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LUCKY ESCAPE
I was about to drown on Costa Concordia – but the thought of my parents losing a THIRD child gave me strength to escape
DANCER Rose Metcalf was staring death in the face on a sinking ship.
After heroically shepherding 400 crew members to lifeboats, she was now trapped on the stricken Costa Concordia and preparing to die.
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Then she realised the devastation for her parents in Britain if she joined the 32 who died in the disaster.
In an exclusive interview with The Sun, Rose, 33, speaking as the tenth anniversary of the sinking approaches, says: “My parents had already lost two children, they couldn’t lose another.”
The “unsinkable” cruise ship was sailing in smooth seas up the west coast of Italy when it struck rocks at 9.30pm on Friday, January 13, 2012.
Captain Francesco Schettino at first refused help. Around 20 minutes later, the ship — 17-storeys high — started to list. The ship was 300 yards off the island of Giglio, and some of the 4,000 passengers jumped into the chilly, dark, waters instead of boarding lifeboats. Many were injured, several seriously.
Nearly six hours after the disaster, Rose was trapped with four other crew members. Captain Schettino, had fled.
Rose, originally from Dorset said: “I was at the front of the ship, looking into a dark abyss. We had been left for dead.
“There was no way off. I’d already tied a hose around the bannister to see if it would reach the water but it was nowhere near long enough.
“If I’d jumped I’d have hit the water like concrete or hit the metal of the ship. There was no way to get off and it seemed like nobody could see us. I was facing my death.
“I thought it would be scary and actually it wasn’t. It was very peaceful. I was only 23 and my childhood had been grief-filled because I’d lost two brothers.”
In 1996, when Rose, one of five children, was eight, her older brother Richard was found dead at 18 in the library at his school in Winchester, Hants. The cause of his death is still a mystery. Almost five years later her little brother, Rufo, died age four after an asthma attack.
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Rose says: “I thought the film playing through my mind would be all of the horrors of the grief I’d experienced in my life already.
“Actually it was all these joyful moments with my family. The moment I graduated from university, happy memories of my friends.
“It was a very beautiful moment to face my death. I was completely at peace with dying.
“As this film was playing I suddenly thought of my parents and remembered what my dad had said to me when my second brother passed away.
“He said, ‘Rose, the reason your mum and I are still here is because we still have you and your brothers to look after’. The grief of losing their children was so intense that they didn’t want to live any longer.
“If my mum and dad felt like that after losing one and then two children, it would break them to lose a third child.
It was pitch black but I could see the ripples of the water and I could see lights very, very
Rose Metcalf
far away. We had been left for dead and there was no way off.
“That is the moment when suddenly my mind started operating in a new way and I started getting solution-oriented. ‘How can I get off this ship? Not for me. I don’t care about me. How do I get off for my parents?’”
In her pocket, Rose was carrying an emergency torch but the wiring was broken. She recalls: “I reconnected the wires using my earring to complete the broken circuit.
“That is also the time I asked the four people I was stranded with ‘Does anyone have a phone?’ One, said, ‘Yes, but I have ten cents of credit and my battery is about to die’.”
Rose used the last of the phone’s power to send a Facebook message to her dad Phil, 66, at the family home in Wimborne, Dorset.
She says: “My dad is the one who raised the alarm and that’s when the Italian military airbase started sending helicopters to look for us on the front of the ship.
“I signalled with the torch but it was such a massive ship that the helicopter couldn’t find us. An hour later, six hours into the sinking, a second helicopter winched us up.” Her mum Carolyn, 67, was on holiday with Rose’s younger brother Robert, now 22. They saw the disaster unfold on TV.
Rose says: “My mum called the hotline you were supposed to call and they started asking her, ‘Does she have any identifiable marks that we can check on the bodies?’
“I was taken to an Italian military base and stayed up through the night directing rescuers to where I’d heard people on the boat banging for help.
“At the end of the night, the captain gave me his iPhone and I called home and left a voicemail for my dad to let him know I was alive.”
Rose flew to London two days later for a very emotional embrace with her mum. Rose says: “She really needed to have me in her arms to really know I was OK. I’d fought so much to live for her. It felt like it was a gift to get to be with her again.”
Later she was reunited at home with her dad and brothers, Robert and Ralph, now 30.
Rose says: “I physically saw it in their bodies how pleased my parents were to see me. It was like they had been holding their breath.
“They have experienced so much bereavement in their lives and they are such brave and courageous parents.
“I’m so grateful to my dad for teaching me the survival skills that I never knew I would need.
“He also taught me not to bow to authority unless it makes sense to me too. So when I was ordered to put my cocktail dress back on and go back inside the ship and entertain the passengers (during the captain’s denial that there was a problem) it was thanks to how he had educated me to think for myself that I said ‘No’.”
Rose suffered from PTSD and survivor’s guilt. She worked on a class action against the ship’s American parent company, Carnival Cruise Lines, but it was kicked out in US.
A case was brought in Italy against Costa Cruise Lines, which stopped paying Rose’s wages on the day of the disaster.
Several years later she received a small payout from the ship’s insurers. It was less than the value of her lost belongings. Disgraced Captain Schettino was jailed for 16 years in 2016.
Rose says of the disaster: “People were told it was just an electric fault and to go back to their cabins. They were lied to.
“They ship still had technology that was pretty much the same as on the Titanic. The lifeboats couldn’t get to the water properly because the ship was on its side.
“I saw a lifeboat on the side of the ship roll and tip people out into the water. I saw people fall to their deaths because the equipment on board was not fit for purpose.”
Rose moved to the US eight years ago and now lives in Hollywood with her actor partner and works as a health and life coach, empowering women to live their lives to the fullest.
She is also collecting survivors’ stories for a book about the Costa Concordia disaster.
Yet, in the decade since the tragedy, this will be the first time her parents hear how they inspired their daughter to live.
Rose says: “We’re still very English and I have never talked to them about my thoughts that night on the front of the ship.
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“I’m just so thankful they gave me the fire to fight back.”
- Channel 5 told the story of the disaster in the two-part documentary The Sinking Of The Costa Concordia which is available on My5.
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The moment Concordia went down
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