Cruise Captain Says He ‘Tripped’ Into Lifeboat, Couldn’t Get Out
Hopefully by now you’ve heard about the Costa Concordia, a luxury cruise ship that ran aground off the Italian coast. If not, Wikipedia has a decent roundup.
The captain, Francesco Schettino, has come under fire for allegedly taking the ship off course to get closer to the coast, causing the wreck, as well as abandoning the ship before the passengers were evacuated. His excuse for the latter, as reported by Phoebe Natanson and Lee Ferran for ABC News, must have come from The Onion:
“I had no intention of escaping,” Francesco Schettino, 52, said during his first court hearing Tuesday, according to Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper.
“I was helping some passengers put the life boat to sea. At a certain point the mechanism for lowering it, blocked. We had to force it. Suddenly the system unblocked itself and I tripped and I found myself inside the life boat with a number of passengers.”
Once in the lifeboat that was lowered into the sea, Schettino insisted to the court that it was “impossible to go back onboard.”