I wrote this letter last year, on the plane ride home from Italy, just a few days after Emily and I escaped the Costa Concordia shipwreck. I didn’t have a laptop or an iPad — those had both gone down with the ship and were submerged under a hundred feet of frigid sea water — so I wrote with a pen and paper, scratching in the margins and making notes, crossing out phrases and rewriting until I was happy with the result.
Over the next few weeks, I tried (unsuccessfully) to get the letter published as an op-ed in the New York Times and in the Boston Globe. Both papers rejected it, so I included it in chapter 55 of my memoir Abandoned Ship. But it actually just occurred to me this morning that I could publish it here on my website as a way of truly making this an “open letter.” After all, I’ve also included chapter one of Abandoned Ship for free on this website. Why not also include this op-ed?
The failure of the United States Embassy to help its own citizens was a fact maddeningly absent from most of the press coverage during the first year after the shipwreck, however I’m happy to report that the embassy failures finally got some reasonable press coverage around the one-year anniversary of the shipwreck, starting with this article in The Daily Beast written by Barbie Latza Nadeau. As far as I know, she’s the first mainstream institutional reporter to ask serious questions about the embassy response, and she’s certainly the first journalist who went back to the embassy and pressed them for a statement.
Anyhow, here’s the op-ed, exactly as originally written to the NYT and the Globe, and as published in my book:
We were on our honeymoon when, in the wee hours of Friday night, after the hull breached and all the working lifeboats had been deployed, we accepted the truth that we would probably not survive. We kissed each other and said our final goodbyes, clinging precariously to an improvised rope ladder halfway down the hull of the ship.
As we’ve recently learned, the captain abandoned us, leaving the ship while we still hung there with our family, shivering and terrified, wondering whether anyone would help us.
Our harrowing experience aboard the ship has been well-reported over the past few days, and I’m proud to do all I can to continue making sure that story is told thoroughly and accurately.
But the story of abandonment, neglect, and indifference doesn’t stop there.
For now, I’ll skip a few details about the ferries that transported us back to the mainland and the buses that dumped us at hotels in Rome without first telling us where we were going or informing the hotel staff to expect our arrival.
It took 33 hours from the time of the accident until we were able to speak face-to-face with a Costa representative to ask for assistance. They abandoned us too.
In the meantime, we turned to the American embassy for help, calling the embassy’s emergency number at about 3 o’clock on Saturday afternoon.
“We are survivors from the Costa Concordia. Can you help us?”
More than 100 American citizens were on that boat. None of us had eaten a meal for at least 16 hours. None of us had changed clothes since the evacuation, and a few people still had wet clothing and shoes from swimming to the shore. No one had undergone a physical or psychological exam. With no passports, no phones, no money, no local friends, no Italian language skills, and no idea how we’d get home, we asked for help from our country.
“That’s not our job. We’re very short-staffed, and this is a holiday weekend.”
Cold comfort for those of us with nowhere else to turn.
According to U.S. Airways Passenger Service Supervisor Loredana Ippoliti, the Australian embassy gathered their citizens and brought them to the airport by Saturday morning, quickly evacuating them from the country and bringing them safely home to their loved ones.
Ambassadors from England, Ireland, Spain, Japan, South Korea, and Argentina (among others) swiftly mobilized their own teams — often personally accompanying the team — to find citizens from their own countries and bring them home.
By contrast, where was the American Ambassador?
The American Embassy had low-level staff on hand to process passport paperwork. And those guys worked hard to help us get new travel documents. But the high-level consular officials — those with the power to mobilize food, clothing, lodging, transportation, and medical attention — were completely absent throughout the whole ordeal.
Just like Costa Cruises failed to protect their passengers in the hour of their greatest need, the U.S. State Department failed to protect its citizens. Whether out of incompetence or indifference, we were abandoned.
And that is shameful.
[…] within the first few weeks after Emily and I got home from Italy. (The first thing I wrote was the op-ed, which I scribbled into a notebook from my seat on the plane home from Italy, and which now […]