Costa Concordia

I haven’t posted here for while, but the grounding of  the Costa Concordia is a very good reason for breaking the drought.

On the evening of Friday January 13 the Costa Concordia ran aground and sank off the coast of Italy. Sadly, at the time of writing, it was reported that three people had died in the incident. This follows on from the grounding of the MSC Poesia in the Bahamas.

Two superficially similar incidents (cruise ships running aground) so close together is undoubtedly a statistical blip and unless evidence is found to the contrary, I don’t think anything should be read into that. There are hundreds of cruise ships in operation today and most of them operate without a hitch.

Whilst it would be fun to speculate on the causes of the incidents and happily point out things that apparently went wrong, it would be pointless. So I won’t be getting into the details of the incidents, simply because we don’t know any of the details.

All that we do know for the moment is that there is a grounded passenger ship lying on its side a couple of hundred metres off a small Italian island, that three people were killed and forty or more are still missing. Anything else is rumour and speculation.

However, these incidents do flag up a few matters which do concern me.

First off is the media’s typically hysterical reaction to the Costa Concordia incident. A lack of facts and a lack of any knowledge of the subject does not stop the media going wildly overboard on the subject.

Now it maybe that Costa and the Italian authorities were handling the media quite well, but that was not the impression given by the BBC this morning. If there were any press briefings then they were not covered by the BBC.

So the BBC were interviewing crewmembers and passengers – no body from the company or  the authorities. Now, again it may be that there were no English speakers available and I am doing them a disservice, but it doesn’t look good. It just led to wild speculation.

The Sunday papers were full of page after page of speculation, with the usual talking heads roped in to give ‘expert’ commentary. That’s something I suppose, but it is all the wildest speculation at the moment. And some of these experts should have known better.

The other, more important, matter is that of the evacuation of a large passenger ship. Now, despite the reports of panic and the difficulties of launching some of the boats, the fact remains that all but a small minority of people were safely evacuated using the ship’s boats and rafts. The problem is not the equipment, it is the practicality of getting four thousand people off a stricken ship in good time. By all accounts it took nearly six hours to get the majority off and well over 24 hours later there are still people missing.

Then there is the question what do you do with the people when they are in the water. The Costa Concordia came to rest close to land, indeed close to a port, and the passengers and crew only had to travel three or four hundred metres to land. Indeed, there are reports of people jumping and swimming for it (not a clever idea, to be honest). However, if the ship had had to be abandoned in the middle of the Pacific, it would have been a completely different matter – the ship would have sunk and there would have been four thousand people in small boats hundreds of miles from help. Not a good thing.

Finally, there is the inevitable arrest of the Master and Officer of the Watch. Now, I know that a ship lying on its side, exposing a 50m gash in the hull, could be seen as being pretty damning evidence, but at the moment we have no idea of what, where, when, why and how. So arresting these men is nothing but a typical knee jerk reaction on the part of the authorities. Hopefully they will be quickly released, but I don’t see that happening. Just another reason I am glad I’m not working at sea any more. Guilty until proven innocent seems to be the rule for the poor bloody sailor. Don’t get me wrong – if the investigations do find evidence of negligence or incompetence then they should have the book thrown at them. However, as ever, there seems to be a rush to judgement.