There was one Rose who was unable to save her lover, and there is one Rose who helped save the lives of 400 people aboard the Costa Concordia cruise ship when it struck a giant granite reef, began to flood and tipped on its side.Rose Metcalf was working as a professional dancer aboard the cruise ship when the incident happened near Giglio Island in Italy at 9:45 pm local time on January 13, 2012. It took more than six hours to evacuate the ship, after which 32 people among the 3,229 passengers and 1,023 crew members were confirmed dead.Thanks to Metcalf, who was just 23 years old at the time, the number of fatalities did not reach higher. Reflecting on her actions on the U.K. daytime show Good Morning Britain (GMB) on Friday, July 31, Metcalf joked that, as a dancer, she didn’t expect to have people’s lives in her hands.Despite being new to the ship, she said that she also quickly realised that many of the crew did not initially realise how serious the situation was, until the vessel began to tip over. “I was one of 12 fluent English speakers on board,” said Metcalf, who explained that she was tasked with doing a roll call of about 30 crew members as a result. “But I ended up being responsible for about 400 just because nobody else was stepping up,” she added.
She was tasked with doing a roll call of about 30 crew members since she was one of the 12 people aboard who knew English
When the ship turned on its side and the lifeboats inside were no longer accessible, Metcalf came up with the idea for crew members to link arms and form a human chain. GMB co-host Adil Ray asked her how she remained composed enough to come up with the idea when most people in that situation would be panicking or trying to save their own lives. “I wasn’t composed; I was in complete fight-or-flight,” Metcalf laughed. “This hallway had become like [an elevator] shaft. There was a bannister [on] the far side of it, so I said, ‘Why don’t we throw people across?’ ”This idea was eventually dropped because, as Metcalf explained, it would have been a “death sentence” if they fell. Instead, she came up with the idea for people to grab onto the bannister and link arms.“We climbed down each other so that you can get to water level,” explained Metcalf. “The problem was… we were so high up, we’d have hit the water like concrete.” “That’s what you don’t realise,” she continued. “When you see the ship listed on its side, you think you could just step off it. You can’t.”Metcalf said she was in a group of five that eventually became trapped as the ship continued to turn over. “We thought we were going down like the Titanic,” she said, recalling that she prepared herself to enter the water if she needed to. “This little slideshow went through my mind, of my life,” she recalled of realising that she could die in the disaster.Yet she continued to help. She ripped a light out of the wall and put it in her pocket, and later used it to alert search and rescue teams. When she saw a helicopter above the ship but realised it could not see them, she rewired the light using her earring and flashed it at the aircraft.The hosts hailed Metcalf’s rescue efforts, but she emphasised that she was not the only person responsible for saving lives. “There were a lot of heroes that night,”
