2012年2月7日星期二

Cruise Ship Wreck: Five More Bodies Found

Divers searching the capsized cruise ship found five more bodies today, bringing to 11 the death toll in the catastrophe off Italy's Tuscan coast.

The victims were found at the stern of the ship under water after search-and-rescue divers blasted holes in the hull of the ship to access the lower decks.

Before the bodies were discovered authorities had said that 29 people were missing, including Jerry and Barbara Heil of Minnesota. Also among the missing was a 5-year-old girl. The victims recovered today were not immediately identified.

Operations are now in motion to retrieve a second black-box recorder that has been located in the wreckage, Warrant Petty Officer Massimo Macaroni of the Italian Coast Guard told ABC News. The device, along with another recorder that has been found, will be analyzed by prosecutors to determined what happened during the disaster.

While divers searched the ship, the Costa Concordia's captain Francesco Schettino was in an Italian courtroom which is deciding whether to file criminal charges against him for reckless control of the ship, abandoning his ship and the death of his passengers.

PHOTOS: Inside the Costa Concordia Cruise Ship Tragedy

In court officials played a tape in which a port official could be heard angrily and repeatedly ordering Schettino to return to his ship to supervise the evacuation of passengers. Schettino can be heard making excuses. It's not certain that he ever returned to his ship.

The court later decided to release Schettino from jail, but put him under house arrest.

Today's grim discovery came four days after the vessel ran aground and searchers were keeping a wary eye on the weather as waves threaten the stability of the ship. It moved slightly on Monday and another 3.5 inches today.

The rescue divers say they can hear the screech of steel every time the 114,000-ton vessel shifts around them.

Rescue efforts had been halted for about three hours Monday because the huge vessel sits on a 120-foot ledge and had shifted slightly as the water got rough. Officials feared the ship could be pushed off the ledge into water that is 224 feet deep.

PHOTOS: Cruise Ship Runs Aground Off Italy

The luxury cruise ship was carrying more than 4,000 passengers and crew when it struck rocks Friday evening near Giglio, off the coast of Tuscany. The Costa line says Schettino was wrong to steer the ship so close to the island.

Genoa-based Costa Cruises, which operates more than a dozen Italian-flagged ships, is controlled by Carnival Corp. of Miami.

Adding pressure is the fear of an ecological impact, as concerns grow that the 500,000 gallons of fuel on the ship could seep into the ocean. Rescue boats are deploying boom -- a temporary floating barrier used to contain a spill -- around the vessel.

Facebook Post: 'Ship Will Pass Very Close'

New indications that the captain of the ship might have veered four miles off course on purpose have come to light as the sister of a waiter on board reportedly posted on Facebook that the ship would soon be moving toward the island.

"In a short period of time the Concordia ship will pass very close -- a big greeting to my brother who finally gets to have a holiday," the Facebook post read.

Italy's La Repubblica newspaper reports that Schettino was heard saying after the last phone call on deck with the port authorities: "My career ends here. They will fire me."

At a news conference Monday, Costa Cruises chief executive officer Pier Luigi Foschi said Schettino had made an unapproved, unauthorized maneuver to change the ship's programmed course.

"We believe it has been a human error here -- the captain did not follow the authorized route, which is used by Costa ships very frequently," Foschi said, "probably more than 100 times a year we travel this route.

"The company will be close to the captain and will provide him with all the necessary assistance, but we need to acknowledge the facts and we cannot deny human error," Foschi told a news conference in Genoa. "He wanted to show the ship, to [go] nearby this island of Giglio, so he decided to change the course of the ship to go closer to the island."

Experts are still analyzing the ship's first black box, which has already revealed a one-hour lag between the time of the impact on the rocks at 9:45 p.m. local time Friday and the ship's alarm call to the coast guard at about 10:43 p.m. Investigators suspect Schettino tried to maneuver the ship before alerting the coast guard, Ansa reported.

Infrared video of the scene aboard the ship as it began to capsize shows people lined up like ants, trying to escape Friday night by climbing down a rope ladder to rescue boats below.

"We were not allowed to deploy any more life boats because the previous one had got stuck to the side of the ship. And it was chaos, because of glass, everything was everywhere," survivor James Thomas told ABC News.

Newly released videos show passengers seated in lifeboats, trying to figure out who was responsible for the accident. One woman is heard saying, "Take pictures, take pictures, it is very important to discover whose fault it is…"

"It was every man for himself," Emily Lau, a passenger from Boston on board the Costa Concordia, said Monday on "Good Morning America."

"The main thing is no one knew how to help because they were never trained. That is the cruise ship's fault," Lau said.

"We had to improvise. There was no instruction," Benji Smith, Lau's husband, told "GMA." "No one was telling us what to do."

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