Five dead, 22 await rescue in ferry fire

A car ferry that caught fire off the coast of Greece has left 22 passengers stranded on board awaiting rescue, more than 24 hours after the blaze started. Italian officials have confirmed five died in the blaze.

Five people were confirmed to have died in car ferry that caught fire off the coast of Greece and rescue teams were working to save another 22 still stranded on board more than 24 hours after the blaze started.

As some of the rescued passengers arrived in Italy, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi told reporters that four more bodies had been recovered. One man was reported dead on Sunday.

Renzi, speaking at a year-end media conference in Rome, said that rescue efforts should be completed within a "few hours" and praised the work of rescuers, who had helped avoid a "massacre."

The Norman Atlantic was carrying 478 passengers and crew and more than 200 vehicles.

Helicopter crews have been airlifting passengers from the upper deck of the ferry, now drifting in rough seas between Greece and Italy.

After initial rescue efforts were impeded by bad weather that stopped other ships getting close, Italian and Greek helicopter crews began the airlift on Sunday afternoon.

Rescuers worked through the night to pull people off the multideck ferry, the Italian navy said. Several passengers have been flown to Galatina in southern Italy.

A medical team and a flight operator had boarded the vessel to assist the passengers and crew as the rescue proceeds, a statement from the Italian navy said. Its San Giorgio amphibious transport ship is coordinating the rescue operation.

A merchant ship carrying a reported 49 of the ferry passengers, including four children, arrived in the southern Italian port of Bari on Monday, and Italian Admiral Giovanni di Tullio told Sky TG24 they would receive medical attention.

Bad weather hampered efforts overnight to attach cables to the ferry for towing, and a tug boat is expected to reach the ship to make another attempt on Monday, Greece's shipping minister Miltiadis Varvitsiotis told Skai TV.

No decision had been made on where the ferry would be taken, he said, although there had been expectations that it would be towed to the Italian port of Brindisi.

Eighty five people had been transferred to the San Giorgio by 0750 GMT and one person suffering from heart disease was taken to the Italian mainland by helicopter, the navy said.

The Italian-flagged ferry, chartered by Greek ferry operator Anek Lines, was sailing between Patros in western Greece to Ancona in Italy.

The cause of the fire has yet to be determined but the Greek coastguard said might have started in the parking area.

Additional reporting by Antonio Defano in Bari, George Georgiopoulos in Athens and Isla Binnie in Rome

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Five dead, 22 await rescue in ferry fire
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2014/1229/Five-dead-22-await-rescue-in-ferry-fire
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe