All for a bow
Ten years ago, at 9:45 pm on January 13, 2012, a cruise turns into drama.
The Costa Concordia ship, which left Civitavecchia at 6:57 pm, at the height of the Argentario promontory abandons the route to Savona and heads towards the Island of Giglio.
Its commander, Francesco Schettino, wants to "bow" in front of the houses of Giglio Porto.
The whole world suddenly learns a term known hitherto with a completely different meaning.
By bow, since then, we also mean that maneuver used to bring the ship as close as possible to the coast, in order to greet those on the mainland.
It was not customary, but on certain occasions it was done.
And that night the occasion, according to what Captain Schettino testified, was to pay homage to the master on board Antonello Tievoli, of Gigliese origins, who had part of his family on the island.
At 21:37 Schettino arrives on the bridge and takes command, saying: “I take the conn”.
He gives directions to the helmsman on course and speed to keep.
Thus the ship continues with the bar at 290 degrees, 42 degrees to the North and 10 to the East and at a speed of 15, 16 knots.
The ship maintains this brisk pace down to the coast.
Schettino is on his cell phone.
He is telling his teacher live about him, the former commander Mario Terenzio Palombo, his reckless maneuver: “Now I'll give a volley of whistles and greet everyone”.
There is confusion on the bridge.
There are people who shouldn't be there: Antonello Tievoli, the Purser Manrico Giampedroni and the Moldovan hostess Domnica Cermortan.
At 9:44 pm the Costa Concordia is only 160 meters from the coast.
Schettino orders "all starboard rudder" (right) to get away from the rocks and, in quick succession, asks for further course adjustments to avoid skidding with too abrupt maneuvers.
He evidently realized that he had dared too much and that he was in danger.
However, the Indonesian helmsman Rusli Bin misunderstood the last indication and turned the rudder 20 degrees in the opposite direction.
It is the fatal error of a ship's conduct which is already extremely risky.
At 21:47:07 the left side of the Costa Concordia hits one of the outcropping rocks of “Le Scole”.
A roar is heard.
At the restaurant, where many passengers are still in the middle of dinner, plates and glasses fly.
The impact causes a breach of 70 meters in length.
A leak so large that it could contain, in abundance, the Tower of Pisa.
Madonna ch'aggio cumbinato ... "
(Francesco Schettino)
The chain of errors does not stop
In the seconds immediately following the impact, all the failure alarms are triggered on board, including those of the rudder pumps and engines.
Schettino will say a revealing phrase, captured by the recordings of the black box: “Madonna ch'aggio cumbinato…”.
The water enters the hole and blows up the electrical panels.
The first blackout occurs.
The commander orders to reduce the speed, but the controls are now out of order.
The first officer Giovanni Iaccarino communicates: “Engine compartment, flooded!
Flooded generators!
Electricity transmission panels flooded! ".
At 9:49 pm Schettino also inquires with the chief engineer Giuseppe Pilon what conditions the engine room is in and asks: "Is there water?"
The officer replies: “You feel like it.
There is water, you cannot go down ”.
And immediately after: "Then we are practically going to the bottom,
I did not understand?"
and Pilon: “Yes, there is water up to the workshop”.
She had penetrated to deck zero, a first level, relative to the ship's massive 14 decks.
But there was the whole mechanical part of the Costa Concordia.
The ship is unmanageable.
She continues her course with her own turn and the rudder locked at 35 degrees to the right.
She parades in front of the port and continues north, north-east, gradually losing speed.
Fifteen minutes have passed since the impact and everything would suggest that the situation is now clear and it is necessary to give the command to abandon ship.
But this was not the case.
Indeed, the order from the commander to the crew is peremptory: "Just say that there is a blackout."
Meanwhile, at 9:57 pm, Schettino called for the first time the head of the Costa Cruises crisis unit, Roberto Ferrarini.
He tells him what happened and reassures him that "buoyancy is not compromised".
At about 10:14 pm the Costa Concordia changes direction, rotating almost 180 degrees.
Instead of aiming for the open sea, it returns with the bow towards the coast, with the speed reduced to one knot.
It is the turning point for a tragedy that could have counted a much greater number of victims.
Schettino will try to argue that the ship was under his control, but the expert commission found another reconstruction more plausible.
It was the intervention of the north-east wind, the grecale, which blew on the side,
together with the sea currents and the internal movement of the mass of water that entered the ship to bring about the miracle and push the Costa Concordia towards land.
Not only.
At 22:24 the ship, which had hitherto been skidded on the port side, suddenly changes orientation and abruptly tilts to the starboard side, drifting towards the rocks of Punta Gabbianara.
Please keep calm, abandon the ship "
(Roberto Bosio, second-in-command Costa Concordia)
At 10:33:40 pm the emergency signal is issued, consisting of seven short and one long whistles.
Ten minutes later, instructions are given to put on life jackets.
Not everyone has them.
Many go out of their way to get on the lifeboats.
It is chaos.
Some slip into the sea and are sucked into the eddies of freezing water that form around the ship.
At 22:50 the operation of launching the lifeboats begins.
But many lifeboats are unusable because they overlook a side of the ship that is now too inclined.
It soon becomes clear that the more than four thousand people on board will not be able to be saved on the few boats still available.
The testimony given by the deputy commander of the Costa Concordia Ciro Ambrosio photographs those dramatic moments: "The passengers, seized by panic,
they threw themselves on the spears in a disorderly manner.
There were panic scenes of all kinds: some passengers beat up the crew members who prevented access to the boats ”.
At 10:51 pm Schettino orders the long-awaited “ship abandonment”, which will be officially announced at 10:54 pm by second-in-command Roberto Bosio: “Abandon ship, abandon ship.
Attention, your attention please, embark on the lifeboat ”- shouts from the speakers -“ Please keep calm, abandon the ship ”.
At 11:04 pm the Costa Concordia is definitively stationary, stranded, on the rocks of Punta Gabbianara, just 96 meters from the shore.
But, thanks to the darkness of the night, not everyone realizes that they have the mainland so close.
At midnight the Costa Concordia definitively bends over the rocks.
There are those who try to save themselves by diving into the sea on the right side, those who remain terrified on board, those who find a way to descend through an emergency rope ladder, a biscaggina, aft.
After half an hour, the Port Authority of Livorno contacts Captain Schettino on his cell phone.
He reports that he is aboard a lifeboat and follows rescue from the sea.
But he is evasive about the number of passengers still to be saved, somehow Schettino's answers do not convince those who are managing the rescue operations from the Livorno operations room, the frigate captain Gregorio De Falco.
At 1:46 there will be the dramatic phone call between De Falco and Schettino,
in which the commander of the Costa Concordia is ordered not to delay too much and to return on board to coordinate the rescue.
The communication ends with the famous phrase: "Get on board, fuck!".
The numbers of people to be saved speak for themselves: 4229 people, including 19 adults in need of assistance and 252 children, including 52 under the age of 3.
At 2:30 the patrol boat of the Guardia di Finanza reports that there are still 200 people on board.
Schettino has already been safely on the ground for about an hour.
The last castaway of the Costa Concordia is found by rescuers and disembarked at 5:27 in the morning.
There is still no awareness of the total number of victims and missing persons.
The last to be saved is the Purser Manrico Giampedroni, found with water lapping on his chest and a fractured leg, inside cabin 8303, 36 hours after the accident.
He remained on board until the end, in an attempt to rescue the people stranded on deck 3. The final toll of the tragedy on the Costa Concordia will be 32 victims and over 150 injured.
The protagonists
Getty / Massimo Sestini
Francesco Schettino - Gregorio de Falco - Domnica Cemortan
Three people, on that tragic night of 13 January 2012, rise to the role of undisputed protagonists of the story.
The first is the commander of the Costa Concordia Francesco Schettino, who is opposed by another commander, the frigate captain Gregorio De Falco of the Port Authority of Livorno.
