Metro

New Yorkers return home with tales of survival after Italy cruise wreck

New Yorkers aboard the capsized Costa Concordia cruise liner have slowly been making their way home from Italy with harrowing tales of survival.

“I was more afraid of panicked people than the sinking ship,” recalled Joan Fleser Aho, who returned to Schenectady Tuesday morning with her husband and teenage daughter.

They had boarded the ship in Italy just a few hours before it ran aground, killing at least 11.

ITALIAN CAPTAIN PLACED UNDER HOUSE ARREST


NEW YORKERS RETURN HOME WITH TALES OF SURVIVAL

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO RECORDINGS

PHOTOS: COSTA CONCORDIA TRAGEDY

“We were at dinner and had just been served our appetizer when he heard a horrendous crashing noise, a boom and then bank and the ship had a violent list to the port side,” she told The Post. “If you saw the movie ‘Titanic’ that’s exactly what it looked like.”

Aho, 57, and her husband Brian, 51, and daughter Alana, 18, made there way from the third floor deck to the fourth floor where the life rafts are stored.

The lights turned off and on twice eliciting screams for the petrified passengers, she said.

Save a heavily-made up showgirl who helped the crowds up the stairs the crew appeared clueless, she said.

“People were ripping life jackets out of each other’s hands. One person, a woman, tore my life jacket in half.”

She said her family made their way to a life raft. She entered, followed by her husband, when suddenly a man, “elbowed” Alana out of the way .

“I grabbed her feet and pulled down into the boat and she was last the person on the boat,” she said.

Once on shore — with nothing save their clothes and a cell phone — a local family on Giglio and the next day were sent by Carnival Corp, the owner of the ship, to Rome.

That’s where she said they were shocked at indifference by the consular staffers at the US Embassy.

Ambassadors and other high-ranking officials from other countries were at the hotel, but Americans were told to take a cab to their Embassy.

Once there, the staffers even tried to charge the family for the photo on their temporary passport.

“No food, no clothes. Nothing and that was inexcusable,” she said. “You have citizens in dire need in a foreign country. You think you can go to the embassy and be taken care of.”

Her ordeal didn’t end Monday when her family was finally sent home.

They were sent to Albany, Ga. not Albany, NY.

Another New York survivor also made it home, Maria Arco, 57, a diabetic woman from of White Plains.

“She got banged up,” said family friend Brian Dicicco. “She was pretty much on her own – she still has a little hypothermia she got looked at over there but they had 4,000 people to look at.”

chuck.bennett@nypost.com