Survivors and lifeguards will participate in the events to remember the 32 fatalities left by the sinking of the cruise liner on the island of Giglio
“Mom, tonight happened.” Antonello Tievoli, head of the dining room at the Costa Concordia restaurants, had warned with a message to his mother, Massimiliana Rossi, that that day, January 13, 2012, she was attentive to the window, because in front of her house, located at A few meters from the port of the island of Giglio, the gigantic cruise ship on which he was working was going to appear. The ship, which carried 4,229 people on board, planned to perform an ‘inchino’ (bow), which consisted of sailing with all the lights on and sounding its sirens about 150 meters from this small island, located in the Italian region from Tuscany. It was a dangerous way to greet its 800 inhabitants.
The maneuver ended in one of the most famous shipwrecks in navigation in recent decades when the cruise ship collided with some rocks, which caused it to end up partially sinking and 32 people died, including the Mallorcan tourist Guillermo Gual. The Spanish submariner Israel Franco would also die two years later in the preparatory work to tow the cruiser.
That disaster was the main culprit of the captain, Francesco Schettino, who would be sentenced to 16 years in prison as he was considered responsible for the controversial ‘reverence’ and for the chain of irresponsibility committed afterwards. It took him more than an hour to give the order to abandon the ship after the impact and fled in terror, leaving many passengers and crew members on board. His justification (“I slipped towards one of the rescue boats”) is not forgotten in Italy, nor is the discussion he had with the head of the port captain’s operations room, Commander Gregorio De Falco, who snapped at him: “Get back on board, damn it!” That phrase even ended up appearing stamped on T-shirts for sale in stores.
De Falco will be one of the protagonists of the ceremonies that will take place this Thursday on the island of Giglio to remember the shipwreck of the Costa Concordia and the lives that the disaster took. “We will embrace some survivors and relive those strong emotions together with the inhabitants of the Giglio. I hope we can learn from what happened, “said De Falco, who is now a senator. In his opinion, what happened a decade ago is “unrepeatable” due to the lack of skill and irresponsibility with which Schettino behaved. “Anyone could have landed in an hour or an hour and a half while the ship was still upright, but it was late and the relief operations lasted nine hours.”
From craving to terror
The first to arrive that night at the Costa Concordia to try to rescue its passengers and crew was Mario Pellegrini, then deputy mayor of Giglio. «I remember that the castaways, especially the children, cried, but were not able to speak. They were speechless, their eyes filled with tears. Nobody was able to scream, they felt the tragedy “, says Pellegrini in the book ‘The Night of Concord’, just published in Italy. «I looked for the officers but could not find them. There was a lot of confusion and I immediately started loading people onto the boats, ”he recalls. Then the ship began to tilt and went from anxiety to terror as the water began to enter the corridors. Pellegrini, who arrived at Costa Concordia at 11 p.m., remained on board until 6 a.m., when the firefighters arrived.
After the human tragedy, the technical challenge that involved refloating the ship and removing it to the port of Genoa began, where it was scrapped. The South African naval engineer Nick Sloane, responsible for that complicated operation, believes that there was something inexplicable in what happened to the Costa Concordia. “The disaster was 100% the result of human error, but something incredible happened. There was a kind of divine intervention that saved the ship, making it rest on the rocks and allowing thousands of people to be saved, “Sloane told the Rai.
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