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All hell broke loose when the Costa Concordia cruise ship came aground on Friday, according to reports from passengers. With the huge ship beginning to list and everyone onboard fearing for their lives, not everyone acted honourably, according to those same reports.

"There was no 'Women and children first' policy. There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats. It was disgusting," Sandra Rogers, 62, told the Daily Mail.

Another woman, who was travelling with her daughter and seven-year-old twin granddaughters, told the newspaper, "I want everyone to know how badly some people behaved. It was a nightmare. I lost my daughter and my grandchildren in the chaos. I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls. It was awful."

Added another passenger, "Everyone was fighting to get to the lifeboats."

An Australian couple who were travelling with their 12-year-old daughter said there were no acts of self-sacrifice to be found during the chaos.

"It was every man for himself," Michelle Barraclough told the Herald Sun newspaper. She later added, "The People that pushed their way on to the life boat were then trying to tell them to shut the door, not to let any more people on the boat after they had pushed their way on."

The terrifying scene was compared by several passengers to the arguably most infamous boat disaster in history.

"Have you seen Titanic? That's exactly what it was," Valerie Ananias, a 31-year-old schoolteacher from Los Angeles told the Associated Press. We all may like to think we would put others first in an emergency, but clearly that was not the case for many during the crash of the Costa Concordia.

What do you think you would do in that situation?

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