Imagine living in a
place like this. Idyllic isn’t it?
Wonder
then how it must feel to wake up one morning and find this outside your window
… and not just for one day either
L
The wonderful view you are used to completely obliterated. Enough to
put you off your morning coffee I should imagine. Vito told me a couple of
weeks ago that he was going to Giglio on business.
“Take your camera”
I cried, “take some photos for the blog!
See if you can speak to some locals, how have their lives been affected
by the Concordia arriving on their doorstep?”
“What about my
work?” he replied.
“What about it?”
He knows when to
take a hint. These terrific photos are down to him (thank you amore J XXX ) What struck me first when I saw them was
how massive and how intrusive the ship was.
Nor had I realised how close Captain Francesco
Schettino had steered the Concordia to “salute” the island.
The boat is now upright, as you can clearly
see (if you can’t look at the brown watermark on this photo down the middle of
the ship) although still partially submerged in 50 ft (15 metres) of
water.
32 people and crewmen died because of one
man’s stupidity.
L
Vito got talking to
a local woman and asked her how the incident had affected tourism on Giglio.
(Giglio has always been a popular destination even during times of
recession). She explained the nature of tourism had
changed. “Tourists still come in droves”,
she told Vito, “however the ferry loads of day-trippers flock to the island to
take photos of the stricken ship and then go back again. No one stays”. So bars around the port fare well enough and overall
little has changed (except perhaps the view),
but more distant places have fewer
visitors. Hotels are jammed packed for months ahead, not with tourists, but
people working on the salvage operation. Vito found it impossible to find a
vacant room anywhere and had to stay on the mainland when he was working there.
What was this woman most fed up with?
“The
experts”!
Apparently “they keep spouting
nonsense, especially the environmentalists” was this lady’s opinion.
For example they rabbit on about detergents
leaking out of their container bottles into the sea and contaminating the ocean.
“How”, the lady wanted to know, “was that
about to happen when we are always being told plastic bottles are not
biodegradable for hundreds of years!” (Certainly the sea looks pristine in
Vito’s photos).
Schettino is despised; not so much for steering the ship too
close to the island, but for his reversal of the “women and children first, Captain
last” rule. His cowardice is viewed as disgraceful and beneath contempt, not
only on Giglio, but also in Schettino’s native Naples where Vito heard plenty
of similar comments when he was there a couple of weeks ago. Being made to walk
the plank would be too good for him.
A sad
tale all round, for the devastated families who lost loved ones, for the
islanders whose lives have been so rudely interrupted, and for the holiday makers
who should have had fun but ended up taking part in a tragedy.
Looking at these pictures though I really
feel the salvage masters from Titan Salvage and Micoperia are true heroes.
What a
fantastic job they have done of
raising the Concordia. If you want to know more about the Costa Concordia,
click here
