Here we have unverified first person accounts as published today in the The Australian. They make more sense than the sensational accounts published heretofor.
Costa Concordia captain Schettino's phone calls and inaction
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/costa-concordia-captain-schettinos-phone-calls-and-inaction/story-fnb64oi6-1226250612022
THE cruise ship's momentum was unstoppable. About 300m long and weighing more than 114,000 tonnes, the Costa Concordia was powering towards the island of Giglio off the Tuscan coast at 15.3 knots moments before disaster struck.
The rocky shore loomed ever larger as the vessel passed as close as the captain dared on a "fly-by" salute to the islanders.
By his own account, Captain Francesco Schettino had sailed that stretch of sea at least five times before. From his radar on the bridge, he judged that the nearest rocks were 200m away. He did not see the rock that ripped a hole in the cruise ship until it was right in front of him.
"I looked to the bow and saw waves breaking," he said in testimony leaked yesterday. "I saw the foam on the water. I realised the bow was heading for the rock and at that point I turned the helm completely to the right, stopping the engines and then I ordered full steam backwards.
"I avoided the impact with the bow but the ship didn't make it and hit [the rocks] at the height of the engine room."
It was 9.42pm on Friday, January 13, when the port side was gashed, lights went out and passengers felt a rumbling thump.
Schettino ordered his first navigation officer, Giovanni Iaccarino, to go below and inspect the engine room.
"What I saw was terrifying," Iaccarino testified to Italian officials. "Everything was flooded and I literally had water up to my throat ... The engine section, the generators and the electricity transmission were all flooded." He alerted the bridge by shouting down an internal telephone.
The showboating captain's response to this grave news is now the focus of a criminal investigation that will assess what he did to protect the 4223 people on board and whether he should have done more.
By the time Schettino gave the order to abandon ship at 10.58pm, it was listing severely and some people were trapped below decks. A 12th body was recovered yesterday and 20 people are still missing.
Investigators are focusing increasingly on what happened during the crucial hour between the alert from the engine room and the order to evacuate.
Why did it take so long? And could Schettino have saved more lives?
Schettino's Giglio sail-pasts had delighted holidaymakers and islanders alike. Had he grown blase? Was he trying too hard to impress some of his guests, including a young blonde Moldovan woman?
.......
At the start of the Concordia's fatal cruise, Schettino invited a number of passengers to a cocktail party. Among them were Marco Monda, his new wife Rosetta and other honeymooning couples.
Monda, a hairdresser, noticed that Domnica Cemortan, 25, a translator and former dancer, was at the captain's side. "Cemortan behaved as if she was the captain's consort. When the ship's photographer took pictures of us and the other couples with the captain, she posed next to him," Monda said.
Investigators suspect Cemortan may have been a guest of Schettino's, although she has vigorously denied having an affair with him.
On the Friday evening, Monda spotted Schettino with Cemortan again as they walked into an invitation-only restaurant on the 11th deck of the ship, accompanied by an unidentified brunette. Schettino had his arms around both women's waists, he said.
The trio walked up to a panoramic window and stood chatting and admiring the nearby Tuscan coast.
"The captain looked like a braggart - he was acting as if he was a millionaire with these two girls," said Monda, 47, from Asti in northern Italy. "He looked very relaxed and arrogant. He was showing off."
Another Italian passenger, Angelo Fabbri, saw Schettino and Cemortan sit opposite each other for a dinner of prawn cocktails and grilled swordfish in the Club Concordia restaurant. He claimed that at least a decanter of red wine had been drunk between them.
Interviewed by The Sunday Times yesterday in Chisinau, Moldova, Cemortan, whose father drowned on a seaside holiday in Ukraine 12 years ago, said she did not think the captain had been drinking.
"I've been made out to be a temptress. It's ridiculous. I was not dating the captain," she said.
In his testimony to the judge, which appeared in the Corriere della Sera newspaper yesterday, Schettino said he had gone to the bridge at 9.30pm for the sail-past with Cemortan and Antonello Tievoli, the head waiter, whose family live close to the Giglio shoreline. Cemortan had been directed to a nearby lounge.
There were five other officers on the bridge when he took command, he said. "I moved to manual and I set a route of 0.5 - that is, to get to half a mile from the coast."
Tievoli telephoned the retired Costa captain Palombo, who also lives on the island. "I talked to Palombo about the sail-past and the sea depth," Schettino said. "I told him I had [enough] water."
