Girdwood family tells of rescue from sinking Italian cruise ship

By Ken Smith
Turnagain Times

Nate and Cary Lukes and their four daughters left Girdwood for what they thought would be a wonderful 7-day cruise ship tour of Europe. At 7 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 13, the family boarded the Costa Concordia at Civitavecchia, the west coast port for Rome.

Five hours after the ship departed, the sound of an alarm could be heard in their rooms.

“We were asleep and heard an alarm in the hall around 10 p.m.,” said Nate, 41, who spoke with his wife at their home in Girdwood, where they have lived for nearly 5 years.

“I guess what woke us was the alarm in the hallway,” said Cary, 43. “I went out and checked to see what was going on. First, I went into the bathroom and saw that things had shifted. Nate’s shaving kit was under the toilet, so we knew something was wrong.”

Cary stepped out into the hall, and saw some crew members and asked what was going on. They said there was a power outage, and they were working on it.

“I thought, ‘no big deal, we’re trying to sleep anyway,’” Nate said.

But as he and his wife lay in bed, they noticed the boat was tilting, and Nate told Cary that it was more than a power outage.

In fact, what actually happened was the ship hit a large rock in a shallow reef just off the shore of Isola del Giglio, leaving a 160-foot long gash in the hull.

“People reported dishes crashing off the table at dinner,” said Cary. “A lot of people felt it, but we did not.”

They went out into the hallway again and crewmembers said there was a problem with the generator, and passengers were instructed to put on their life jackets and stay in or near their rooms.

“There were a lot of announcements in Italian that we couldn’t understand,” said Nate. “But I thought ‘we’re taking on water if the ship is listing.’”

“I’m sure their goal was to stop people from panicking,” Cary added. “The last thing they wanted was 4,200 people rushing to the deck, so they told us to stay in our room. I can’t tell you how many times they said, ‘The situation is under control, it’s just an electrical issue. Stay in your rooms.’”

Back in their rooms, the family waited. Five minutes passed when Nate went into the bathroom and found a headlamp in his shaving kit. He approached Cary and told her they should go on deck.

“I just said, ‘let’s just go up on deck and be safe, and we’ll watch the stars. It’s probably nothing, but I don’t feel comfortable staying in the room down in this maze of hallways.’ And we really weren’t familiar with the boat yet, having been on there for only a few hours. We basically got on dead tired, had dinner and went to bed. And we did not know the way out.”

One of their girls, Lucy, was with them in their room. Nate went into the hallway and pounded on the door to the room where his other daughters were sleeping, woke them up and told them to get their coats on and get ready to go on deck.

“They asked if they could go in their pajamas, and I said jokingly ‘No, dress as if you’re going to be in a life raft.’ They asked if they could bring their computer, and I told them just bring what you can fit in your pockets. But I really thought that was kind of overkill at that point.”

The family made their way slowly through the darkened hallways, taking some wrong turns along the way and occasionally bumping into passengers running through the hallway with lifejackets.

“I just wanted to get to the exterior,” said Nate. “I didn’t want to be in a hallway if this thing flipped over. People couldn’t understand English. About every third crew member we met could actually speak English.”

When they finally made it to the deck, it was full of people in life jackets lining up to get on lifeboats. As they stood waiting on the deck, people became more frantic and began yelling at the crew asking why they couldn’t get on a lifeboat.

“After about 15 minutes, this buzzer went off seven times, signaling to abandon ship,” said Nate, “and then somebody got on the intercom announcing for people to ‘abandon ship, abandon ship’ and then people really got excited. It was just like a mob where everybody who had been standing comfortable distances apart, started to squish up towards the front, really pushing their way to the front. Pushing our kids aside, you know, grown men and people getting hostile with each other fighting their way to the front.”

Amidst the panic, the family fought to stay together, holding hands and shirts.

“The fear for us was getting trampled,” said Cary. “The first round of lifeboats took off, and there was a legitimate worry that any other lifeboats would get overloaded.”

