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January 15th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
“Suddenly there was an enormous bang. It was like an earthquake – everything
fell on the floor,” recalled Miss Zhou. “The lights went out – there was a
blackout.”
At 9.30pm in Milano, one of the ship’s five restaurants, Christine Hammer, 65,
from Bonn, was at the second dinner sitting.
“Suddenly we heard a crash. Glasses and plates fell down and we went out of
the dining room and we were told it wasn’t anything dangerous,” she said.
Luciano Castro, another passenger at the second sitting, said: “We were having
supper when the lights suddenly went out. We heard a boom and a groaning
noise and all the cutlery fell to the floor.”
Alan and Laurie Willits, a Canadian couple celebrating their 30th wedding
anniversary, were watching the magic show when they felt a lurch as if from
a “severe steering manoeuvre” followed by a “loud scraping sound along the
side of the ship”.
“As soon as we all heard the noise, the magician was off – he didn’t hang
around,” said Mrs Willits, 52.
As the magician fled, the rest of his act was stuck on stage.
Rosalyn Rincon, 30, from Blackpool, was inside a box during the magic show
when, she said, “I realised that everything stopped. The music stopped.”
Everything on the stage fell on top of her and other people in the act. “There
was no signal as to what was going on until about 30 minutes into it,” she
said.
Her boyfriend, an engineer officer on the vessel, told her that there was a
blackout and the ship crashed into something.
“They told us there was a fire,” she said.
Then another blackout occurred, and the ship went into darkness, she said. She
put on her life vest in her cabin and about 15 minutes later, “the captain
of the ship told us it was an electrical problem,” she added. “We ran to our
cabin and grabbed what we could,” said Mrs Willits.
“There was very sketchy information, and they just said there was a generator
problem. An alarm sounded but we didn’t know that it meant that water was
coming into the ship.”
Reassured by a Tannoy announcement that it was “just a technical problem” and
that there was nothing to fear, passengers largely stayed calm at least for
those first 45 minutes.
It may not have helped, according to some witnesses, that many of the crew
were from Asia, and didn’t speak much Italian, English, French or German –
the main languages spoken by the ship’s passengers.
But there are suggestions that some crew members may have paid a terrible
price; their quarters were in the lower of the 13 passenger decks, where
divers are now searching.
In the fourth-deck restaurant, Fernando Tofanelli, a 38-year-old Italian
studying English in London, said: “I was sitting down to dinner at around
nine, when I suddenly heard a very loud noise and felt an enormous bang.
“At first I thought it was something mechanical with the engine, but after a
few seconds we felt the ship starting to lean over from one side to the
other. Plates and tables were flying all over the place and people were
falling over as the tilting got worse. People were shouting and screaming
and it was absolute chaos.
“At first the crew of the ship said it was nothing serious and they didn’t do
anything to begin emergency procedures.”
Nobody, it seems, expected a state-of-the-art, £350 million cruise ship to
encounter such a problem. Even with the ship listing – first one way and
then the other – not all the passengers realised at this stage just how
serious their predicament was.
But as the ship lurched, so the realisation of the seriousness of the
situation began to dawn, especially among the crew.
Amelia Leon, 22, the cabaret singer from Birmingham, was in her cabin; she had
been watching a DVD with her boyfriend.
“Suddenly the boat went on its side and we were like ‘this is a bit strange’,”
said Miss Leon, a veteran of cruise ships despite her youth.
“Because it wasn’t moving it was just tilting more to the side and suddenly
the TV went flying to the floor and the lights went out and then I started
to really panic. I was like ‘Oh my god, what’s going on?”
Miss Rincon talked of the moments immediately after the captain had sounded
the order to abandon ship: “Then panic set in. The life rafts weren’t
opening. We had to let the passengers go first.
“The ship was going down. The water was rising. And I just thought there was
only one thing to do – jump and swim – and there were mountains nearby that
we could get to.”
With the vessel listing severely she admits she was terrified.
“We were going higher and higher, and were in a vertical position. I was
holding on to the railing. All we could [hear] was noise and creaks. It was
very, very scary It was just chaos.”
Many passengers had to be carried to the lifeboats. Some had fainted and
others had injuries to their face or body.
Crew were left with a choice of jumping into the water and trying to swim
ashore or waiting for a lifeboat, which Miss Rincon eventually did after all
the passengers had left. “We were literally thrown into the boat,” she said.
Miss Zhou, who had taken a sleeping pill, suddenly realised what was
happening. “I looked out of the cabin and everyone was putting on life
jackets – but nobody had told us,” she said.
“We left straight away. I lost everything – my camera, computer, iPhone,
jewellery, money. I just grabbed our bags and ran.”
Out on the decks, panic and fear had inevitably spread. The announcement was
made to abandon ship, signalled by horns blaring amid the darkness; the mad
scramble had begun to get into lifeboats.
But by then – at about 10.30pm and an hour after the initial collision – vital
time had already been lost. The ship was listing badly; water was flooding
into the lower cabins and it was not easy to launch the lifeboats. Some
passengers jumped into the sea. At least one is thought to have died that
way, suffering a heart attack as he entered the cold water.
The evacuation was clearly easier on one side of the ship than the other. On
the side now tilted closest to the sea, the boats could be lowered fairly
easily. Some passengers and crew even jumped straight into the water and
swam to shore.