Shortly after the Concordia hit the rocks, the harbourmaster's office in the Tuscan port of Livorno radioed the ship to ask: "Everything OK?" The reply was: "Affirmative."
Someone among the crew told the coastguard that the liner had suffered a "small technical failure".
But Schettino's story is that he notified Costa Cruises, his company, as soon as he heard that the engine room had flooded.
He said in his testimony that he had made his first call at 10.05pm to Roberto Ferrarini, head of the Costa Cruises crisis unit, declaring: "I've made a blunder, I went too close to the Giglio and we hit something. I'm telling you everything, I'm telling you the truth."
Investigators want to know what was said during at least 10 phone calls in all between Schettino and Ferrarini. The company declined to say whether any of the calls had been recorded.
"I'm sure I told him in real time about everything," Schettino said, "and then I asked him for helicopters and tug-boats because I thought I could repair the damage."
Corriere della Sera has reported that Costa knew the situation was extremely serious because Palombo, the retired captain, had already called its general director, Gianni Onorato, at 9.50pm. Onorato, in turn, had immediately alerted the managing director, Pier Luigi Foschi.
Foschi, however, has denied knowing how critical the situation was, blaming the captain. "Schettino lied to us and to the crew," he said.
The captain insisted that his priority had been to manoeuvre the ship into shallow waters where an evacuation could be carried out more safely.
"I wanted the grecale [a northeast wind] to carry the ship towards the island," he said. "I ordered the anchors dropped because that would help me carry out the manoeuvre."
This account was supported by Cemortan, who said: "He tried to steer the boat towards the shore as it was beginning to tilt. He said to me he wanted to take the boat closer to the shore so the lifeboats would have a better chance of making it."
Schettino said he was concerned not to create panic. Passengers were initially told only that there was an "electrical problem" that required them to return to their cabins.
As the ship began to list and panic broke out anyway, the crew continued to insist that nothing serious was wrong. In a passenger video, a female crew member tells passengers in lifejackets: "We have made an announcement in the name of our captain, we kindly ask you to return to your cabin, or if you want to, to the lounge ... Everything is under control."
Such advice may have cost several passengers their lives, among them Williams Arlotti and his daughter Dayana, 5, still missing last night.
It was left to passengers and crew to take the initiative. Several ship's officers staged what has been described as a "mutiny" to begin the evacuation without waiting for the captain's order.
No sooner had the ship beached at 10.40pm than the purser, Manrico Giampietroni, 57, scrambled to help people into lifeboats. The order to abandon ship did not come until 18 minutes later.
At midnight, he telephoned his wife Laura to say he would be all right. "He said, 'Stay calm, I am getting passengers on to lifeboats, then I will take care of myself'," she told La Stampa newspaper.
In a recorded phone call to the coastguard at 11.40pm, Schettino said all but 200 or 300 passengers and crew had left and promised that he would be the last man on board.
Yet just over an hour later, at 12.46am, the captain told the furious coastguard he was on a lifeboat. His claim that he had "fallen" into it has been widely derided. Father Vittorio Dossi, the Giglio parish priest said Schettino left the boat with his mobile phone, laptop and other personal belongings - and that two of his senior officers were with him in the same lifeboat.
Schettino told the judge he had been unable to obey an order from Captain Gregorio De Falco of the Coast Guard to "get the f*** back on board" because the sailors in charge of the lifeboat would not take him.
Captain Roberto Bosio, 44, on holiday and on his way home after six months sailing the Serena, took command and spent the night helping passengers into lifeboats. "Only a good-for-nothing could have abandoned all those people on board," he said.
Giampietroni, the purser, made his way down to the third deck to check for passengers just after 2am but broke his leg falling into the restaurant as the ship tilted. He climbed on a table when water rushed in.
Asked what he thought about as he lay trapped, he replied: "The dark. The thing that terrified me was being alone in the dark." He shouted for help until he was rescued 36 hours later.
What should he have done once the severity of the incident was known? Captain Kirk Greiner, a maritime consultant and former US Coast Guard inspector, said it was sensible to beach the ship and understandable to delay evacuation until it was known whether or not it would sink.
But all passengers should have been advised to muster on deck before the evacuation was sounded.
"Passengers should never have been asked to go back to their cabins once they were in their lifejackets, but should have been on deck," he said. "Some of the bodies have been recovered from cabins or corridors and they should never have been there."
The Sunday Times
