SoCal Family Survived Cruise Ship Wreck, Details Their 'Grueling Experience'
If you haven't been paying attention to national headlines lately, you may have missed the shocking news of a cruise ship that ran aground off the coast of Italy's Tuscany last Friday night. A Downey family aboard the ship survived and has returned home, and its members are now recounting their horrific brush, or brushes, with death. And they are angry.
Georgia Ananias, her husband and two daughters were aboard the Costa Concordia ship eating when it wrecked near the Island of Giglio. They crawled on their hands and knees with only the light from their life vests shining into the darkness. The family is now telling the world of their experience, as well as what needs to change in the cruise line industry.
Describing the incident as a "5.5 hour grueling experience," Georgia told reporters the family "faced death four times." She and her husband noted that changes in safety procedures must be made, notably the "training of the crews," said the husband, adding that the cruise liner crew was "totally incompetent." You can watch KTLA footage of the family discussing their experience here.
The family was one of the last groups of passengers of 4,234 total passengers to escape the submerged ship due to, as described by one of the daughters on Dr. Drew Pinky's show, the complete chaos during the panicked evacuation. "It took several minutes to get everybody on, people were screaming and crying, they had us count," she said.
The death toll has reached 11 persons, and 28 people are still missing. The ships' captain, Francesco Schettino, has since been arrested, and investigators and the Costa cruise company say Schettino deviated from the usual course along the Italian coast by veering too close to the island and hitting rocks.
