December 28: On This Day in World History … briefly
The heat from the fire permeated the entire ship, even starting to melt people’s shoes on the reception deck.
2014: Nine people die as Italian ferry burns
MS Norman Atlantic is a roll-on/roll-off passenger (ROPAX) ferry owned by the Italian ferry company Visemar di Navigazione. The ferry was chartered by ANEK Lines from December 2014. On 28 December 2014, she caught fire in the Strait of Otranto, in the Adriatic Sea. Thirty people are believed to be dead as a result of the fire. The bodies of ten victims were found, while eighteen others remained missing. Additionally, two crew members of the Albanian tug ‘Iliria’ were killed during the salvage operations on 30 December. According to ANEK Lines, the total number of passengers and crew, based on the ship’s manifest, was 475. The Italian judge investigating the case determined that 499 people were officially on board the ferry due to overbooking, not including stowaways.
The incident happened in Greek territorial waters but with night closing in, the ship started drifting towards Albania. There were gale-force winds and lashing rain. Passengers assert that the order to abandon ship was not given until four hours after the fire had started. Despite their cabins filling with smoke, no alarm had sounded. They also state that the crew of Norman Atlantic gave them little assistance. One group of 49 managed to escape in a lifeboat, but others were prevented from doing so as two of the four lifeboats were destroyed by the fire. The lifeboats had a capacity of 160 people each. Survivors described ‘scenes from hell’ on board the burning ship, with the ship’s crew overwhelmed by the crisis and jungle law prevailing rather than an orderly evacuation.
Those in the lifeboat were rescued by the Singapore-registered container ship ‘Spirit of Piraeus’ and landed at Bari, Italy. Several liferafts were also launched, but some of them capsized, causing the deaths by drowning or hypothermia of several occupants. The merchant ship ‘Aby Jeannette’ rescued 39 people from Norman Atlantic’s liferafts and brought them to Taranto, and the tanker ‘Genmar Argus’ rescued a Norman Atlantic crewmember from the sea. Other people in the sea or in the rafts were rescued by helicopters.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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