Wrapped in a blanket, a passenger of the stricken Greek ferry Norman Atlantic is helped down a gangway after the freight ship Spirit of Piraeus picked him up and brought him to the port city of Bari, Italy, on Monday.
AFP/Reuters
Survivors of a disaster in which a car ferry caught fire in a heaving Adriatic Sea on Monday described a terrifying ordeal that could easily have claimed far more lives.
The death toll from the disaster rose to seven with the discovery of two more bodies soon after the 24-hour operation to evacuate the stricken Norman Atlantic was completed in the early afternoon.
Ship captain Argilio Giacomazzi, 62, upheld centuries of maritime tradition by ensuring he was the last man off, handing over to Italian navy officers at 2.50 pm.
His conduct was in marked contrast to that of the last Italian sea captain to make global headlines, Francesco Schettino, the Costa Concordia skipper currently on trial for manslaughter abandoning a sinking cruise liner on which 32 people died in January 2012.
Wrapped in blankets and with many of them sporting bandages, 49 of the 478 passengers and crew who were on board the ferry when it caught fire shortly after dawn on Sunday disembarked from a merchant ship at the Italian port of Bari.
They and other evacuees told how the fire triggered panic which the crew appeared ill-prepared to deal with.
One of the first passengers off in Bari told reporters he had thought he was going to die as parts of the boat became engulfed by thick smoke as the ferry was travelling from Greece from Italy.
'Lifeboats did not work'
"We did not know what to do. The staff had no idea how to get people off the boat," he said.
"The lifeboats did not work, there was only one of them in the water and none of the crew were there to help people."
The evacuation was completed nearly 36 hours after a fire broke out on the car deck and left the huge vessel drifting dangerously in high seas off the coast of Albania.
With a second navy boat at the scene and able to provide a landing deck for helicopters, the pace of the evacuation accelerated significantly on Monday.
With the evacuation complete, questions began to be asked about how the fire started and why it was not contained.
Bari prosecutor Giuseppe Volpe announced a criminal investigation which will seek to establish whether negligence contributed to the disaster.
The Norman Atlantic was carrying 478 passengers and crew and more than 200 vehicles.
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.