Italian news article

passenger list from Wikipedia

The captain claimed that he struck a rock that was not charted; still, no mayday signal was sent until after passenger evacuation had started.

I heard a quote from one of the German survivors "It was like being on the Titantic". Yeah, right, row 15, seat 7 of the Multiplex Movie Theater in Frankfurt, 1997.

Modern cruiseliners are terribly top-heavy, Without power to the stabilizing systems they will capsize as soon as you sneeze at them. As for chaos in an emergency, you will get that when you crew your ships with cheap labour.

My friend and her family went on this same cruise in November. They had a great time.

One part of me is grateful that it happened so close to an island. The other part is says is fuming. This cruiseliner has sailed the same journey many times over. I refuse to believe the statement that they hit a rock/shelf that hadn't been marked on their maps, etc....

I hope they find all the missing people alive and tipsy from all the hospitality the islanders have given them.

According to the BBC the ship seems to have deviated "from its course by 3-4 nautical miles" so it will be interesting to see what happened

according to italian news the most probable explanation is that the captains of cruise ships pass very close to certain cities on the coast to allow passengers to "greet" the inhabitants. especially at night it is a great show, of course.

not sure if the inhabitants are all so happy about this, but now a letter of thanks written by the mayor of Giglio just last august has been made public: in this he expresses his great appreciation for what he calls an "unrenounceable tradition" of Costa of passing so near to the coast, allowing the inhabitants to enjoy the amazing show, especially at night.

there've been reader's letters commenting that local politicians linked to the local tourist authorities might even have "arranged" the whole thing with Costa...

Maybe I should donate a GPS

Should I inform the Canadian coast guard

On commerical aircraft there is a "black-box": actually 2 "boxes"
Flight Data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.

Anyone know how the shipping industry records boat and cockpit data??

same thing on ships, it seems. and the Concordia black boy has already been recovered and is currently been examined.

sxcuse me, I meant black box, of course...

Don't have the news link handy but I read that many locals took in stranded passengers to their homes. That's cool.

The Titanic reference is a bit melodramatic, but I can imagine the level of fear and panic for the passengers was probably way off the meters for their life experience. It seems that evacuation procedures were not gone over with the passengers by the crew, plus the 20 degree list made the boarding and launch of lifeboats very difficult- plus, it was dinner time and most people were in evening wear with totally inappropriate clothing for the cold. Perhaps if this had happened in summer there would have been no fatalities.

SS Andrea Doria comes to my mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Andrea_Doria

some of them might not have died, like the old man who suffered a heart attack falling in the water. but two bodies have been found in the cabins and 17 are still missing, hopefully not all of them dead (for instance two japanese tourists who were declared missing had simply travelled on to rome without reporting to their embassy).

apparently the electric lock of the cabins failed and there might be more people closed in, also due to contradicting orders from a very incompetent management of the emergeny on the part of the crew.

the captain is being incriminated not only for causing the disaster with a wrong manouvre but also for abandoning the ship. the carabinieri spotted him in the harbour of Giglio and tried invain to convince him to return onboard to coordinate rescue operations as requested by law! outrageous, I mean every child knows that the captain is supposed to be the last one to abandon the ship.

there were also cases of heroic behaviour, though, like someone from the restaurant or hotel staff (not a marine officer) who according to many witnesses contributed to saving many lives before collapsing in a cabin with a broken leg. his cries were heard today, and he could be rescued after 36 hours ordeal.

As a frequent cruiser there are so many difficulties that I can see the passengers had.
When you board before the ship goes anywhere it is compulsory to take your lifejacket to your muster station where you are told what you must do in the unlikely event that you need it.
Your lifejackets then go back to your room in the cupboard.

Unless you have cruised you cannot understand how large some of these ships are. We have often wondered if we were in the situation what would we do. If you are on deck 2 or deck 12 and needed to get your jacket it would take a long time to get to your cabin and we can get around quickly - so many people who cruise cannot do this. But of course the time taken to go back to your room could have been spent rushing to the lifeboats.

Maybe electrical problems made the ship unsteerable so it drifted into shallow water - so many theories and so sad for the families who have lost loved ones.

I heard, that the reason, that the evacuation started that late, was that the crew tried to bring the ship as close to the coast as possible before abandoning it. The actual accident didn't happen where the ship is lying now, but a few kilometres away from the coast.

just an update after watching italian news tonight: the helper with a broken leg was indeed an officer of the crew.

finally another big issue has been addressed, that regarding the rimoval of the wreck, which is stranded not only just 150 m from the shore an island living of tourism, but also in an important marine nature reserve which encompasses a unique biosphere.

they're saying it will take at least a year to take all the single components of the ship apart and take them away. in a best case scenario there will be no oil spill from the tanks.

good point, I'd heard about that at the beginning, too, but it didn't come up again. enquiries are well underway and there are constant updates. I'll try to follow the special editions later on this evening.
for them moment the whole event seems to be overshadowed by the outrageous behaviour of the captain.

I would not be too harsh on the captain. The era where the captain went down with his ship is long past and there is another reason why he could have left.
The ship was dead, modern ships are diesel-electric, the power is supplied by diesel engines, they cut off automatically as soon as the list gets over a certain degree and although there is a bit of a UPS battery back-up it is not designed to run the ship for long.
Without power the captain has no control over anything and on a 200-odd meter long ship a megaphone is not much use.
If he left the ship to co-ordinate rescue on land then he did the correct thing as there is no law that states he must be with the ship.
Modern cruise ships are not built the way you would imagine a ship to be built, they are more like containers bolted to a hydrodynamic pontoon, everything is modular, it makes it possible to build really BIG ships in order to maximize profits, however it makes them extremely rank or top heavy.
As soon as water gets in and floods the hull the ship will tend to roll over and not settle.
A capsizing ship can not launch the boats making the promise of every man on board a place in a lifeboat moot. That is why cargo ships have their boats mounted on a slide at the stern.
I worked on MS Europa a cruise liner many moons ago and although we were trained in emergency procedures we knew that if anything happened there would be chaos, steel corridors without lights and maybe a list would be a death trap maze.
We did not have much trust in the officers who were chosen for their good looks and ability to charm.
We crew had a sort of pact that we would gather any passengers that we can find lead them aft and get the hell out of dodge.
MS Europa was sold and I was on the last voyage, a few years later I heard that the ship had collided with a rock in Cadiz and sank, she was scrapped in situ in the harbor.
Rumor has it that it was an insurance job.
Aaaand her new name was MV Costa Columbus run by Costa-lines, the very same as our recent newsworthy item.


A much younger Slammer in the middle of the photo and his ship.

I heard on the news yesterday that there is in fact a law that the captain is required to stay on board, and the penalty for not doing so is 12 years in prison.