And then she, the Moldovan stewardess who had gone up to the helm station, Domnica Cermortan.
The one on which she has burdened for several months, more wrongly than rightly, the suspicion of having been the cause of the accident.
Who were Francesco Schettino, Gregorio De Falco and Domnica Cermortan ten years after the disaster, how have they been told to us?
Francesco Schettino
Francesco Schettino had been with Costa Cruises since 2002 and held the role of captain since 2006. He therefore already had six years of experience behind him in managing large cruise ships.
Shortly after hitting the rock of Le Scole, he calls his wife on the phone and confides to her: "My career as a captain is over".
Immediately surrounded by the security cordon of the shipping company's lawyers, he will minimize his public statements.
When he comes out of prison on January 17, once the state of arrest is over, and reaches his home in Meta di Sorrento, he is forced to enter through a service entrance, to avoid the dozens of journalists waiting for him on the doorstep. .
He remains locked in there, under house arrest.
Marco Imarisio of Corriere della Sera reports a familiar background of those days of tension.
Schettino's daughter, Rossella, aged 15, "refuses to go to school, oppressed by the weight of that surname, which has become synonymous with shame".
Today, when she is 25, she defends her father and she considers it unfair that she was the only one to pay.
Through social media,
he fights to prove the alleged existence of other managers: "My father was left alone from the first moment on the bridge, where the entire bridge team was missing in his role".
The judge who leads the judging panel of the first instance trial will have a different opinion.
He recently told the newspaper La Nazione: “It was a difficult, exciting process.
And the sentence, also given the subsequent degrees of judgment, was perfect ”.
The former commander Francesco Schettino is now 61 years old, for over 4 and a half years he has been detained in the new complex of the Rebibbia prison following a 16-year sentence for multiple manslaughter, negligent shipwreck, multiple culpable injuries, abandonment of the ship, false communications .
In May 2022, he will have served a third of his sentence, and will therefore be able to request admission to alternative measures to prison.
From the pages of the Press, through his lawyer, Schettino explains that he is awaiting the sentence of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for the review of the trial.
He believes he was the victim of "a media trial even before a judicial one".
In prison, according to the chaplain, he seems to be a model inmate, kind and respectful of everyone.
He takes two university courses,
Massimo Sestini
Schettino on the Island of Giglio
Gregorio De Falco
, born in 1965, born in Naples and graduated in Law in Milan, began his career at the Naval Academy of Livorno.
After touring half of Italy, from Mazara del Vallo to Genoa, in 2005 he became head of the operational section of the Port Authority of Livorno.
At 1:46 am on the night of January 13, 2012, the phone call that made him famous throughout Italy and beyond takes place.
Two commanders clash, two sailors born in the same part of Italy, in Campania, but different in everything.
"Go aboard, fuck", this said during that excited conversation the captain of the frigate Gregorio De Falco to the fleeing commander Francesco Schettino.
The phone call, published by the journalist Simone Innocenti on the Corriere Fiorentino website, went around the world in a flash.
Everyone recognized themselves in De Falco and in that outburst of his, so human and far from formal language between equal degrees.
Many appreciated the steadfastness and courage with which he had faced those who seemed to be running away from their responsibilities.
That phone call was actually one of six communications they exchanged that night.
De Falco describes his reaction as follows: “I understood that he had minimized and delayed the declaration of a ship in danger.
The tragedy was born there, 45-50 precious minutes were lost.
In the last sentence, when I told him to go back on board, there was the certainty that someone could be saved, including Schettino in his role of command ”.
Today De Falco left the Navy for politics.
In 2018 he was elected to the ranks of the Five Star Movement, from which he then left.
He is currently a senator of the Italian Republic.
Domnica Cermortan
, born in 1987, Moldovan from Chisinau, blonde, very blonde indeed.
She was 25 years old in 2012, a past as a dancer, then a student at the University.
She had a three-year-old daughter, who however remained in her country of origin with her grandmother, to allow her to work on the Costa Concordia and, subsequently, to take a short vacation on board the ship.
