14 people from the passenger list of the passenger ship “Euroferry Olympia” are still missing. They are still being searched for.
The ship caught fire on Friday en route between Igoumenitsa in northwestern Greece and Brindisi in eastern Italy. Three people on board were injured, including two passengers and one crew member.
At around 4:30 a.m., fire suddenly broke out on the Italian-flagged ferry with 237 passengers and 51 crew members on board. Pictures showed that the ship built by the Italian shipping company Grimaldi in 1995 was completely on fire. No fuel got into the sea. A spokeswoman for the Greek Coast Guard said the extinguishing work could take several hours.
The fire broke out in a garage on the ship where hundreds of vehicles, including several trucks, were located. Two Bulgarian truck drivers who had been locked in the garage were brought to safety by helicopter. They are doing well, reported Grimaldi Lines.
“The flames were very high and there was panic on board,” a witness told Italian news agency ANSA. The captain gathered everyone on board on a single deck and ordered the evacuation. The flames are said to have been extinguished in the meantime.
An Italian coast guard ship, which was not far from the “Euroferry Olympia” at the time of the accident, took 242 of the 288 people on board, who were then taken to Corfu. The remaining passengers boarded Greek patrol ships. The Greek authorities had sent three patrol boats and three coast guard tugs to the scene of the accident in the Ionian Sea. Italian President Sergio Mattarella called the commander of the Italian Coast Guard and congratulated him on the rescue operation.
The case commemorates the devastating fire of the Norman Atlantic car ferry on December 28, 2014 in the Adriatic Sea, which killed 31 and injured 64. The “Norman Atlantic” of the Greek line Anek, which had left the port of Patras bound for Ancona in Italy, had caught fire off the coast of Greece. The ship with 466 people on board was evacuated under dramatic circumstances. The rescue was complicated by strong winds. There were five Austrians on board the ferry who were rescued. 19 bodies could never be found, and two helpers died during the rescue operation.
