'Complete chaos': How McHenry County family narrowly escaped cruise ship

For a few minutes, it was like being on the Titanic, said Jim Salzburg, who was onboard the Costa Concordia cruise liner when it ran aground on the Italian coast of Tuscany late Friday.

“It was complete chaos,” Salzburg said. “No one knew what was going on. Nobody seemed to be in charge, so everybody was just running around looking for a lifeboat to jump into.”

Four hours into what was supposed to be a 16-day trip aboard the luxury liner, Salzburg, his wife and daughter were in their cabin getting ready for bed when they heard a sudden grinding noise followed by a resounding thud.

“You could feel the ship lift when it hit this thing,” said Salzburg, 71. He, his wife Josephine, 70, and their daughter, Mary-Jo, 39, questioned a crew member in the hallway, who told them an electric generator had blown and it was nothing to be concerned about.

The Salzburgs, who live in the small McHenry County town of Richmond, are veterans of more than a dozen cruises. While the crew kept insisting the generator was to blame and everything would be fine, “we got our life jackets,” Salzburg said.

Five minutes later, the lights went out in the cabin.

As is well-known now, the luxury liner carrying more than 4,200 people ran aground around 10 p.m. local time off the Italian coast, tipped over onto its side with a 160-foot gash in its hull, and capsized. At least six people are dead and 29 are missing, including 25 passengers and four crew members, according to news reports.

The only Americans not accounted for are Gerald and Barbara Heil of Minnesota, who have a son living in Mount Prospect.

Salzburg said the family is lucky to be alive.

“We just left with the clothes on our back,” said Salzburg, who was wearing a sweatshirt and pants. His wife was dressed in a shirt, pants and sandals, while his daughter was in pajamas. With no electricity, the family couldn't retrieve their passports, travel documents, or the 500 euros they had locked up in the cabin's electronic safe.

Salzburg said crew members first instructed the family to leave their second-deck cabin and go to the fourth deck where they were told to go to the third deck, and then the fifth deck.

“My wife has fibromyalgia. She has a hard time getting up and down the stairs,” Salzburg said.

Passengers were told to get to their “muster stations” to board lifeboats, but because the ship had not yet held a lifeboat drill, nobody knew where they were supposed to go, he said.

“Everybody ran out the same doors, we were all standing in the same spot looking for a lifeboat,” he said. “There was absolutely no information given by Costa. Their crew was not trained at all in disaster situations. Hardly anybody spoke English or hardly anyone even understood what we were talking about.”

Some of the doors to the lifeboats weren't working properly. There weren't enough crew members to man all of them, and the family saw cooks and stewards trying to wrestle with the doors.

An old hand at life jackets, Mary-Jo helped panicked passengers who didn't know how to put theirs on. It was dark, except for a few emergency lights, and the ship was already listing 20 or 30 degrees. The other passengers didn't speak English, but working by touch, Mary-Jo managed to get the jackets onto them.

The deck was becoming more crowded and the frantic search for lifeboats was on.

“We got to about six lifeboats before we were able to get on one,” Jim Salzburg said.

Despite being told there was no room, Josephine forced her way onto that seventh lifeboat, dragging Mary-Jo along. Jim Salzburg was half-in, half-out of the boat when people started shouting, “Go! Go!”

Josephine screamed that she wouldn't leave without her husband, but no one understood her. Mary-Jo reached for her father's hand and pulled him in, seconds before the boat dropped into the water.

The roughly 200 passengers on that lifeboat and hundreds more in other lifeboats eventually got to the shores of the summer resort island of Giglio, off the coast of Tuscany. Many others that didn't get onto lifeboats tried to swim ashore, Salzburg said.

When they stepped off the boat onto solid ground it was about 10:45 p.m., only 45 minutes after the ship ran aground.

“We didn't even know where we were cause it was dark,” Salzburg said. The night air was about 40 degrees. “Most people didn't have coats. Some people just had a T-shirt on. Some people didn't even have that.”

Salzburg said just about everything was closed on the island of about 1,000 inhabitants. They found a church, where Josephine rested her aching leg. Mary-Jo, meanwhile, used the last remaining power in her iPhone to reach the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

A ferry ride later (to where, the Salzburgs never did determine), the stranded passengers were received by the Red Cross, which provided them with blankets.

The family finally boarded a bus that brought them to Rome by midday Saturday. After a brief rest in a hotel, the family went to the U.S. Embassy and got new passports made. They got home to Richmond at about 11:30 p.m. Sunday.

Salzburg said he's not sure if he'll ever go on a cruise again, and said his wife is still pretty shaken up.

Authorities say the cruise liner's captain caused the deadly wreck by veering off-course and later abandoned the sinking ship before its 4,200 passengers and crew had been evacuated.

“They are blaming almost all of it on the captain, which they should, 'cause he definitely didn't protect the people that he was supposed to,” Salzburg said.

Ÿ Staff Photographer Patrick Kunzer contributed to the reporting of this story.