Firefighters board burning ferry in Italy, find black box data recorder

Wearing gas masks against the smoke, Italian firefighters and investigators boarded the charred Norman Atlantic ferry on Friday and retrieved a data recorder they hope will help them discover what caused a deadly blaze. But with some parts of the ferry still burning, they emerged hours later to admit they had to put off for at least a day the search for any more bodies in the maritime disaster that has already killed 11 people. Greece says 19 people are still unaccounted for after a fire broke out Sunday as the ferry traveled from Greece to Italy, and disputes Italian claims of a higher number of missing. Italy says 477 passengers and crew were rescued from the burning ferry, most by helicopters operating in gale-force winds.

For the time being, it is unfortunately impossible to get inside…for safety reasons, we cannot verity firsthand what’s inside.

Italian prosecutor Ettore Cardinali

The badly damaged ferry was towed for 17 hours across the choppy Adriatic Sea before docking Friday at the southern Italian port of Brindisi. Both nations fear the ferry car deck where the fire started could contain more bodies, possibly those of unregistered migrants trying to slip into Italy. Fears about migrants hidden on the huge ferry are based on reality. In 2014, Italy says it rescued or discovered some 170,000 migrants and asylum seekers at sea as they tried to slip into Europe. Firefighters say they will not start searching for bodies until the blaze is fully extinguished — and could not give an estimate of when that would be.

There are cars and trucks and other things that are still slowly burning, which…could still go ahead for a long time.

Brindisi Fire Commander Michele Angiuli

Europe ferry