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Did captain move Costa Concordia closer to shore as favor to head waiter?

Costa Concordia

Rescue divers have resumed their search of the stricken vessel the Costa Concordia, after they were earlier forced to evacuate the site due to safety concerns, as the ship shifted.

Firefighters' spokesman Luca Cari said, "There was a slippage of 9 centimeters (3.5 inches) vertically and 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inches) horizontally. We evacuated immediately. This is something we have been worried about. Operations are suspended. We will have to monitor the stability of the ship and we don't know when we will resume operations."

A few hours later, seas stabilized, and the search again resumed.

Earlier, the ship's owners, Costa Crociere, said in a statement on Sunday that the captain of the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, appeared to have made "serious errors of judgment" and brought the ship too close to shore, where it struck a rock that tore a 150 foot plus long hole in the hull. Later, the CEO of the company, Pier Luigi Foschi, also blamed "human error" on the part of Schettino for the accident. He said the cruise ship had passed all safety tests in its 2011 evaluation. According to him, all Costa ships have their routes programmed, and if they deviate, alarms are set to go off. "This route was put in correctly. The fact that it left from this course is due solely to a maneuver by the commander that was unapproved, unauthorized and unknown to Costa."

Just before dawn on Monday, rescue workers searching the cruise ship found the body of an adult male. The man was reported to be wearing a life jacket, but he was not found in a part of the ship that was submerged. The news brought the death toll to six people with 60 injured.

Among the passengers still missing from the liner Barbara and Jerry Heil of White Bear Lake, a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. Family members issued a statement Monday confirming that they are the two Americans missing.

An estimate of the total cost to insurers by Joy Ferneyhough, an insurance analyst at Espirito Santo Investment Bank in London, speaking Bloomberg, could be as high as $1 billion, depending on liability claims. Lloyds of London confirmed it was the underwriter for XL Group, one of a number of firms sharing the $512 million insurance burden for the Costa Concordia ship itself.

Meanwhile, Italian authorities have declared a state of emergency. The country's environment minister said that some sort of liquid has begun to leak from the stricken cruise ship, but it is unknown if that is any of the vessel's 500,000 gallons of fuel. In order to protect against what could be an immense environmental disaster, protective barriers have been put in place to contain the liquid.

Update: Shortly before the ship hit the rocks, the Costa Concordia's head waiter's sister, Patrizia Tievoli posted on Facebook that: “In a short period of time the Concordia ship will pass very close. A big greeting to my brother who finally gets to have a holiday on landing in Savona." It's now theorized that the captain of the ship moved the vessel closer to shoe as a favor to that head waiter, Antonello Tievoli.

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Image Source: Video Capture

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