The family made their way to the stern and asked crewmembers if there were any more lifeboats, and they told them to try to the other side. At this time, the boat was tilting more and footing on deck was getting difficult. Passengers started running to one side of the boat to get to life boats, and the ship starting listing even more.

Nate and Cary then had the horrific thought that the ship might actually sink.

“I remember looking at Nate and thinking ‘this is happening, this ship is sinking,’” she said.

“After that lifeboat left, that was really a low point because we thought ‘oh, great, all the lifeboats are gone,’” said Nate. “And here we stand with about half the people on the deck.”

To Nate’s astonishment he saw crewmembers going down with lifeboats and leaving in them. “Guys in hard hats and engineers were lowering the boats. They would lower them to the surface, unhook them, and they took off. They were gone!”

The family made their way to the back of the boat and stood alongside some crewmembers next to small rubber rafts hanging from the ship.

“I said, ‘we’re not going back to the other side of the ship,’” Nate said. “They said we could wait inside or go to the other side and wait for life rafts, but I said let’s wait right here by these canisters, that way I can put my hand on it. If we have to, we can deploy it ourselves.”

After five minutes of standing there, a group of bartenders came over to the family and told them that they could go with them, and they dropped one of the rubber rafts and threw a ladder down by the side of the boat.

Nate looked at his wife apprehensively, and she said, “Do we want to do this? Go down this ladder?”

Nate asked the girls if they were comfortable going down the ladder, which was about 70 feet.

The decision was unanimous – just get off the ship. One by one they made their way down the ladder to the raft. They cut it loose and drifted away until a Coast Guard boat came by and towed them to a ferry.

The family was on the ferry for five hours. They stood on the deck watching the carnage taking place on the cruise ship a short distance away as helicopters and spotlights were brought in to help the more than 1,000 people that were still trying to get off the ship as it slowly rolled over onto its side.

“There were still people coming off it at 6 a.m. when we pulled out,” said Nate.

Of the 4,200 passengers and crewmembers, most got off safely, however, 32 passengers were unaccounted for.

“Even though it seemed chaotic and disorganized,” said Nate, “the fact of the matter is that more than 99 percent of the people got off the boat safely. It didn’t look great, but it’s a mass casualty scene, so I guess it turned out pretty good – for us. I wouldn’t say that if it was my love one who died.”

When on shore, Nate said the Italian authorities were exceptional with over 500 emergency responders handing out towels and warm pastries and tea. They brought them to a heated tent, but rather than stay there, the family decided to walk into town and get a hotel room.

They rested for several days and got their passports and traveling paperwork in order to continue their trip. Nate was fortunate to have kept his wallet on him, but they lost all their passports.

The family ended up finishing their European tour on a 10-day trip, traveling by train with little or no luggage, but, nonetheless, they said it was a great ending to a trip that started out like a terrible nightmare.

“It was one of those things where Nate doesn’t get a lot of time off,” said Cary. (He works as a dentist in Anchorage.) “So what are we going to do, go home? We’re in Europe. I also thought it might be the best thing for the kids. What are we going to go home and stew about it? A lot was learned on that trip. We lost a lot of things that we apparently didn’t need because we had a great trip. It was definitely an education for our kids on how to adapt, how to get a new passport and how to learn to use the train system when you had an itinerary that’s now at the bottom of the ocean.”

Costa Crociere SpA, operator of the Costa Concordia, has offered each uninjured passenger a compensation of $14,460.

“We received a letter from the cruise company saying they would compensate us for the cruise and our travel expenses and anything that was left in our safe,” said Cary. “My concern is that we had a lot of items that weren’t in the safe, and then, just recently, they came out and said that any unharmed passengers will receive this compensation.”

When the family returned to Girdwood, they said they were met by friends with champagne and wearing life jackets to greet them.

“There’s really unbelievable people in this community,” said Cary. “I’m really grateful for the friends we have here. Throughout the whole trip, I think we were all pretty stoic, and then we get home and we see these people that are welcoming us, and that’s when you get a little bit emotional. We’ve got a pretty good life.”