Rescuer revisits the night almost two years ago when the Costa Concordia was shipwrecked

(12 Jan 2014) A boatman, who helped rescue thousands of passengers from the Cost Concordia cruise liner that crushed into a reef in 2012, revisited the shipwreck on Saturday, nearly two years since the disaster. Mauro Pretti, who works for Italy's Civil Protection for Sea Rescues on the island of Giglio said his memories are still very vivid from the night of the accident. The Concordia slammed into a reef off the island of Giglio when its captain took it off course in an apparent stunt to bring it closer to the island. With a 70-metre (230-foot) gash in its hull, the ship listed for an hour and finally capsized off Giglio's port. Pretti showed the Associated Press that even on his small Global Positioning System, a satellite navigation programme, the series of rocks known as Le Scole - that Costa Concordia crushed into - are clearly marked. He said he cannot imagine how a cruise ship like the Costa Concordia with much more advanced systems would not have been able to see the reef clearly. Pretti said it took a lot of trips to evacuate all the passengers from the shipwreck. "People began doing everything they could, they dived off the decks, they jumped into the sea, at that point there was a general panic," he said. "Some people managed to reach these rocks in front of us, known as La Gabbianara," Pretti said, pointing to a group of rocks. "They got to them by swimming a few strokes. My colleagues handling the land side of the Civil Protection, who realised this was going to happen, ran up there so that they could lead the people up to the provincial road above," he added. Pretti also said he remembers clearly one man, who showed him a picture of his wife, asking for help to find her. "I remember the face of a gentleman, who kept continuously asking me and showing me a photo of his wife, saying they had thrown themselves off the ship together," Pretti said. "He gave me his mobile phone number. Unfortunately, I never saw that woman," he added. A few days later it turned out she was Maria Grazia Trecarichi, one of the 32 victims. Her name is now on a plaque on the pier in Giglio's port together with the names of the other victims. The remains of one passenger, Russel Terence Rebello, an Indian waiter aboard the ship, have never been found. Captain Francesco Schettino is currently on trial for alleged manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all the passengers had been evacuated. He says he is innocent and that he saved lives with the ship's final manoeuvres. In a remarkable 19-hour engineering feat, salvage operators in September righted the Concordia from its side and brought it to rest upright on a false seabed. Since then, crews have stabilised the giant ship and prepared its heavily damaged starboard side, which had borne the weight of the ship against underwater rocks, to be outfitted with giant tanks that will help it float. On Friday Italian officials announced the shipwrecked Costa Concordia will be removed from its watery graveyard in June and taken to a port to be dismantled, the final phase of an unprecedented 600 million-euro (817 million US dollars) salvage effort. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...