Cruise Ships Anchored Off Italian Coast Irking Locals: Fortune Report

Table Of Content

• More than 60 people drown after a migrant vessel capsizes off Libya, U.N. says
• Key dates in Costa Concordia shipwreck, trial and cleanup
• ‘An eyesore’: An armada of ghostly cruise ships is clogging the Italian Riviera, and locals are fed up
• The Costa Concordia Disaster: How Human Error Made It Worse
• Children of Flint water crisis make change as young environmental and health activists
• Haitians scramble to survive, seeking food, water and safety as gang violence chokes the capital
• Rock And A Hard Place: What To Do With Concordia

The dinner plates that flew off the tables when the rocks first gashed the hull. The final mad scramble to evacuate the listing liner and then the extraordinary generosity of Giglio islanders who offered shoes, sweatshirts and shelter until the sun rose and passengers were ferried to the mainland. Few of the 500-odd residents of the fishermen’s village will ever forget the freezing night of Jan. 13, 2012, when the Costa Concordia shipwrecked, killing 32 people and upending life on the island for years.

More than 60 people drown after a migrant vessel capsizes off Libya, U.N. says

With Giglio Island lying in a protected marine area, environmental issues relating to the Concordia wreck were of particular concern. The vessel was on the edge of an underwater cliff, leading to worries that the ship might slip and break apart, causing an oil spill. To lessen any potential damage, oil booms were placed around the wreckage, and in February 2012 salvage workers began removing more than 2,000 tons of fuel; the undertaking was completed the following month. Schettino was convicted of multiple manslaughter as well as abandoning ship after leaving before all the passengers had reached safety. Ortelli was later on hand when, in September 2013, the 115,000-ton, 1,000-foot long cruise ship was righted vertical off its seabed graveyard in an extraordinary feat of engineering. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, cruise ships brought millions of tourists into Venice, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, every year.

Key dates in Costa Concordia shipwreck, trial and cleanup

Captain Francesco Schettino has been arrested on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship. Gathered here are images of the Costa Concordia, as efforts are still underway to find the fourteen passengers that remain missing. For Concordia survivor Georgia Ananias, the COVID-19 infections are just the latest evidence that passenger safety still isn’t a top priority for the cruise ship industry. Passengers aboard the Concordia were largely left on their own to find life jackets and a functioning lifeboat after the captain steered the ship close too shore in a stunt.

‘An eyesore’: An armada of ghostly cruise ships is clogging the Italian Riviera, and locals are fed up

The crash tore a massive gash in its hull and the ship veered sharply as the water poured in, eventually keeling over and sparking a panicky evacuation. Sloane says the priority is to remove the ship in one piece in order to minimize impact on the environment. Weather permitting, the Costa Concordia should be refloated and towed to a mainland port by early next year. The shipwreck has altered the local economy; Mayor Ortelli says tourism income has dropped by 50 percent. Traditional nature lovers who came for a week or more have been replaced by day-trippers. Ananias and her family declined Costa’s initial $14,500 compensation offered to each passenger and sued Costa, a unit of US-based Carnival Corp., to try to cover the cost of their medical bills and therapy for the post-traumatic stress they have suffered.

Search for missing people

The Concordia was supposed to take passengers on a seven-day Italian cruise from Civitavecchia to Savona. But when it deviated from its planned path to sail closer to the island of Giglio, the ship struck a reef known as the Scole Rocks. The impact damaged the ship, allowing water to seep in and putting the 4,229 people on board in danger.

Ten years on, Costa Concordia shipwreck still haunts survivors, islanders - Reuters

Ten years on, Costa Concordia shipwreck still haunts survivors, islanders.

Posted: Thu, 13 Jan 2022 08:00:00 GMT [source]

The Costa Concordia is two-and-a-half football fields long, says Nick Sloane, the senior salvage master for the project. "And we're dealing with 60,000 tons of weight, on rocks right on an exposed parts of island." "And a ship with more than 4,000 people on board cannot be put under the command of such an amateur." It was the same church that sheltered many of the 4,200 passengers and crew members of the Costa Concordia on a cold night in January. Prosecutors blamed a delayed evacuation order and conflicting instructions given by crew for the chaos that ensued as passengers scrambled to get off the ship.

Children of Flint water crisis make change as young environmental and health activists

"I imagine it like a nail stuck to the wall that marks that date, as a before and after," he said, recounting how he joined the rescue effort that night, helping pull ashore the dazed, injured and freezing passengers from lifeboats. It will also honour the 4,200 survivors and the residents of Giglio who took in passengers and crew, offering clothes and shelter until passengers could return to the mainland. Through the confusion, the captain somehow made it into a lifeboat before everyone else had made it off. A coast guard member angrily told him on the phone to “Get back on board, damn it! “Every one of us here has a tragic memory from then,” said Mario Pellegrini, 59, who was deputy mayor in 2012 and was the first civilian to climb onto the cruise ship after it struck the rocks near the lighthouses at the port entrance. The lifeboats wouldn't drop down because the ship was tilted on its side, leaving hundreds of passengers stranded on the side of the ship for hours in the cold.

