On the day of the 51st anniversary of the London Valor tragedy, which took place before the port of Genoa on April 9, 1970, the book is out ‘The day of the devil. The sinking of London Valor‘ of Maurizio Piccirilli All Around editions in collaboration with the Command of the Port Authorities. A mild April day fifty-one years ago. Suddenly a strong storm wind struck the port of Genoa, is what English sailors call Genoa Cyclone. Some ships in the roadstead managed to remove the moorings. So it was not for the London Valor, cargo ship flying the British flag. The libeccio blew at a hundred kilometers an hour, the sea at force 8, for London Valor, with the engines out of order, there was no hope.
A handful of rescuers faced the stormy sea near the Galliera breakwater and managed to save part of the crew. Thirty-eight survived out of the fifty-eight people on board. It was the challenge to Neptune and Aeolus by sailors from the port, men of the Captaincy who braved the gigantic waves as well as a small fire brigade helicopter, at the controls the captain Rinaldo Enrico, literally caught a few castaways. A team of firefighters from the breakwater braved the storm to retrieve the freighter’s sailors.
That April 9, 1970 the patrol boat of the Harbor Master’s Office, CP233, under the command of the lieutenant Joseph Telmon, he slipped into waves up to ten meters high and recovered the Filipino sailors several times, without ever retreating. They managed to save 38 crew members, twenty perished in the shipwreck between them the commander and his wife. A tragedy experienced live by the whole city of Genoa that witnessed petrified that drama remained so strong in the memory that the Genoese singer-songwriter Fabrizio De Andrè he dedicated a metaphor song of those times to him. The mayor of Genoa Marco Bucci wrote the preface of the book which tells of that shipwreck which, at just 10 years old, he witnessed in the company of his father.