We continue to operate in the open sea around the wreck of the Euroferry Olympia to look for survivors, to avoid the risk of pollution and to extinguish the last outbreaks on the ferry that burned down Friday night between Greece and Italy, a few miles north of the Corfu island.
The more time passes, the less hopes of finding the 12 missing passengers (three Greeks, seven Bulgarians, one Lithuanian and one Turkish) alive, who were among the 290 registered on the boarding lists but are not among those saved.
The survivors, including the 64 Italians, are all in Corfu, where the rescuers took them yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Grimaldi Lines ferry remains adrift and there are fears that it may sink. In Olympia's tanks there are at least 800 cubic meters of fuel and 23 tons of dangerous goods.
And today from the Italian Coast Guard, which flying over the area of the shipwreck saw a spill into the sea, the pollution alarm went off. The Ministry of Ecological Transition has therefore made available to the Greek authorities a vehicle of the National Anti-Pollution Service Society, the 'Ievoli white', while the Coast Guard ship Diciotti has already arrived in the area of the accident, equipped with anti-pollution devices , which has a team of experts on board made up of an Ispra technician and two officers from the marine environmental department.
The belly of the ship is still glowing, temperatures have reached 600 degrees, which in addition to complicating the extinguishing operations, feeds the anguish on the missing. It cannot be ruled out that someone is trapped inside, but it is still impossible to enter the holds for checks, technical checks and damage counting.
On the mainland, on the other hand, the causes and possible responsibilities of the stake are investigated. The hypothesis is that the flames started from the hold, in garage 3, perhaps from a parked vehicle. The Hellenic judiciary is dealing with this, which currently hypothesizes the crimes of shipwreck and an attack on transport safety and which has delegated investigations to the Central Port Authority which has asked to identify the triggering of the flames, as soon as possible.
(Unioneonline / L)