Movement on grounded liner suspends plan to blow three holes in hull as rescuers continue search for survivors
Divers searching for passengers on the Costa Concordia have been urgently pulled off the grounded cruise after sensors revealed it had shifted a few centimetres.
"All rescue operations have been suspended after the ship moved slightly around 8am this morning," said a fire service spokesman, Luca Cari.
A similar shift on Monday held up rescuers, who fear that the vessel may move from the rocks on which is now lodged towards the edge of a rock shelf 30 metres away and tumble into 70-metre depths.
Navy divers had been planning to blow three more holes in the hull in their search for missing passengers.
After the navy team used explosive charges to blow five holes in it on Tuesday, they gained access to lower parts of ship and retrieved five bodies, bringing to 11 the number of confirmed dead among the more than 4,200 crew and passengers on board.
All the holes are being blown on the landward, downward-tilting, starboard side of the 290 metres-long vessel, which ran aground on Friday night on the Tuscan island of Giglio after the ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, steered the ship into rocks that tore a hole in the port side, causing the ship to list as it took on water.
Schettino was placed under house arrest last night at his home, near Naples, after investigators held him on suspicion of manslaughter and abandoning ship.
The captain has become a national villain in Italy after transcripts of phone conversations were leaked in which he appeared to shirk his responsibilities to passengers fleeing the ship.
Prosecutors believe the Costa Concordia was moving at 15 knots when it struck the rocks on Friday, and that 300 passengers remained on board when Schettino abandoned ship, Corriere della Sera reported.
The paper reported that Schettino told prosecutors he had slipped and fallen into a lifeboat while helping passengers aboard, after which it was difficult to get back on the ship.
A cruise company colleague of Schettino's, Martino Pellegrino, was quoted as saying: "If I had to make a comparison, we had the idea that he would drive a bus like a Ferrari."
On Tuesday, Italian authorities produced an updated list of 28 passengers they say are still unaccounted for, a list that will shorten if and when the five bodies found on Tuesday are identified. The youngest on the list is a five-year-old Italian girl, one of six Italians. There are 13 German and four French passengers. Italian media reported that a German passenger considered missing had been traced in Germany.
An Italian woman who managed to get off the ship on Friday with her husband and two children said on Italian television on Tuesday she was trying to trace an English woman to thank her for taking off her life jacket and handing it to her during the evacuation.
As the chances decrease of finding any more survivors on board the vessel, rescuers on Giglio may decide that the urgent need to start pumping fuel off takes precedence over the search for bodies.
After Italy's environment minister warned of a potential ecological disaster should the vessel break up and leak fuel as rough weather looms, a Dutch salvage firm said it was ready to start drilling through the fuel tanks to pump off the 240,000 tonnes on board
Alessandro Busonero, a navy spokesman, said on Wednesday the three holes the navy was planning to blow in the hull would all be under the waterline of the vessel, 18 metres down.
"We aim to go in on deck four, where the five bodies were found yesterday, and where the meeting points are for boarding the lifeboats," he said. All five bodies found on Tuesday were wearing life jackets, as if they had been waiting to board lifeboats.
At a briefing that ended at 1am on Wednesday, divers were instructed to blow the holes in the 3cm-thick glass windows, which measure 80cm by 2 metres; two are towards the stern of the ship, and one is near the bows.
The operation will resume when the ship is again declared stable.
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