guard rules and the Safety of Life at Sea regulations issued by the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency that governs passenger shipping, cruise ships must conduct a safety drill within 24 hours of sailing. It must include instructions on the use of life jackets and how and where to gather in an emergency. But passengers are not required to attend, and cruise lines vary in how quickly they have drills and how stringently they enforce passenger participation.

'A recipe for chaos'

U.S.-based lines conduct lifeboat drills before departure from port. Cruise expert and guidebook author Fran Golden said that although "cruise lines make a good effort to make people pay attention during drills, many don't."

Golden said another potential problem on ships like the Costa Concordia, which draw passengers from many countries, is that announcements are made in multiple languages, which "can be a bit of a recipe for chaos."

Death at sea

"Cruise lines for years have been saying the (sinking of the) Titanic could never happen again because of all the safety procedures put in place," Golden said. "It seems pretty clear there was a 'perfect storm' of things that went wrong here."

Malcolm Latarche, editor of global shipping magazine IHS Fairplay Solutions, said it's not clear whether a possible electrical malfunction coincided with striking the rock or perhaps contributed to it by disabling navigational equipment. He notes two other cruise ships had electrical problems in recent years.

Carnival's Splendor had a power failure off the coast of Mexico after an engine fire in November 2010. The Queen Mary II had a blackout after an explosion in its electrical switchboard room as the ship approached Barcelona in September 2010.

"This ship clearly had a power blackout," Latarche said of the Concordia. "Whether that's a result of damage from hitting the rock or something else is difficult to say at this moment. It might have been just coincidental."

Latarche said it's unusual for cruise ships to run aground because of sailing too close to shore.

"They tend to go from port to port, and the ship itself is the resort these days, rather than the old type of cruise where you used to visit exotic locations and shore excursions were what it was all about," he said. "There is always a temptation in going past something that is interesting to sail as close as possible to it. But I don't really see anything - I don't know anything particularly interesting about this small island. It would be a few lights on a darkened hillside."

He said the black box recovered from the ship will have information from its global positioning system (GPS) and automatic identification system (AIS), details on the ship's speed and wind direction and voice recordings between the bridge and engine rooms. "It will be very helpful," Latarche said. "The VDR on a ship takes in information from various sources. I suppose at the point of impact, there will be a whole lot of Italian curses being recorded."

Latarche hasn't followed an Italian investigation of a cruise-ship accident like this. He said other countries will typically issue warnings to the industry quickly if problems are revealed.

"They will put out safety bulletins for the industry so that action could be taken to avoid something similar," Latarche said.

Evacuees took refuge in schools, hotels and a church on Giglio. At Mass on Sunday morning, altar boys and girls brought up to the altar a life vest, a rope, a rescue helmet, a plastic tarp and some bread. Don Lorenzo, the parish priest, told the faithful that he wanted to make this admittedly "different" offering to God as a memory of what had transpired.

The Concordia had a previous accident in Italian waters. In 2008, when strong winds buffeted Palermo, the cruise ship banged against the Sicilian port's dock and was damaged, but no one was injured. In February 2010, another Costa ship, the Europa, hit a pier in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, killing three crewmembers.

In the past, Costa captains have occasionally steered the Concordia near Giglio and sounded the siren in a special salute to entertain tourists on the island, said Italo Arienti, 54, a sailor who has worked on the Maregiglio ferry between Giglio and the mainland for more than a decade. Such a nautical "fly-by" was staged last August, prompting the town's mayor to send a note of thanks to the commander for the tourist treat, local news portal GiglioNews.it reported.

Arienti and other residents said that even then, the cruise ship always stayed far offshore, well beyond the reach of the reefs.

Effects on industry

Though Costa draws few American passengers, the fact it's a modern vessel could affect cruise sales on this side of the Atlantic temporarily, said Mike Driscoll, editor of the industry publication Cruise Week.

"From what travel agents are telling me, that horrifying image (of the massive ship on its side) is going to turn the cruise industry on its side, too," Driscoll said.

"It would be absolutey Pollyanna-ish to suggest that some percentage of would-be passengers won't go elsewhere for vacation. This question is, how many?" said Charlie Funk, owner of Just Cruisin' Plus in Brentwood, Tenn.

Ross Klein, a sociology professor at Canada's Memorial University who has written two books on the cruise industry, said the accident shouldn't dampen sales in the long term.

"I think this will likely prove to be one of the worst disasters for many years," Klein said. But "while this might have an impact on cruise bookings in the very near term, I think most cruise passengers accept that there is a small risk on a cruise, and they will look past this event."

Klein did anticipate a "huge economic hit" on Costa's parent, Carnival, in lost revenue, the loss of the ship and compensation for passengers and crew. He notes there can be myriad environmental problems, not just from fuel leaks, but hazardous chemicals and other pollutants in the electronics.

"It has to be a real nightmare for the company," Klein said. "The scale of issues and concerns is difficult to fathom."

Italian ship disaster: Death toll climbs to 11

Capt. Francesco Schettino fled before all passengers were off

Italian ship disaster: Death toll climbs to 11

by Nicole Winfield - Jan. 17, 2012 07:41 AM

AP

ROME -- Five more bodies were found Tuesday from a crippled cruise ship, and a shocking audio emerged in which the ship's captain was heard making excuses as an Italian coast guard officer repeatedly ordered him to return and oversee his ship's chaotic evacuation.

Prosecutors have accused Capt. Francesco Schettino of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his ship before all passengers were evacuated for the grounding of the Costa Concordia on Friday night.

The Italian news agency ANSA reported that another five bodies were located Tuesday, raising the confirmed death toll to 11. Before the latest find, 29 people had been unaccounted for.

The Costa Concordia was carrying more than 4,200 people when it hit a reef off the Tuscan island of Giglio when Schettino made an unauthorized deviation from the cruise ship's programmed course.

Schettino has insisted he stayed aboard until the ship was evacuated, but the recording of his conversation with Italian Coast Guard Capt. Gregorio De Falco indicates he fled before all passengers were off -- and then resisted De Falco's repeated orders to return.

"You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are. Is that clear?" De Falco shouted in the audio tape.

Schettino resisted, saying the ship was tipping and that it was dark. At the time, he was in a lifeboat and said he was coordinating the rescue from there.

De Falco shouted back: "And so what? You want go home, Schettino? It is dark and you want to go home? Get on that prow of the boat using the pilot ladder and tell me what can be done, how many people there are and what their needs are. Now!"

"You go aboard. It is an order. Don't make any more excuses. You have declared the abandoning of the ship, now I am in charge," De Falco shouted.

Schettino was finally heard agreeing to reboard. It is unclear whether he did.