But on the side now raised up toward the sky, many lifeboats appeared to have
been rendered useless, unable to be lowered down into the water.
One witness described seeing a man in his 70s in a wheelchair struggling to
get into one of the lifeboats. Many others – because by now the ship was
leaning so steeply – could not be launched at all.
Women and children were supposed to go first, but fathers, desperate to be
with their families, ignored the order. This was very much every man for
himself.
Some passengers even fought with each other to get on to the boats.
“There was a lot of panic, screams, children crying,” said Giuseppe D’Avino, a
pastry chef from Modena. “Some passengers came to blows as they tried to get
in the lifeboats.”
Fabio Costa, a crewmate, who tried to bring order to the chaos, said: “We were
giving priority to kids and women and trying to leave the men until last,
but they were not accepting it because it was their families.
“So that is why there was a huge confusion. We were just trying to stop people
getting stepped on.”
As the vast ship listed, the Ananias family from Los Angeles were on their
hands and knees, crawling along stairways and near-vertical hallways to get
to the top deck.
“Have you seen Titanic? That’s exactly what it was,” said Valerie Ananias, 31,
a schoolteacher who was travelling with her sister and parents.
“We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life
vest strobe flashing,” said her mother Georgia,
“We could hear plates and dishes crashing, people slamming against walls.”
Tears welling up, she told how an Argentine couple handed their three-year-old
daughter to her, unable to keep their balance as the ship lurched to the
side and the Ananias family found themselves standing on a wall.
“He said ‘Take my baby,’” Mrs Ananias said, covering her mouth in realisation
of the horror.
“I grabbed the baby. But then I was being pushed down. I didn’t want the baby
to fall down the stairs. I gave the baby back. I couldn’t hold her. I
thought that was the end and I thought they should be with their baby.”
Her daughter Valerie whispered: “I wonder where they are?”
Mr Tofanelli recounted: “After about an hour the ship finally sounded several
blasts on the horn, and that was the signal to go to the lifeboats, but by
now people were pushing each other to get out of the way, and some were
leaping over the side into the sea.
“They didn’t have enough lifeboats for all the passengers because some
appeared to be underwater from the ship leaning over.
“Fortunately I was above the water line, but I could see it climbing higher
and higher towards us. Some of the crew didn’t seem to even know how to
release the lifeboats or start the lifeboat engines once they were down on
the water. The crewman in charge of our lifeboat was absolutely ashen-faced,
he just didn’t know what to do.” Some of the lifeboats could only be
launched by cutting through cables or smashing the fixings with a hammer.
“It took hours for people to get off the ship,” said Mr Costa. “It was easier
for people to jump in the sea because we were on the same level as the water
so they just started to swim.”
Agata Martisi, 40, and her husband Falici, 43, who had been celebrating their
22nd wedding anniversary, were left dangling in a lifeboat because the cable
had become snagged.
“It was terrifying,” said Mrs Martisi. “One of the cables of our lifeboat
snagged and we were stuck there for 10 minutes before they managed to lower
it.
“The boat made it to a nearby island where the local priest opened up the
church for us and gave us all blankets to keep warm.
“It was absolutely traumatic. As the lifeboat was leaving the ship, we could
see it leaning right over on its right-hand side. We can’t have been very
far from the coast when it began because we could see the lights quite
nearby.
“Thank God I left my daughters at home. One of them is only seven. We’ve
managed to speak to them and tell them we’re all right. There was no help or
apparent co-ordination from the crew. We felt as if we’d been abandoned.”
The island, with a population of just 700, was soon overwhelmed.
Jim Yates, 64, a deputy sheriff from Louisiana, who was accompanied by his
wife, Margaret, said: “One boat fell into the water after a cable that had
got stuck was cut with a hatchet. It was panic. People were jumping into
lifeboats even when they were full.
“It didn’t seem to be a case of passengers first, the crew were just taking
care of themselves. Basically the Costa people were taking care of the Costa
people.”
The evacuation took hours. By 3am, there were still as many as 100 people on
board, largely crew.
Among them was Rose Metcalf, 24, from London, one of eight British women in
the dance troupe.
“My name is Rose, it’s Friday 13th and I’m one of the last survivors still
on-board the sinking cruise liner off the coast of Italy,” she wrote in what
she may have thought were her last words on Facebook, the social networking
site. “Pray for us to be rescued.”
Miss Metcalf was one of the last people left aboard the Costa Concordia; she
was eventually airlifted off by helicopter to a nearby naval base. Others
had made their way to shore by swimming. They were freezing, many wearing
evening wear, or nightclothes.
Miss Zhou, recovering from her ordeal, was yesterday as angry as she was
relieved. “The ship’s management lied to us,” she said, “A lot of passengers
are saying they want to sue. People died last night for nothing. If there
had been more warning … but there was no safety drill, no alarm, no knock on
the door.
“The 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is coming up and we were
talking about it before we came on the cruise.
“I told my sister ‘Don’t worry, this is the 21st century’. But the handling of
this accident was as bad as on the Titanic. I just want to get home to New
York.”
Reporting team: Nick Squires in Porto Santo Stefano, Harriet Alexander, David
Barrett, Josie Ensor, Claire Duffin and Melanie Mulhern in London
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