Rescue crews working on the cruise ship that capsized off the coast of Italy are running out of time to find any possible survivors. NBC's Michelle Kosinski reports.
By msnbc.com news services
Updated at 12:55 p.m. ET
GIGLIO, Italy -- The cruise ship grounded off Tuscany shifted again on its rocky perch, forcing the suspension Friday of search and rescue operations for the 21 people still missing.
Firefighters' spokesman Luca Cari said rescue squads would be discussing the next step after the movement made conditions unsafe for divers already hampered by poor visibility, floating objects and underwater debris.
Seven days after the 114,500-ton ship ran aground and capsized off the Tuscan coast, hopes of finding anyone alive have all but disappeared and the cold waters around the ship have become rougher, with worse weather expected at the weekend.
"The ship is not in safe enough conditions for rescue operations to continue," Coast Guard spokesman Cmdr. Cosimo Nicastro told The Associated Press.
Attention is now turning to how to remove more than 2,300 tons of fuel aboard the vessel, which lies on its side on a rock shelf in about 20 meters of water off the little island of Giglio and which could slide off its resting place.
Salvage crews are waiting until the search for survivors and bodies is called off before they can begin pumping the half-million gallons of fuel out of the wreck, a process expected to take at least two weeks.
Worries in paradise
The fuel is in danger of leaking out and polluting some of the Mediterranean's most unspoiled sea, where dolphins are known to chase playfully after sailboats and fishermen's catches are so prized that wholesalers come from across Italy to scoop up cod, lobsters, scampi, swordfish and other delicacies.
Concordia lies dangerously close to a drop-off point on the sea bottom. Should strong waves nudge the vessel from its precarious perch, it could plunge some 20-30 meters (65-90 feet), further complicating the pumping operation and possibly rupturing fuel tanks. Italy's environment minister has warned that if those tanks break, globs of fuel would block sunlight vital for marine life at the seabed.?
A week after the Concordia struck a reef off the fishing and tourism island of Giglio, flipping on its side, its crippled 114,000-ton hull rests on seabed rich with an underwater prairie of sea grass vital to the ecosystem. The dead weight has likely already damaged a variety of marine life, including endangered sea sponges, and crustaceans and mollusks, even before a drop of any fuel leaks, environmentalists contend.?
"The longer it stays there, the longer it impedes light from reaching the vegetation," said Francesco Cinelli, an ecology professor at the University of Pisa, in Tuscany. And the sheer weight of the Concordia will also crush sea life, he said.?
The seabed where the Concordia lies is a flourishing home to Poseidon sea grass native to the Mediterranean, Cinelli told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.?
"Sea grass ... is to the sea what forests are to terra firma," Cinelli said: They produce oxygen and serve as a refuge for organisms to reproduce or hide from predators.?
The Tuscan archipelago's seven islands are at the heart of Europe's largest marine park, extending over some 60,000 hectares (150,000 acres) of sea.?
DigitalGlobe
The Costa Concordia ran aground Jan. 13 off the coast of Italy, resulting in the evacuation of thousands of passengers as the ship began heavily listing.
They include Elba, where Napoleon lived in exile, and the legendary island of Montecristo, a setting for Alexandre Dumas' novel "The Count of Monte Cristo" ? where rare Mediterranean monk seals have been spotted near the coast.?
Montecristo has a two-year waiting list of people hoping to be among the 1,000 people annually escorted ashore by forest rangers to admire the uninhabited island. Navigation, bathing and fishing are strictly prohibited up to 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) from Montecristo's rocky, cove-dotted coast. A monastery, established on Montecristo in the 7th century, was abandoned nine centuries later after repeated pirate raids.?
Come spring, Porto Ercole's slips will be full, with yachts dropping anchor just outside the port. It lies at the bottom of a steep hill, whose summit gives a panoramic view of a sprawling seaside villa, once a holiday retreat of Dutch royals, and of the crescent-shaped island of Giannutri, with its ancient Roman ruins.?
Alberto Teodori, 49, who said he has been hired as a skipper for the yachts of Rome's VIPs for 30 years, noted that the area thrives on tourism in the spring and summer and survives on fishing in the offseason.
If the Concordia's fuel, "thick as tar," should pollute the sea, "Giglio will be dead for 10, 15 years," Teodori fretted, as workers nearby shellacked the hull of an aging fishing boat.
Questions about safety
Late Thursday, Costa-owner Carnival Corp. announced it was conducting a comprehensive audit of all 10 of its cruise lines to review safety and emergency response procedures in the wake of the Costa disaster. The evacuation was chaotic and the alarm to abandon the ship was sounded after the Concordia had capsized too much to get many life boats down. The disaster claimed the lives of at least 11 people.
The owners of the doomed Italian cruise liner Costa Concordia were not aware of unsafe practices involving ships coming close to shore to give tourists a better view, Costa Cruises chief executive Pier Luigi Foschi told a newspaper on Friday.
Investigators say Francesco Schettino, the captain of the Costa Concordia, steered the ship too close to the Tuscan island of Giglio, where the 114,500 ton vessel ran aground and capsized last week, apparently while performing a maneuver known as a "salute" which took it within 150 metres of the shore.
Foschi told the Corriere della Sera that ships sometimes passed near to shore during what he termed "tourist navigation" but he said this was always performed safely and he denied that the company knew the Concordia would be going so close.
He said the Concordia's onboard newspaper had announced that the ship would pass five miles from Giglio.
"I can't rule out that individual captains, without informing us, may have set a course closer to land. However I can rule out ever having known that they may have done it unsafely," he said.
Doubts have already been expressed about whether Costa Cruises, a unit of Carnival Corp, the world's largest cruise operator, can have been unaware of the practice of ships "saluting."
The company had approved a similar maneuver in August and Lloyd's List Intelligence, a leading maritime publication, says its tracking showed that the ship's August route actually took the Concordia slightly closer to Giglio than the course that caused the grounding last week.
The $450 million Costa Concordia was carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew when it slammed into well-marked rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio. The ship then keeled over on its side and is still half-submerged nearly a week later.
'He saved over 3,000 lives'
Meanwhile,?a young Moldovan woman who translated evacuation instructions from the bridge after the Costa Concordia ran into a reef emerged as a potential new witness in the investigation into the captain's actions on that fateful night.
REUTERS/Zhurnal Tv via Reuters TV
Costa Concordia crew member Dominica Cemortan gestures in this still image from a Jan. 17 television interview. Cemortan defended the captain's actions, saying he helped to save the lives of passengers.
Italian media have said prosecutors want to interview 25-year-old Dominica Cermotan, who had worked for Costa as a hostess fluent in several languages but was not on duty when she boarded the ship Jan. 13 in the Italian port of Civitavecchia.
In interviews with Moldovan media and on her own Facebook page, Cermotan said she was called up to the bridge of the Concordia after it struck the reef to translate evacuation instructions for Russian passengers. She defended Schettino, who has been vilified in the Italian media for leaving his ship before everyone was evacuated safely.
"He did a great thing, he saved over 3,000 lives," she told Moldova's Jurnal TV.
Schettino, who was jailed after he left the ship, is under house arrest, facing possible charges of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his ship.
Costa is owned by Miami-based Carnival Corp.
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Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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Source: http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/20/10196829-rescue-divers-unlikely-to-find-cruise-ship-survivors
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