South Floridians among survivors of aground ship

MIAMI (WSVN) -- South Florida passengers onboard the cruise ship that ran aground off the coast of Italy are now speaking about making it off the ill-fated ship alive.

On Monday, Connie Barron and Jay Garcia landed at Miami International Airport with only the clothes on their backs.

The couple, appreciative to be alive, were met by their family with hugs and kisses after surviving a night of terror on the sea. "I'm so lucky to be alive and to be with them," said Barron.

The Costa Concordia, carrying over 4,000 passengers and crew, ran aground just off Giglio Island in Italy late Friday night. Since then, six people have been found dead and at least 29 passengers, two of them American, are still missing.

Barron and Garcia were in their room on the ship when it hit rocks. "The lights were going on and off, on and off. Yeah, we knew there was something wrong," said Garcia.

After realizing something was wrong, the couple looked to the crew for help. "They were lying, they kept saying go to your cabin and close the door. Don't open the door until we tell you," said Barron.

Once the ship began listing, the couple's instincts took over. "Trying to go down the stairs at an angle is not the easiest thing to do," said Garcia.

At the lifeboats, the couple remembers people pushing and shoving without direction from senior staff. "The crew that was helping were the cooks and the waitress but not any of the officers," said Barron.

Camacho and her husband Louis Hernandez were also local passengers onboard the cruise ship. The couple made it to a lifeboat, but in a chaotic, unorganized scene were forced from the lifeboat back onto the sinking cruise liner. "We had to jump from the raft to the boat and we started running around and see where we can find another one because all of them were full," said Camacho.

The panicked passengers trying to get off the cruise ship as it laid on its side and began to sank has been compared by some passengers as a scene from the movie Titanic. "I couldn't believe it. I was telling her no this is not going to happen, we're not going to sink, you know, we're going to get off," said Louis Hernandez.

Other passengers from South Florida recall how staff onboard the ship were unprepared to handle the emergency. "People were lined up in the hallway with kids and people were crying and screaming," said Kaelin Lynn, a passenger from Miami. "And I asked our cabin boy what to do, he had no idea what to do. No one had any idea what to do."

Jesus Garcia from Miami was onboard with his girlfriend and says as people tried to get off the ship it was everyone for themselves. "We never heard anything from the captain. The captain never spoke on the boat. We never heard the captain," said Garcia.

Costa Cruises said in statement that "significant human error" is to blame for the accident, as the ship was traveling too close to the rocky shores of Giglio Island.

Francesco Schettino, the ship's captain, left the ship before the chaotic evacuations were complete and is now being detained by Italian authorities as he faces possible charges of abandoning ship and manslaughter.

When the South Florida passengers got to Rome, it was then that they realized how lucky they all were to escape alive and uninjured. "It's almost surreal and as we're watching it on TV it's hard to believe this has actually happened to us. It's just in slow motion," said Karen Kois, a passenger from Miami.

Many of the South Florida passengers arrived back in Miami Monday afternoon.

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