Nightmare journey from Genoa to Porto Torres, departure seven hours late: "Poor emergency management"
Passengers on the GNV Excelsior ship are furious: the disruption was due to engine problems.Per restare aggiornato entra nel nostro canale Whatsapp
Over a thousand passengers experienced disruption overnight, once again experiencing disruptions on board GNV ships on the Genoa-Porto Torres route.
The Excelsior ferry, which was due to leave the Ligurian port at 7:00 PM on Thursday evening, departed shortly before 2:00 AM, after hours of waiting in the Genoa port area, with endless lines of cars, people under severe stress from the high temperatures, and no way to buy a bottle of water due to the lack of facilities.
Some passengers requested the intervention of the police, who arrived on site along with the Genoa Coast Guard who boarded to carry out an inspection. It is believed that the cause was a technical problem in the engine room, a malfunction of the engines that were repaired after several hours of work by technicians.
"The departure times kept being postponed, first to 9:00 PM, then not even to midnight, then the announcement was made at 1:30 AM," explain workers, tourists, and Sardinians. The 1,080 passengers disembarked at the western pier in the commercial port of Porto Torres at 1:40 PM, tired, exhausted, and filled with anger. A five-hour delay, amid uncertainty about the actual departure and no explanation for the cause of the engine room failure.
Yet another technical problem on Grandi Navi Veloci's ferries. "We don't yet know the cause of the delay, but what infuriates us is the poor management of the emergency," explains Carla Muscau, who disembarked in Porto Torres with her husband and three young children. "We arrived at the port of Genoa at 5:00 AM on Thursday, July 16th, scheduled to depart at 7:00 PM, but the departure was postponed to 9:00 PM, and after that, no communication was received," she continues. On board, the staff offered breakfast and lunch the next morning, but no one has explained with certainty what technical problems caused the delay. This is another sour note after the incident on the evening of June 19th, when a fire broke out in the engine room of the GNV Azzurra, causing two of its four engines to fail. The ship, off the coast of Corsica, did not arrive in Genoa, but was towed by tugboats to the port of Porto Torres.