John Scimone and Meghan Scimone recount surviving the Costa Concordia disaster with their 14-month-old daughter, Lilah Scimone, in Netflix’s Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea. The family’s account returns to the night the ship struck an underwater rock and began flooding and tilting with more than 4,000 passengers and crew members onboard.
The documentary was released on July 10. It places Lilah, who was 14 months old, at the center of a family escape that began after her parents had just put her to bed.
Lilah Scimone on the Costa Concordia
Meghan Scimone said in Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea, “Lilah was 14 months old, so we felt like it was a good opportunity for us to do a really big trip together.” In July 2012, John Scimone and Meghan Scimone traveled across Paris, Switzerland, Venice and Barcelona before ending their vacation on the Costa Concordia.
They boarded the ship with Lilah, their eldest child. John and Meghan later live in Austin, Texas, with Lilah and her two younger siblings.
July 13 and the escape
On July 13, 2012, John and Meghan heard a loud screeching noise and felt the boat shake when the Costa Concordia hit an underwater rock near Giglio Island. Meghan said they realized something more devastating had happened than a blackout as the ship began to flood and tilt to one side.
The couple woke their sleeping baby, fled their room and ran up the stairs to a deck to try to get on a lifeboat. Meghan recalled Lilah was “crying the whole time.”
Francesco Schettino and the order
Francesco Schettino downplayed the situation and told passengers there was no need to panic, even as the ship had already struck the rock and flooding had started. He initially refused to call the abandon-ship order.
In 2015, Schettino was sentenced to over 16 years in prison for manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning passengers. Five other people were also sentenced in connection with the crash.
For readers following the family’s story, the clearest next step is the documentary itself: it is the account that places Lilah inside the scale of the disaster, where more than 4,000 people faced the evacuation and 32 people died.
