Cruise liner survivors safely home in Hampton Roads

Karen Kennedy didn't panic - not when the cruise ship sounded like it was scraping against an obstacle, not when she had to don a life jacket and climb into a lifeboat, not even when desperate passengers began jumping from the listing ship into the lifeboat as it was being lowered to the sea.

The most disturbing part of the whole ordeal was when the lifeboat got stuck against the ship on its way down, she said Monday, a few hours after returning to Hampton Roads from what was supposed to be a weeklong Mediterranean cruise. Instead, she endured an escape from the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that ran aground Friday off the coast of Italy carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew members.

"That was the unnerving part," said Kennedy, recalling how their lifeboat seemed pinned against the ship. It eventually made it to the Tyrrhenian Sea and into the harbor of a nearby island.

"You're so caught up in what's going on around you that it's not like 'Oh my god, I'm going to die.' It wasn't this overwhelming feeling of death. It was like, 'This is something very serious,' " she said.

Kennedy and her partner, Richard Langlands, love to travel - independently and together - and won't be scarred by what happened, she said.

"I'm fairly well-seasoned, but I've never experienced anything like this," she said.

The pair has covered thousands of miles - and lots of emotional ground - since Thursday, when they left Norfolk for Italy. They boarded the ship Friday, hours before it ran aground. Kennedy said she slept little on the overseas flight, so when the ordeal began in earnest that night, she was already tired.

The first sign of trouble came around 9:30 p.m. Friday, when they heard "a big scraping noise, and the electricity went off." She and Langlands headed to the top deck and could see that the boat had stopped moving. Power returned, then went off again for a longer stint. Crew members seemed to be moving around with more urgency. Sensing trouble, the pair returned to their stateroom, retrieved a few valuables, then headed to the deck where the lifeboats were located.

They forgot to bring their life jackets with them from their room but were given spare ones on the lifeboat deck. A crew member helped the two Americans put them on. Announcements were being made in five or six different languages, she said.

Their lifeboat seemed to be filled close to capacity, she said, and as it was being lowered to the water, passengers afraid of getting stuck on deck began jumping into it.

"It was dark - almost midnight - and even though there were lights on the ship, where I was sitting in the lifeboat, I couldn't see," Kennedy recalled. "I felt it when the people jumped in, and I could hear the people shouting."

She and Langlands were separated to make room for the jumpers, though they were still within view of each other. As they talked after the ordeal, they realized that similar thoughts went through their minds.

"When they were lowering the boat into the water, I was trying to think, 'What do I do if once we hit the water, it flips over?' I was trying to be prepared. 'How am I going to get to safety?' "

Kennedy said she and her boyfriend are practical, pragmatic people.

"That's how we are," she said. "It's not like the Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio scenario from 'Titanic.' "

An insurance agent who works in Newport News and has homes there and in Virginia Beach, Kennedy said she was numb at certain points and probably experienced a little bit of shock.

She thought of death only in the abstract, she said, wondering whether she'd paid her life insurance premium and hoping, for her beneficiary's sake, that she had.

She remembers watching hundreds of fellow passengers stream into a church in the little island village after the lifeboats made it to safety, and recalls volunteers wrapping them up in blankets.

Hours later, it was time to get back on a boat, this time a ferry that took them to the Italian mainland. In Rome on Saturday, the U.S. embassy issued temporary passports to about 120 American tourists who'd been aboard, allowing them to return to the United States.

Kennedy and Langlands arrived in New York on Sunday and got back to Hampton Roads on Monday morning.

Kennedy said she couldn't corroborate accounts from some passengers that the ship's crew was unprepared or overwhelmed. The man at the helm of their lifeboat seemed to know what he was doing, she said.

"When you have 4,000 people running at you, it becomes a capacity issue, a mental capacity issue," she said.

She said she appreciates all the support she's gotten, from colleagues and customers and friends and family. Monday afternoon, she began returning more than 30 voicemails. And she picked up Frodo, her long-haired dachshund, from the kennel.

She's glad to be home, but she knows she'll be ready to travel again before long.

"If a cruise piques our interest, we'll go for it," Kennedy said.

Kate Wiltrout, 757-446-2629, kate.wiltrout@pilotonline.com