Cruise ship run aground in Italy

[MrsSnaplegs]

* Cruise ship runs aground in Italy *
More than 4,000 people are being evacuated after the cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground off Italy, with at least six reported dead.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16558910
Looks horrendous - live photos show it almost horizontal

clam - my mum is on the Arcadia too. Took me about fifteen minutes to find where she'd written down which boat she was on.

Really feel for all the families who still haven't heard about the missing people :(

the biggest desing flaw is their sheer size. more than 4000 people on board, that is a huge undertaking getting them all off board quickly and safely without the boat being in trouble!

mousymouse Yes, especially when so many elderly people, some with reduced mobility, go on cruises. So many of them must be physically unable to evacuate themselves in that kind of emergency....Does anyone know if disabled people get assigned helpers or if contingency plans are made for them in the event of this kind of emergency?

Rabid - the £1 billion fall in the value of the shares reflects what the market thinks will happen to the cruise industry. A lot of potential customers will be put off by this. My MIL already rang up to say she will never go on a cruise ship again. Its not really the price of life that is being reflected.

The cost of salvage will be covered by the insurers and the ship will be cut up and hauled away and the scrap sold off.

Far easier to blame one rogue master than admit that the procedures and processes in place aren't fail safe.

I'd imagine that Smits are working on a salvage plan that salves the vessel in its entirety. I'd be very surprised if it is scrapped if there is a potential to salve it. If it slips further then of course that will be a risk, depending on water depth.

But this isn't the first cruise ship to come a cropper in recent years...it's funny that this is getting so, so much more coverage than the Sea Diamond accident in Santorini several years back (again, hit a rock, 3 presumed dead, last I heard the finger of blame was being pointed at the Greek Hydrographic Office for putting the rock in the wrong place on the charts ).

does anyone know what happens to all the luggage that is still on board?
will they try to recover it or just bin it?

Sorry, should have said that that last post was a response to MoreBeta...

I dunno MousyMouse, but passengers on the Sea Diamond lost everything, passports, everything. Although that may have been because she slipped down into very deep water and, IIRC, totally submerged after a few days, so no chance of salvaging anything after the event.

stubborn - this one is just a bit more visible. Carnival is the firm that ultimately owns the Costa Concordia and is quoted on both the New York and London stock exchanges. The owners of the Sea Diamond were a smaller firm quoted on the Cyprus exchange (according to Wiki).

MollieO - yes I was wondering if Smit could somehow right the ship. It will need sealing and pumping out and hopefully float free but I think it will slip off the reef before long. I suspect if they can right they ship they will probably just tow it to India and scrap it on the beech after stripping the interior of fittings.

I do think that comparing this to the Titanic is crass. How many people died on the titanic vs six people now confirmed dead on this ship.

And ultimately, the buck stops with the captain - i something goes wrong then the responsibility lies with him.

It can't be as bad as

\link{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTS_Oceanos\the oceanos}

which sank in South Africa, and where the Captain was actually the first to leave the ship and directed the rescue from a helicopter. I lived in SA at the time and the headlines were astounding.

It will depend on its insured value. It's build cost was US$450m so quite a lot of money before it could be declared a CTL.

I think it's being compared to the Titanic because a) it's a fairly modern film that many of the passengers would have seen and certainly the reports of panic/people jumping into the water/horrendous sounds of things crashing as things slid and not being able to lower the lifeboats because of the list were all very visual aspects that the film portrayed well. b) because it's still the same issue - boats getting bigger and while these days there are enough lifeboats to remove everyone (unlike the Titanic), the actual practicalities of getting that many people off a ship at once hasn't really been thought through, it seems. c) the general arrogance of the captain/shipping company etc that 'it couldn't happen' - certainly lots of reports along the lines of that gash shouldn't have made it sink there must have been something else like an engine room explosion, again with lots of Titanic parallels.

The Titanic had huge cultural impact on our psyches and the comparisons didn't surprise me at all.