She immediately made her suspicious that she had gone up to the bridge to witness the "bow".
Indeed, her first hypothesis is that that maneuver was intended to be a tribute to her towards her, a gallant gesture of her commander to make her admire the island and show her her talent, with that maneuver of dexterity.
After the accident, Domnica will admit the relationship with the commander, initially denied and, to the weekly Oggi, in an exclusive interview released on March 13, 2012, she declares:
“The story, if we want to call it that, only lasted a couple of weeks.
Lover seems like a big word to me.
I hid the relationship with Schettino to protect me, my private life and also that of the commander ”.
The two had met during the previous cruise, she had boarded on 9 December 2011 and then descended on 28. She had held the role of stewardess for Russian passengers: "When there are a certain number of passengers on board, all of the same nationality, the captain gathers them in a room on the ship and welcomes them with a welcome message.
There were several Russians, there were at least a hundred of them every cruise.
Schettino did not speak Russian and it was I who prepared the text for him to read in public.
It must be transcribed from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin one, taking into account the phonetics ”.
On January 13 Domnica had come aboard to take a vacation.
She had bought a regular ticket along with her other colleagues.
“At dinner I had a dessert with the captain, at the table there were other people coming and going.
In the end they invited me to go and see the island ”.
Her testimony partially absolves Schettino: “There were all the officers (on the bridge), I stayed on one side.
At one point an officer got the commander's order wrong.
He scolded him and repeated the order.
After a few minutes what happened happened ”.
His testimony partially absolves Schettino: “There were all the officers (on the bridge), I stayed on one side.
At one point an officer got the commander's order wrong.
He scolded him and repeated the order.
After a few minutes what happened happened ”.
His testimony partially absolves Schettino: “There were all the officers (on the bridge), I stayed on one side.
At one point an officer got the commander's order wrong.
He scolded him and repeated the order.
After a few minutes what happened happened ”.
After the accident, Domnica returned to Moldova.
About her Very little is known about her about her current life, except through some sporadic information filtered through what she posts on social media.
In 2016 she would have completed her university studies in Chisinau, then she would have thrown herself into politics, but without success, and finally to be a columnist for radio and TV.
In recent years you have started a blog, where you write about current affairs and promote social campaigns.
Her main business today would seem to be managing a foundation in her name that deals with violence against women.
The survivors' tale
Patrizia Perilli
, journalist from AdnKronos, was on board the cruise ship on the evening of 13 January 2012.
From the excitement of the journey to the moment of impact: the lights go out, the people screaming and running away towards the bridges, the dishes on the ground.
Images and sounds that Patrizia will never forget.
The enterprise
The Costa Concordia is the largest wreck ever attempted to recover.
Right from the start, that operation appears extremely risky, also due to the environmental impact it could have had if it went wrong.
We needed to put together the best resources and design without precedent to which we could look to imagine solutions.
A consortium was created between the Italian company Micoperi and the American Titan Salvage.
The operations began on May 29, 2012. The first problem to be solved was to avoid the leakage of all the poisonous and polluting sewage present on the ship.
Tons of fuel and then acids, soaps and disinfectants that risked ending up in the sea.
The Dutch company Smit Savage was commissioned to remove the fuel from the tanks and the operation was successful.
On 18 June 2012, the work to remove the wreck begins.
To monitor all the steps, an Observatory is set up by the government, which replaces the Technical Scientific Committee, and reports directly to the extraordinary Commissioner for the emergency Franco Gabrielli.
On 15 July, Titan-Micoperi's technicians, engineers and divers completed another delicate operation, that of working underwater to remove the part of the rock stuck in the hull.
We soon realize that it is urgent to stabilize the ship, so that it does not slide along the reef, due to the currents and the swell.
Tie rods are applied, kept in tension by hydraulic jacks monitored by sensors.
Then we proceed to anchor the ship to concrete blocks, positioned along the rocks on which the Concordia keel rested.
The seabed is 88 meters deep and, if the ship had reached it, it would have ended up completely submerged, compromising the entire recovery project.