Haitians scramble to survive, seeking food, water and safety as gang violence chokes the capital

Costa Cruises offered compensation to passengers (to a limit of €11,000 per person) to pay for all damages, including the value of the cruise; one third of the survivors took the offer. Dozens of cruise ships, out of commission during the pandemic that brought tourism and demand for trips on the massive liners to a halt, have been docked off Italy's coasts for a year and a half. In a normal year, according to Lorenzo, cruise ships would serve 13 million tourists annually in Italy. Media reports say that despite a cautious relaunch this year, only around one in five commercial cruise ships is being used, and those that are in use are operating far below capacity. But cruise lines suffered over-sized impacts because of pandemic-related risks connected to cruise ships’ confined spaces, frequent exposure to the same people, and the difficulty of isolating potentially infected individuals.

Rock And A Hard Place: What To Do With Concordia

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control last month warned people across-the-board not to go on cruises, regardless of their vaccination status, because of the risks of infection. The ship's captain Francesco Schettino is on trial for manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all the passengers had been evacuated - even though he has claimed that he fell into a lifeboat. NBC News correspondent Kelly Cobiella caught up with a group of survivors on TODAY Wednesday, a decade after they escaped a maritime disaster that claimed the lives of 32 people. The Italian cruise ship ran aground off the tiny Italian island of Giglio after striking an underground rock and capsizing. Costa Concordia was declared a "constructive total loss" by the cruise line's insurer, and her salvage was "one of the biggest maritime salvage operations". On 16 September 2013, the parbuckle salvage of the ship began, and by the early hours of 17 September, the ship was set upright on her underwater cradle.

In July 2014, the ship was refloated using sponsons (flotation tanks) welded to her sides, and was towed 320 kilometres (200 mi) to her home port of Genoa for scrapping, which was completed in July 2017. And three giant Costa cruise ships are anchored near La Spezia, "motors running, lights on, and with small crews aboard," Fortune reporter Eric J. Lyman wrote. Legambiente, an Italian environmental lobby group, estimates that around 100 cruise ships of various sizes are parked in or near Italian ports. According to Italian media reports, they include MSC Cruise ships near Civitavecchia, Rome’s main port, the Adriatic port city of Trieste, the Sicilian ports of Palermo and Syracuse, and Venice. Costa, owner of the three ships anchored off the Gulf of Poets, reportedly has other ships parked outside nearby Genoa, at Civitavecchia, and Naples. Ships from smaller cruise companies have reportedly been spotted parked near tourist destinations including Brindisi, Catania, and Livorno.

More than 20 killed after Italian tourist bus crashes off Venice overpass - Al Jazeera English

More than 20 killed after Italian tourist bus crashes off Venice overpass.

Posted: Wed, 04 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

But the temporary decision prevents cruise ships from even approaching the iconic St. Mark's Square. A vice president of Legambiente Liguria told Fortune the organization is considering forming a petition to ask the Italian government to prevent cruise ship operators from parking their ships near Italy's most scenic locations. Six months after one of the biggest passenger shipwrecks in recent history, relatives of the dead attended a memorial service Friday near the site of the disaster. Italy will mark the 10th anniversary of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster on Thursday with a daylong commemoration. Thirty-two people died when the ship slammed into a reef and capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio.

But after eight years in the US and then Italian court system, they lost their case. GIGLIO PORTO, Italy — The curvy granite rocks of the Tuscan island of Giglio lay bare in the winter sun, no longer hidden by the ominous, stricken cruise liner that ran aground in the turquoise waters of this marine sanctuary ten years ago. A decade after that harrowing night, the survivors are grateful to have made it out alive. None of the survivors who spoke with Cobiella have been on a cruise since that day. The calamity caused changes in the cruise industry like carrying more lifejackets and holding emergency drills before leaving port. Ananias and her family declined Costa’s initial $14,500 compensation offered to each passenger and sued Costa, a unit of U.S.-based Carnival Corp., to try to cover the cost of their medical bills and therapy for the post-traumatic stress they have suffered.

In 2019, the cruise ship MSC Opera collided with a tourist boat on the Giudecca Canal, one of Venice's main waterways, reigniting debate on whether large vessels should be allowed in Venice’s canals. Arnold Donald, chief executive of international cruiseline company Carnival, told Fox Business in June that the company has "far more demand than we have ships available to supply right now." Dubbed Italy's "most hated man" by the Italian media after the disaster, he found himself in hot water again on Tuesday after photographs emerged of him partying on the island of Ischia while the final preparations were being made to tow away the wreck. Lazaro joined fellow survivors in throwing flowers into the sea at the shipwreck site in a solemn ceremony on Tuesday. Islanders can't wait to see the ship's removal, but it's an enormous salvage operation.

In a first step to prevent pollution of the shore and assist in a refloat the ship, its oil and fuel tanks were emptied. Locals are unhappy about unsightly liners marring the seaside views, making constant sound, and the potential for their negative environmental impact on the surrounding towns, according to a Fortune report published Monday. Precision sensors attached to the sides of the ship will monitor for possible cracks in the crippled hull, while underwater cameras will watch for debris washing out of the vessel amid fears toxic waste could spill into the sea. There are going to be substantial risks before the Costa Concordia is gone for good, however.