Domnica Cemortan told Romanian TV: “I was with (Capt. Francesco) Schettino. I saw that the captain lost his temper. There were two hours of hell.
YouTube Domnica Cemortan told Moldovan TV: “I was with (Capt. Francesco) Schettino. I saw that the captain lost his temper. There were two hours of hell.”
She told the Romanian newspaper Adevarul: “He saved many lives.”
Cemortan was on the cruise liner, where she had worked recently, as a birthday present, she told Moldovan TV.
The Italian newspaper Il Secolo XIX published photographs sent to them by two passengers of Cemortan dining on the bridge with the captain shortly before 9 p.m.
A steward is pouring her a glass of wine.
Il Secolo said she was not on a passenger list but officials with the Costa line later said she was registered and they had the paperwork to prove it.
Italian media described her as a potential witness. Moldovan TV described her as the “Moldovan heroine” of the Concordia.
“I stayed on deck until 23:50,” she told Adevarul, which is based in Bucharest where Cemortan now lives. After the crash, she said, she was working to help translate evacuation instructions for Russian passengers.
“The horror was that I did not see anything, I could just hear the ship creak and things begin to fall.”
A new audiotape of Schettino released Thursday shows a crew member telling the port authority at 10:12 p.m. last Friday that the problems onboard were only a “blackout.”
That was 30 minutes after the rocks sliced open the side of his 12-deck ship and the electricity went off.
The ship had begun to capsize at 9:50 p.m. and the abandon ship alarm sounded at 10:10 p.m.
“Good evening Costa Concordia, please, do you have problems on board?” an official asked the bridge.
An unidentified member of the crew replied: “We've had a blackout, we are checking the conditions on board.”
The official pressed him: “What kind of a problem? Is it just something with the generator? The police have received a phone call from the relatives of a sailor who said that during the dinner everything was falling on his head”
The crew member repeated that there had been a blackout.
A French steward who has returned home told France-2 television, “They asked us to make announcements to say that it was electrical problems and that our technicians were working on it and to not panic.”
READ MORE: Concordia cruise ship disaster
Thibault Francois said the captain took too long to react and that eventually his boss told him to start escorting passengers to lifeboats.
“No, there were no orders from the management,” he said.
Schettino has admitted to an Italian judge that he miscalculated when steering the ship close to the island of Giglio to perform a sail-past salute to people onshore, a manoeuvre he said he’d done “three or four” times previously.
“I’m a victim of my own kindness” he said to the judge, according to the newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Schettino is under house arrest at his home in Meta near Naples. He could face charges of manslaughter and of abandoning ship.
The 52-year-old captain, who has commanded Costa cruise ships since 2006, resisted repeated orders that night to return to the ship and direct the evacuation.
He has said he stumbled into the lifeboat when the 300-metre liner suddenly listed and was unable to get back to the liner.
Eleven people have been confirmed dead and 21 others are still missing.
Divers resumed the search for the missing Thursday on an evacuation route at the fourth level of the ship, about 18 metres below the surface, where five bodies were found earlier this week.
A sudden lurch by the ship, which is wedged onto a rock ledge near deeper water, halted the search on Wednesday and also postponed efforts to siphon off 1.9 million litres of fuel before it fouls a marine sanctuary nearby.
Compounding the efforts were an imminent storm.
“We are very concerned” about the weather, minister Corrado Clini told Mediaset television.
“If the tanks were to break, the fuel would block the sunlight from getting to the bottom of the sea, making a kind of film, and that would cause the death of the marine system in the area.”
Violinist saved children before dying in Concordia cruise ship disaster
Sandor Feher, 38, disappeared after he went back to his cabin to get his prized violin, pianist Jozsef Balog has told authorities.
YOUTUBE Sandor Feher, 38, disappeared after he went back to his cabin to get his prized violin, pianist Jozsef Balog has told authorities.
His body was found inside the wreck and identified by his mother who travelled to Italy, according to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry.
Feher was working on the cruise ship just a month after posting a video on YouTube asking for a job and talking about his passion for teaching children the violin.
He came from a musical family, he said in the video: both his father and grandfather played the violin. Feher had started playing the violin when he was 6.
For the family of Russel Rebello, a 33-year-old cook from Mumbai, the agony of waiting goes on. Rebello’s brother has arrived on the island of Giglio in the shadow of the shattered liner, to hope for word of Russel, various news reports said.
Divers resumed searching for the 21 missing Thursday after the Concordia, carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew, slammed into a reef near the Italian island of Giglio on Friday, after its captain Francesco Schettino made an unauthorized manoeuvre.
READ MORE ON THE WEB: Dancer with Concordia captain as cruise ship hit rocks
“The entire area has been sealed and I have no access to reach the point where the search operation is going on at the moment,” Kevin Rebello told the Indian newspaper Mid-Day. “There is no direct communication. All I can say is the situation on the ground is worse than is being shown.”
A friend of Russel’s who was on the ship with him said he spotted the cook in the crew area on deck three soon after the accident.
“Soon after the accident, I rushed to the lower deck and spotted Russel at the crew area on deck 3. He told me that the ship was badly damaged and water had gushed into his cabin,” Nikhil Mulati told Mid-Day.
“I helped him with warm clothes and shoes, and then he left for the upper deck. It was after that, as complete chaos overtook the ship that Russell went missing.”
On Thursday Italian officials confirmed that French passengers Jeanne Gannard, 70 and Pierre Gregoire, 69, were among the dead.
Of the 11 dead and 21 missing, Italian officials have only released 27 names so far. They are two Americans, 12 Germans, six Italians, four French, and one person each from Hungary, India and Peru.
Among the missing are an Italian father and his 5-year-old daughter. The girl's mother pleaded for rescue crews to keep working and asked passengers if they could remember when they last saw the pair.
READ MORE: Complete coverage of Concordia cruise ship disaster
“Don't stop, bring home my daughter. Get her out,” Susy Albertini, 28, said on Italian television Wednesday evening.
Crew members returning home have begun describing the chaos of that night.
Ship waiter Mukesh Kumar, 26, said in New Delhi Thursday, “The emergency alarm was sounded very late,” only after the ship “started tilting and water started seeping.”
“The ship shook for a while, and then the crockery started falling all over,” kitchen worker Kandari Surjan Singh said.
“People started panicking. Then the captain ordered that everything is under control and that it was a normal electric fault. . . so people calmed down after that.”
They were among 202 Indians working aboard the Costa Concordia. About a third of the 300 Filipino crew members have arrived back in Manila.
“It is supposed to be the captain the last one to stay on the ship if there is a collision like this and not the passengers and the crew members,” ship steward Andrew Bacud told the BBC.
Steward Gilda Gido arrived in Manila holding a bright red life vest.
“This life vest saved my life,” she told Reuters. “I was wearing it when they made the announcement to abandon ship. It became my companion. That's why I took it home as a souvenir.”
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