Twelve truck drivers are still missing on Saturday off the Greek island of Corfu, more than 30 hours after the start of a violent fire on board the Euroferry Olympia ferry in which they were traveling.
Twelve truck drivers are still missing on Saturday off the Greek island of Corfu, more than 30 hours after the start of a violent fire on board the Euroferry Olympia ferry in which they were traveling. The boat of the Italian company Grimaldi, en route to Brindisi in Italy, caught fire at dawn on Friday, two hours after leaving the Greek port of Igoumenitsa, with 290 people, including 51 crew members, registered at edge. The inferno fanned by the wind, the sporadic explosions and the infernal temperature rising to more than 500 degrees prevent rescuers from intervening on board the ship, according to the firefighters and the Greek coast guard.
Aided by a helicopter, a frigate and a firefighting vessel, divers and firefighters crisscross the disaster area, hoping to find the missing. Tugboats managed to bring the ship closer to the coast, about ten km north of Corfu, according to public television ERT. In addition to 278 people registered, two illegal Afghan migrants were also rescued, raising fears that other passengers not listed in the manifesto are missing, migrants often boarding illegally on ferries linking Greece to Italy.
The investigation by the Greek Maritime Accident Service has only just begun. But the fire could have started from a truck parked in the holds, according to several concordant declarations. However, several truck drivers reported to ERT on Saturday that they preferred to sleep in their truck than in the crowded cabins of the ferries. The twelve reported missing are all truckers, seven from Bulgaria, three from Greece, one from Lithuania and one from Turkey, the Greek coast guard told AFP. Their families joined Corfu on Saturday, supervised by a psychologist.
“Boat in a pitiful state”
“From what I know, my father slept in the truck. The boat was in a pitiful state in every way,” said Ilias Gerontidakis, the son of a missing Greek. With 50 cabins for 150 trucks, “there were not enough cabins (…) we had to sleep four per cabin” and “there were bed bugs, it was dirty, without a security system” , reported this man, himself a driver, on the website of the Proto Thema newspaper. Vassilis Vergis also thinks that his missing cousin “stayed in the truck” because he was “afraid of the cabins” and “of the coronavirus”.
According to the daily Kathimerini, the Greek truckers’ union denounced in June 2017 the malfunction of the air conditioning in the cabins of the Euroferry Olympia and the Euroferry Egnazia, another Grimaldi ship. In a letter to the Greek Ministry of Merchant Marine, quoted by the newspaper, the union also criticizes the lack of cabins and the poor ventilation of the holds reserved for vehicles. In accordance with international law, the ferry, built in 1995, had undergone a control visit which “resulted in a positive result” on February 16, said the Grimaldi group.
Friday evening, two passengers, prisoners in the vehicle hold, were able to be evacuated after more than ten hours in thick smoke, before being hospitalized, according to the coast guard. One of the two, a Bulgarian, has “very low oxygen saturation and has been intubated,” said Bulgarian Deputy Foreign Minister Velislava Petrova on Saturday morning. But the specialized team that had been able to board could not stay in the burning ship.
“Some jumped overboard”
Hosted in a hotel in Corfu, a Turkish survivor, Fahri Ozgen, is in despair: “some of our friends are still missing, we don’t know where they are”. The day before, on the deck of the ship, some “250 people were screaming, shouting, some jumped into the sea” to escape the threatening fire they felt “under their feet”, he told AFP. Some find themselves with nothing in Corfu. “We lost our money, our passports, all our administrative documents, I don’t even have shoes on my feet anymore,” laments Turkish driver Ali Duran to AFP.
Once the fire is extinguished, the boat must be towed “to a safe place” to pump fuel and water, in order to avoid any maritime pollution, Greek Minister of the Merchant Navy Giannis Plakiotakis said on Saturday on Skaï TV. The previous fire on a ferry in this part of the Mediterranean took place in December 2014 on the Norman Atlantic, an Italian ship, which was en route from Patras (Greece) to Ancona (Italy). It had killed 13 people, including nine passengers.
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