Italy marks ten years since the Costa Concordia ship 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.
The events will end with a candlelight vigil at 9:45pm when the ship hit the reef.
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.
"For us islanders, when we remember some event, we always refer to whether it was before or after the Concordia," said Matteo Coppa, who was 23 and fishing on the jetty when the darkened Concordia listed toward shore and then collapsed onto its side in the water.
"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.
The boat would stay off the coast of the island for another ten years until being removed in 2014.
The sad anniversary comes as the cruise industry, shut down in much of the world for months because of the COVID-19 pandemic, is once again in the spotlight because of virus outbreaks that threaten passenger safety.
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.
“I always said this will not define me, but you have no choice," Ananias said in an interview from her home in Los Angeles, Calif. “We all suffer from PTSD. We had a lot of guilt that we survived and 32 other people died.”
Prosecutors blamed a delayed evacuation order and
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