Today is the 19th anniversary of the tragedy of the ferry “Moby Prince”. The first photo shows the memorial plaque inside the “Porto Mediceo”In the second picture (from a postcard) we can see the “Moby Blue” and the “Moby Prince” in the port of Bastia (Corsica), while the pictures of the wreck are from the magazine “Panorama”.
These last images are courtesy of the website “Navi e Armatori” (Ships & Owners) of which I am a proud member.
Here is the Wikipedia entry about the event:
On April 10, 1991, at 22.23, the ship collided with the oil tanker Agip Abruzzo in Livorno harbour and it caught fire killing 140 people. Not all the deaths were caused by the fire; it has been reported that a large portion of the victims died intoxicated by massive toxic inhalations, while they were gathered in the main internal room of the ship.
The operations of rescue were managed badly; the may day sent from the Moby Prince, very weak, wasn't apparently heard from the radar officers of Livorno. The rescue teams were deployed only on the Agip Abruzzo. Initially the commander of Agip Abruzzo thought that the ship hit was a small bettolina, and also said to the rescuers “Not to exchange our ship with that”.
Only some volunteers managed to approach the ferry, rescuing only a single survivor, a mariner from Naples. Despite this mariner reporting that there were still survivors on the burning ferry, nobody climbed on the wreck to rescue them.
When the rescuers entered the wreck the following morning, they found only dead bodies. Initially the crash was attributed to a very thick fog, but some amateur video footage excluded this possibility.
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