Reliving wreck of Andrea Doria on the 45th anniversary

About the only thing that Anthony Grillo remembers of the sinking of the Andrea Doria is a tumble he took through the fog ... a floating, headlong fall from the deck of the sinking ship into a lifeboat that bobbed below.

He was 3 at the time, and doesn't recall a thing about the open-sea collision July 25, 1956, in the North Atlantic near Nantucket, Mass., of two passenger ships, the Andrea Doria and the MV Stockholm. But yesterday, Grillo watched the two oceanliners crash in a way he's sure to remember - from the bridge of the Stockholm.

As part of the 45th anniversary commemorating the sinking of the Andrea Doria, Grillo and about 60 other survivors gathered at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point yesterday to view the collision in a high-tech simulator that was specially programmed to re-create the accident where 46 people died and more than 1,650 were rescued.

It's one of a handful of such simulators in the United States, and the only one with the Doria crash programmed into it. Survivors stood on a recreated ship's bridge as the sounds of a simulated diesel engine hummed in loudspeakers and squinted at the fog and rolling ocean on a screen projected in front of them. It was only 30 seconds before they saw the dim lights of the Andrea Doria coming toward them.

The simulation is used by the academy as an object lesson on the importance of using radar correctly, for it was a mistake by a crewmember manning the radar on the Stockholm that led to the fateful collision.

But yesterday was the second time that the simulation was shown to survivors, and it was far more realistic than the first time they saw it on the 40th anniversary of the collision.

"This is about as real as it can get," said Capt. Robert Meurn, the instructor at the academy who teaches the simulation to students.

This time, the Andrea Doria that appears suddenly in the fog, as the Stockholm is in the midst of a turn, is an accurate depiction - not a substitute of the Queen Elizabeth II that was available five years ago. And this time, the collision comes complete with sound, a wrenching noise of twisting metal that lasts for several moments.

"The sound was just like how it was," said survivor Joseph Bellomo, 51, of Boston, who was 6 at the time. He watched the simulation yesterday with his sister, Maria Leone of Seneca Falls, who was also aboard the night of the crash. "There were all sorts of rumors going around," Bellomo said. "Some people were saying we hit a big whale, but you hear that sound again and you know what it is."

Grillo, who runs a Web site, www.andreadoria.org, that tells the story of the ship, was among those who saw the re-creation five years ago. "It was scary," Grillo said of the experience. "I just started shaking. I saw it with several of the survivors, and a lot of them were really shaken up."

It was a lot different from how he felt, as a toddler, when the ship was actually sinking. "My mother tells me that I thought it was some kind of game," he said yesterday. "She found me on the deck of the Ile de France [one of the rescue ships] eating an orange. I was happy as could be."

The nautical disaster is also considered "one of the most amazing rescues in the annals of sea history," Meurn said. Of the more than 1,700 passengers and crew on the Doria, 45 died on impact and one perished during the rescue.

The rest were hauled aboard six ships. Five answered the Doria's distress call. The sixth was the Stockholm.

Several of the survivors said that seeing the simulation could never replace the memories of that foggy night in the North Atlantic. Leone, 64, for one, pointed to the scar from a rope burn on her arm that she suffered while lowering herself into a lifeboat, and the scar on her leg when she fell the last several feet onto an oarlock.

"These things," she said, "you don't forget."