The Costa Concordia Cruise Ship

For Reporter, Cruise Ship Disaster Is A Local Story

by Sylvia Poggioli

The Costa Concordia cruise ship remains half-submerged three weeks after it crashed. And it continues to be a source of anger for local residents.

February 5, 2012

It rarely happens to a reporter that a major story breaks in her own neighborhood. And well, it's not really a neighborhood, but the Tuscan archipelago, where a cruise ship crashed last month, is an area I know very well.

I spend summers there, and just last August I was boating a few yards from Le Scole, a rocky reef near Giglio island that is the scene of the disaster.

For the past three weeks, the half-submerged Costa Concordia has dominated the landscape of Giglio and looms ominously over the island's future as a haven for nature lovers and scuba divers.

She's not the first ship to make her grave in these waters. Archaeologists have led excavations of at least one ancient Roman ship and of an Etruscan vessel dating from 600 B.C.

But islanders say this shipwreck is anything but a tourist attraction — they fear it will keep Giglio's traditional visitors away.

The grounded carcass of the Costa Concordia looks like something out of a disaster movie, an alien that came from out of nowhere and plopped down alongside the wooden dinghies moored in the small fishing port. The 1,000-foot-long ship is clearly visible from the mainland eight nautical miles away.

A huge hunk of granite from that reef is now embedded in the hull of the marooned Costa Concordia, lying on its side on a rocky ledge just outside the port.

Read more here.