In November 2012 that fear becomes concrete.
Nick Sloane, the head of operations, remembers those moments as follows: “The first sirocco storms caused the ship to collapse two meters deep.
I stayed up all nights looking out the window at the wreck in a storm.
I listened to all the alarms that sounded and indicated that it was moving, that it was collapsing.
I didn't think we would make it ”.
And, instead, the recovery of the ship is a story of success and, if you like, of redemption and pride.
Starting from the starting idea, simple and risky at the same time.
Massimo Sestini
Isola del Giglio (GR) aerial view of Costa Concordia 10-08-2013
Water and air
The project developed by the engineers of Micoperi and Titan Salvage consists of two phases.
The first is to create a counterweight such as to rotate the enormous body of the Concordia, that is the 112 thousand gross tons, without counting the additional ones of the furniture and the rest.
The ship should have rotated 65 degrees, but through a slow and controlled movement, which did not generate thrusts and counter thrusts.
In this regard, a submerged platform is created to anchor chains and tie rods to be hooked to the left side of the ship.
Also on that side, along the whole side of the Concordia, eleven large, empty metal caissons are mounted.
Those would become the counterweights.
The containers are gradually filled with water.
As the water enters the caissons, the weight on the left side of the ship increases.
The action of the tie rods does the rest.
This is how the miracle of rotation, in technical jargon “parbuckling”, of 65 degrees was possible.
Easy to say, but the operation left everyone in suspense for nineteen, interminable, hours.
The action begins at 9:06 am on September 16 and ends successfully at 4 am on September 17, 2013, freeing the five hundred people of twenty-six different nationalities who participated in that historic undertaking, never realized before, from the tension.
Nick Sloane recalls that the night before the parbuckling: "Nobody believed it would work: engineers,
other rescue companies and the same consulting engineering firm of Costa Cruises.
I thought maybe they were right and we were 'crazy', but then I went over all our calculations, added the elements in our favor and decided we had no choice.
However, it was necessary to try (from the Messenger of January 9, 2021) ".
The second operation is the reverse of the first.
If those caissons had previously served to increase the weight of the ship on one side, this time they had to serve to lighten it.
The water inside the caissons is pumped out with compressed air and the ship begins to float again.
Easy to say, but even this time there were many unknowns of the so-called “refloating”.
Meanwhile, more caissons had to be added on the left and right sides, up to a total of 15 per side.
In this operation, on February 1, 2014, Spanish diver Israel Franco Moreno, the 33rd victim of the Costa Concordia, was killed.
Having repaired the damage on the starboard side, which had been crushed for a long time in contact with the rocks, the definitive phase of removal would begin.
On 30 June 2014 the Council of Ministers announced that the demolition of the wreck will be carried out in the port of Genoa.
The last phase of this feat remained to be carried out: towing the Costa Concordia to the port of Genoa, 200 nautical miles away, or 370 kilometers.
The last trip
On 23 July 2014, under the eyes of all the televisions in the world, the last journey of the Costa Concordia begins.
The area affected by the trip is prohibited for navigation and flying.
The ship is towed by two ocean-going tugs, the Blizzard and the Resolve Earl, at an average speed of 2.5 miles per hour, which corresponds to 4 kilometers per hour and reaches the port of Genoa in just under four days.
The Costa Concordia enters the port area of Genoa-Prà at dawn on 27 July and is moored along the Foranea dam.
Here the first phase of dismantling takes place, with the removal of all the furnishings of the ship.
On 12 May 2015 she was transferred to the former Superbacino area of the port of Genoa for its definitive demolition.
What remains of the Costa Concordia
With the arrival of the Costa Concordia in Genoa, ownership of the wreck changes hands: from Costa Cruises to the Ship Recycling Consortium, an association of companies that sees Saipem at 51% and San Giorgio del Porto at 49%, to which an agreement will be added between Saipem and Feralpi Siderurgica Spa for the subsequent sale of scrap.