(Ex-Titaniac long before the film ever came out - in my dim distant past have been part of an open source project to get the historical inquiries typed up and available on the internet - is interesting from a dispassionate point of view to see many of the same things being brought up in that inquiry coming up again a century later)

Right, this thread has inspired me to try to work out how to do a link for the first time.. www.seanews.com.tr . Lots of marine disaster news for the ghoulish, like me, including some really in-depth stuff on the Concordia...

This looks interesting too, stubbornstains:

Passenger ships and the SOLAS Convention

"There are two naval architectural principles applied to passenger ships under SOLAS.

The first is that of the margin line, an imaginary line up to which the watertight bulkheads must extend, so that if the prescribed number of watertight compartments are flooded, water will not flow over the top of the bulkhead into the adjacent dry compartment. The margin line the margin of safety.

The second principle is that passenger ships, if they are going to sink, do so on an even keel. To achieve this, they are fitted with cross-flooding valves to equalise list.

Costa Concordia suffered huge damage as a consequence of the grounding - the rock embedded in the ship's port side is evidence of this. To have sunk means that more than the 'survivable' number of compartments were breached and the margin line was submerged. To have listed to starboard means she became unstable as she sank, which is not what she was designed to do.

No passenger ship the size of Costa Concordia has ever sunk. The Antipodean Mariner speculates that the investigation will focus on why she rolled over and what the impact of an open water sinking could have on the fleet of super-cruise ships in service. The loss of life is tragic, but thousands may have died if Costa Concordia had not rolled on to an island outcrop."

So in other words, there's an engineering flaw at work and they are very lucky the death toll wasn't in the thousands :(

That's interesting RubberDuck. I remember that point being raised about the Herald of Free Enterprise, 25 years ago, and lessons supposedly having been learnt....it should be far easier to make a cruise ship that sinks on an even keel than a RoRo ferry, too.

We're descending into our own little world of nerdiness aren't we?

Yes, sorry

it seems she's slipping into deeper waters. all searches have now been abandoned...

Back on now. With all this stuff about captain isn't there some kind of formal hearing rather than this trial by media? Presumably it will be Italy doing all the legal follow up as sank in their waters and it's registered there.

I think that's where we need the inquiry - I've seen a couple of reports now saying that sailing towards the coast was the right thing to do (and certainly that is what the blog post I cut and paste earlier implies - the outcrop it rested on when it did roll actually stopped a far worse disaster) - also in this news report: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16584591

"As the accusations against Mr Schettino grow, there have been those who have come to his defence, setting up a Facebook page with 1,500 fans.

Many of them are sailors themselves who have commented on how Mr Schettino's decision to steer the ship towards port after it collided with the rock had probably saved dozens of lives."

I agree a mayday call should have gone out straight away. I wonder if he assumed that it was only a few compartments breached and that he could just make an emergency call to port and offload with minimum fuss and publicity and it wasn't until it started to list that the extent of the damage became obvious. I guess we won't really know for a year or two until the inquiry is ready.

It always amazes me that Wikipedia gets updated so quickly: Costa Concordia disaster - best summary I've seen so far.

I can't link it as it is subscriber only content but Lloyds List shows the actual course the ship took. It will be interesting to see where on its route it was holed as the track shows it going completely off course. Up until it went off course it was on exactly the same track as it did on 6th January.

Not sure about Wikipedia saying it is a CTL. It will only be a CTL if the salvage cost outweighs the insured value. I think it is too early to accurately assess. The third party liabilities (crew, passenger, pollution) and business interruption claim (if they have cover) etc won't form part of the CTL assessment.

This company ate known for being less than professional, and their deck officers have odd ways of doing things. Rules state that a full evac drill should be done within 24 hrs of leaving port (they never got that far), but most of the bug companies do it before departure to cover this eventuality. Most officers have been saying for a while that the lifeboat situation is wrong, that it is a design flaw.

Done well, the evacs work, even with 4000 guests. However with an irresponsible and potentially poorly trained bridge crew (not all the officers) the leadership isn't coming from the top.

Salaries aren't great, even compared to the poorly paid merchant fleet...especially given the number of lives involved and the years of training. 2nd officer, watchkeeper (so one of the 3 who have overall charge of the vessel on their own) gets around £23k p/a, not paid when not afloat. Shocking.