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Killer waves caused panic on Med. cruise ship
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Killer waves caused panic on Med. cruise ship
AFP - Friday, March 5
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The Maltese-flagged Greek Cypriot-owned Mv Louis Majesty cruise liner docked at Barcelona's harbour on March 4. Terrified passengers told Thursday how three giant rogue waves smashed through the front windows of the Mv Louis Majesty, killing two people and causing mass panic on the liner.
BARCELONA, Spain (AFP) - – Terrified passengers told Thursday how three giant rogue waves smashed through the front windows of a Mediterranean cruise ship killing two people and causing mass panic on the liner.
The eight metre (26 foot) high waves injured another 14 people, including one woman in "very serious condition" in hospital. Most of the 1,300 tourists were being repatriated from the Mv Louis Majesty to their home countries on Thursday.
"It was a monster wave... it smashed all the windows. Everything happened so quickly," one German woman passenger told Spanish public television.
Images filmed by a passenger showed screaming people fleeing as a wall of water crashed through a window and then swept into a lounge area, knocking over furniture. The film was shown by Spanish television.
"We didn't know what was happening, if there were dead or injured, only that we were going back to Barcelona," an Italian passenger identified as Franco told the television.
One German and one Italian passenger were killed in accident on Wednesday evening as the ship was off the coast of Spain, the owners, Cyprus-based Louis Cruise Lin said.
One 64-year-old woman, was in "very serious" condition, a spokeswoman at Barcelona's Vall d'Hebron Hospital said. Spanish media said the woman's legs were broken in the accident. A 59-year-old man was also hospitalised with multiple injuries.
The ship docked in Barcelona late Wednesday to evacuate the dead and injured, start repatriating passengers and carry out repairs.
The company said in a statement that the passengers were killed when the freak waves smashed windows in a public area at the front of the ship.
Louis Cruise spokesman Michalis Maratheftis said there would be no investigation.
"This was a natural, unforeseen and unpredictable phenomenon because we are talking about three big waves, higher than eight metres, striking the vessel," he told AFP in Cyprus.
"This is not an incident which we could have prevented, therefore there will be no investigation.
"All passengers are on their way back to their respective countries as we speak. We have made all the necessary arrangements for all of the passengers to be safely transported back to their countries," Maratheftis said.
The Maltese-flagged ship was to remain in Barcelona for repairs before sailing back to the Italian port of Genoa where normal operations would resume on March 12.
The captain rerouted the 200-metre (660-foot) long ship was on a 12-day cruise of the western Mediterranean with 1,350 passengers and 580 crew when it was hit.
It had been due to return to the Italian port of Genoa, the starting point and ultimate destination on Thursday.
Experts say rogue waves are almost always generated by storm-related winds.
One 31 metre (100 foot) wave hit a North Sea oil platform out of the blue in 1995. Another 19 metre rogue wave hit the Brittany Ferries ship the Pont-Aven when going from Santander in Spain to Plymouth in England in May 2006.
"They always come when you are least expecting it," said Michel Olagnon, a specialist on the phenomenon at the French Sea Institute (Ifremer) in Paris.
Once possible scenario for Wednesday's monster waves could be a phenomenon of amplification whereby two or more waves overlap.
"As wind increases in intensity, it is first going to create relatively small waves, and then bigger ones, which travel faster," said Christain Kharif, a French oceanographer and co-author of "Rogue Waves in the Ocean".
"Eventually the big ones will catch up, and the energy is concentrated as the waves pile up," he told AFP
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