"A year after the disaster that killed 32 people, she told for the first time how it left her “destitute” and unable to mentally process the events, only crying for the first time this month. Ms Metcalf, who worked on the liner as part of a dance troupe, is among the Londoners fighting for compensation from the ship’s owner, Costa Cruises.
The 112,000-ton vessel awaits salvage off the Italian island of Giglio, where it ran aground with 4,229 people on board, including more than 1,000 crew. Ms Metcalf was praised after taking responsibility for roll call on her deck and ensuring that about 200 crew were evacuated onto lifeboats. She was one of the last people winched to safety.
She told how she had been drinking coffee in the bar on her evening off when the ship struck rocks at 9.42pm: “There was a horrific ripping sound, like an earthquake, and we were all thrown back. Everything was shaking and the glasses were flying off.
“Nobody really knew what to do. They told us it was an electrical fault.” The lights went out five minutes later. Then the 955ft long vessel began toppling over. Ms Metcalf dashed to her cabin, changing from her silk cocktail dress into jeans and trainers.
She said: “There was no higher level of crew that made it to the muster station who were capable of taking command, they were panicking. The way I’ve been brought up I couldn’t just abandon my responsibilities.
"We had some passengers who tried to jump off in panic and we had to haul their legs back from the edge.”
One friend was left paralysed after being crushed after running down a corridor to escape gushing water.
“People went to the mortuary and were chucking coffins out, and using them to float because the lifejackets were locked in trunks,” Ms Metcalf added. “There were lots of explosion sounds inside the ship and gas bubbling in the water that filled the cabins.”As the vessel toppled further, she used rock-climbing skills learned as a teenager to clamber up surfaces: “The wall became our floor, the doorways became lift shafts”.
The dancer, three Indonesian crew and a Bulgarian plumber hauled themselves on to a higher part of the ship. Pointing at her watch, she told how she and the plumber used it to calculate how quickly the ship was sinking: “If we’d have jumped into the water we would have broken our bones from the metal underneath,” she said.
“I stayed on until I knew everyone I was responsible for was safe, but then I was stranded. I was trying to find every option how I could get off, then when I realised there wasn’t a way, I had a strange serenity and peace.
“I summarised my life, wrote a note to my parents and accepted I might not make it.” It was then that she posted the Facebook photo, using a phone belonging to one of the Indonesians. At 5am she was finally winched to safety.She said: “I feel very sad for those families who haven’t been able to put to rest the remains of their loved ones. I haven’t coped with it for a year. I was destitute when I got off the ship. I lost everything, £13,000 worth of things, including all my dance equipment.”
Ms Metcalf became a legal firm’s “advocate for ship safety” travelling the world meeting disaster victims, and is working on the sales floor in Harrods. She married husband Robert, 42, just before Christmas.
“Initially when I came back I was running on the adrenalin of wanting to get the information out there. It’s an accident that could have been prevented,” she said. “It completely ruins your life. I met the family of a helicopter crash in Peru and that night I broke down hysterically crying, which I haven’t done for a year. I need to see a psychologist and just want to get back to dancing.”
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/dancer-who-survived-costa-concordia-disaster-reveals-desperate-bid-to-survive--one-year-on-from-tragedy-8464413.html