Of that giant of the seas, built in 2006 by Fincantieri of Sestri Ponente (GE), which included: 1502 cabins, 66 suites, a 1,900 square meter wellness area, a Grand Prix driving simulator, 4 salt pools, two of which with a self-propelled glass roof, a theater on three decks, 5 restaurants and 13 bars, a gambling house, a nightclub, a mega cinema screen, there would be nothing left.
If not a mass of steel and other metals to be sent for recycling.
The order for the dismantling and demolition of the wreck amounted to 100 million euros.
22 months of work, 1000 employees who participated, 53 companies involved.
50,000 tons of steel were dismantled, of which 80% was reused.
The convictions and reparations
The very first suspects are the commander Francesco Schettino and the officer on duty on the bridge that night, Ciro Ambrosio.
Both are arrested on charges of shipwreck, multiple manslaughter and abandonment of a ship in danger.
The investigation, in addition to identifying the responsibilities, had to ascertain why a distress call had not been sent, the famous "mayday", and for what other reason the route had been chosen, different from the one set to reach Savona and so close to the coast of 'Lily island.
In September 2012, the report on the black box was delivered.
It will be a turning point for the investigation.
For the first time, it is possible to hear the exact words spoken by Commander Schettino, the directions given to the helmsman during the “bow” maneuver and the communications exchanged on the bridge during all phases following the impact.
In the thousand pages and 7 DVDs in which the experts have transcribed everything that happened on board the Concordia, during the night of January 13, it will emerge clearly that Schettino had not fully realized the gravity of the situation and that, in bridge, some orders were marked by errors.
On 21 December 2012, the Grosseto Public Prosecutor's Office closed the investigation.
Twelve are the suspects, with different charges and nine, in the end, those sent for trial: the commander Francesco Schettino, the first mate Ciro Ambrosio, the helmsman Jacob Rusli Bin, the third mate Silvia Coronica, the Chief of the Costa Cruises Fleet Crisis Unit Roberto Ferrarini, Costa Concordia Executive Vice President Manfred Ursprunger, Company Fleet Superintendent Paolo Parodi, Second Deck Officer Simone Canessa, Purser Manrico Giampedroni.
To these will be added, on 31 January 2013, the president and CEO of Costa Cruises Pier Luigi Foschi.
In the preliminary hearing of the trial all the defendants made a request for a plea bargaining, to which the prosecutor gave its consent, except for the position of commander Francesco Schettino, who therefore remains the only accused.
On 9 July 2013, the ordinary trial begins before the college of the court presided over by judge Giovanni Puliatti.
It is celebrated at the Modern Theater of Grosseto, set up for the occasion as a courtroom, to be able to contain witnesses, journalists and the public, who flocked in large numbers.
The trial phase ended in January 2015, after the hearing of hundreds of witnesses.
The prosecutor asks for 26 years in prison for Schettino, who pleads innocent.
On 11 February 2015, the first instance sentence arrives.
Schettino is sentenced to 16 years of imprisonment, of which ten for culpable multiple homicide, five for negligent shipwreck and one for abandonment of the ship.
The commander and the naval company Costa Cruises are also jointly and severally condemned to pay compensation of 1.5 million euros for the Ministry of the Environment, 1 million euros for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, 500,000 euros for the ministries of Defense, Infrastructure, Interior and Civil Protection, 300 thousand euros for the Municipality of Giglio.
Numerous other compensation goes to the relatives of the victims, the injured and the castaways.
On 31 May 2016, the 16-year sentence was confirmed in second instance by the Florence Court of Appeal.
Provisions in favor of passengers amount on average to 15 thousand euros each, bringing the compensation awarded to each of the survivors to an overall figure between 40 and 65 thousand euros.
The 16-year criminal sentence for Francesco Schettino is definitively confirmed by the Court of Cassation on 12 May 2017.
Finally, on December 27, 2021, a new chapter of compensation in favor of survivors is added.
The first section of the Civil Court of Genoa condemns Costa Cruises to compensate the passenger Ernesto Carusotti for damage from post-traumatic stress, with 77 thousand euros plus legal costs.