Divers were forced to suspend their rescue efforts in the the half-submerged Costa Concordia on Wednesday because it had shifted on its rocky perch for the second time in three days. More Photos »
By GAIA PIANIGIANI and
Published: January 18, 2012
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GIGLIO, Italy — The saga of the stricken liner Costa Concordia took further twists Wednesday, with a warning from Italy’s environment minister that it could sink and news that the captain claimed he had slipped on deck and tumbled overboard, winding up in a lifeboat during the panicky passenger escape — not abandoned ship like a coward, as accused.
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GraphicWhere the Cruise Ship Crashed
PhotographsCruise Ship Runs Aground in Italy
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Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press
The Costa Concordia listed off the coast of Giglio island on Wednesday. More Photos »
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"I am wondering if the ship's captain was having trouble facing failure, not fear. Cold and darkness, a few feet from shore, would not be a problem for a man of the sea."TC, Ontario
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The captain’s account of the Costa Concordia’s final moments afloat, as it lurched to starboard with a rip in the hull, was reported by the newspaper La Repubblica as Italian frogmen suspended rescue efforts in the gurgling underbelly of the half-submerged vessel because it had shifted on its rocky perch for the second time in three days.
Conflicting information about the total number of missing among the 4,200 passengers and crew members added to the frustration five days after the shipwreck, which could become one of the costliest disasters in the cruise line industry.
The Italian authorities revised the number of missing on Wednesday to 26 people, including a retired American couple, and identified one of the five waterlogged bodies found on Tuesday as that of a 42-year-old Hungarian crew member. The official death toll remained at 11.
The instability of the $450 million vessel, coupled with forecasts of stormy winds for this island off the Tuscan coast, raised fears that the 950-foot-long hull could slide into deeper water. Those fears were reinforced later by Italy’s environment minister, Corrado Clini, as he addressed Parliament in Rome.
“The ship is leaning on the right-hand side, on a rocky bottom and next to an escarpment that goes deep down to 50-90 meters,” he said, and there was a “real risk that that coming sea storms could cause the ship to sink further.” The minister also said that structural damage to portions of the ship threatened “potentially dangerous consequences for the environment.”
The suspended rescue effort also delayed plans by marine salvage workers to begin extracting the ship’s half-million gallons of fuel and other potential pollutants.
A new explanation by Capt. Francesco Schettino, 51, for why he vacated the vessel after he smashed into the rocks last Friday night came as the Italian press pilloried him as negligent, sheepish and fearful. But his earlier account of hitting an uncharted obstruction received a credible boost. Lloyd’s List, a leading maritime publication, said on Wednesday that the ship had sailed close to the island last August, when it came within 230 meters of the coast — “slightly closer to the shore than where it subsequently hit rocks on Friday.”
Captain Schettino was quoted by La Repubblica as telling investigators that he had not planned to leave the ship as it tilted toward the water.
“The passengers were pouring onto the decks, taking the lifeboats by assault,” he said, according to the newspaper. “I didn’t even have a life jacket because I had given it to one of the passengers. I was trying to get people to get into the boats in an orderly fashion. Suddenly, since the ship was at a 60-to-70-degree angle, I tripped and I ended up in one of the boats. That’s how I found myself there.”
The drama has captivated Italy, offering at a time of political and economic uncertainty a national metaphor of hero and antihero: Captain Schettino, accused of leaving the ship prematurely with hundreds still aboard, and Capt. Gregorio Maria De Falco, a coast guard officer, who tried to cajole him via phone into returning and taking command of the evacuation. Leaked transcripts of their heated exchange has dominated the news coverage here, some of which has cast the final moments of the shipwreck as a clash of good and evil.
Referring to Captain De Falco, the headline of a front page editorial in Italy’s leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera, on Wednesday said, “Thanks, Captain.”
The behavior of the two captains, Aldo Grasso wrote in the newspaper, contrasted the “two souls of Italy” — one represented by a “cowardly fellow who flees his own responsibilities, both as a man and as an official” and the other as the one who tries to bring him back.
A sentence loosely translated into English as “Get back aboard! Damn it,” which Captain De Falco shouted at Captain Schettino, has already become a slogan emblazoned on T-shirts.
“It is more than a cry, full of sorrow, it’s a motivational hymn, a sign of renewed pride,” Mr. Grasso said in Corriere della Sera, while Captain Schettino’s insistence that it was too dark to rejoin the vessel was “the cry of a child,” according to the columnist Adriano Sofri in La Repubblica.
In an interview with a local newspaper here, Il Tirreno, Captain De Falco was quoted as saying: “I am not a hero or an iron man. My team and I just did our duty.”
On Wednesday, Filippo Marini, a coast guard spokesman, said that sensors aboard the vessel recorded slight movements just after first light, forcing divers to delay plans to blast three more holes in the hull to open up new access routes into the vessel. Divers looking for bodies or survivors say it is too risky to enter the hull if there is a chance that the ship will shift further.
“Stability of the ship is crucial to us,” said Antonino Pireddo, one of 40 divers with experience working in caves who have been searching the central part of the ship since Tuesday. “The floating furniture does not make our work easier.”
Captain Schettino is under house arrest. His lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, said in a statement that his client had saved “hundreds, if not thousands” of lives because he brought the ship close to shore after it hit a rock.
The owner of the vessel, Costa Cruises, has acknowledged that the cruise liner changed course once before, on Aug. 14, to sail close to Giglio, but had insisted that it was never less than 500 meters from the coastline, Lloyd’s List reported on Wednesday. But, citing its own tracking facilities, Lloyd’s List said the route last August “took the vessel far closer to Giglio than the 500 meters” and within 200 meters of the “point of collision.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 18, 2012
An earlier version of this article said incorrectly that divers had planned to blast five holes, rather than three, in the hull of the ship. It also misspelled the given name of the Coast Guard spokesman, Filippo Marini, as Fillipo.
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