Italian Cruise Ship Disaster

Schettino said the black box on board had been broken for two weeks and he had asked for it to be repaired, in vain.

The World Costa Concordia deathtoll reaches 16, as skipper blames company
January 25, 2012

THE captain of the stricken Costa Concordia told a friend the day after the disaster that a manager from the cruise company pressured him to sail too close to shore.
The news comes as fire brigade divers found a body in the stricken Italian cruise ship, bringing the official death toll to 16 as salvage crews prepared to pump 2380 tonnes of fuel from its tanks.

The body was found on the third deck where some of the 114,500-tonne vessel's lifeboats were located, with rescuers declining to give further details on the grim discovery 11 days after the Mediterranean tragedy.

Captain Francesco Schettino told a friend he was following the advice of a manager about what route to take, saying ''pass through there, pass through there,'' media reported, quoting a call secretly recorded by police the day after the January 13 shipwreck.

''In my place, another would not have been so ready to pass there, but they got to me with their 'Pass through there, pass through there','' Schettino said.

...''The rocks were there, but the instruments I had weren't showing them, so I went through,'' he said.

Schettino then reportedly said he thought he was about 450m away, but the ship hit a rock.

''So, here we are and it's me who's paying for everything,'' he said.

Schettino has been under house arrest since January 17.

Rescue workers also identified one of the victims found so far as 30-year-old Maria D'Introno, whose relatives survived the disaster and said she was too scared to jump into the sea when the order came to abandon the ship.

The story of D'Introno - who had a life jacket but did not know how to swim - is one of the many dramas from a chaotic night-time evacuation of the massive ship after it hit rocks off the island of Giglio on January 13 and keeled over.

Other victims include Hungarian Sandor Feher, 42, who helped children into a lifeboat before heading back towards his cabin to get his violin, and Frenchman Francis Servel, 71, who gave his wife his lifejacket. She survived.

The anger of survivors has concentrated on captain Francesco Schettino, who is under house arrest at his home on the Amalfi coast and is accused by prosecutors of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship.

But Schettino's wife defended him, saying he had become "a scapegoat".

"There's a manhunt against him! People are looking for someone to blame, a scapegoat, a monster," Fabiola Russo said in an interview for the next edition of French magazine Paris Match.

Russo said he "knows how to analyse situations, understand them and manage them. At home he is very orderly, meticulous," adding that he was "lucid" - a response to criticism that the captain appeared in an altered state that night.

Crews from Dutch company Smit Salvage on the island meanwhile were looking for the best way to access the Costa Concordia's 23 fuel tanks before syphoning all the heavy oil out in order to avert an environmental catastrophe.

Officials said the pumping was not expected to begin before Saturday and that the whole process could take weeks, with salvage workers working initially on the half of the oil that is accessible from the above-water part of the ship.

Smit will carry out a so-called "hot-tapping" operation, which involves pumping the fuel out into a nearby ship and replacing it with water so as not to affect the ship's balance and stop it from slipping into the open sea.

The Costa Concordia went down on January 13 with 4229 people on board. It has emerged that Italian prosecutors were looking into the cruise ship operator's possible role in the wreck and reports of a messy evacuation.

"The employer is the guarantor and is responsible. We have to look at the choices made by the operator," Beniamino Deidda, chief prosecutor for the region where the disaster occurred, was quoted by Italian media as saying.

"For now the attention has been on the fault of the captain, who turned out to be tragically incompetent. But who chooses the captain?" Deidda asked.

The prosecutor also pointed to multiple problems with the evacuation, including a lack of preparation for the emergency among crew members.

Environmentalists warn that the human tragedy of the Costa Concordia could now be followed by an ecological catastrophe if oil spills into the pristine seas of the Tuscan archipelago in what is Europe's largest marine sanctuary.

The head of Italy's civil protection agency, Franco Gabrielli, who is overseeing rescue operations, said a thin oil slick measuring some 60,000sqm had been spotted and may have come from the ship.

Hundreds of metres of absorbent barriers have already been placed around the wreck to contain any possible oil spills. Gabrielli said there has also been some contamination of the sea from toxic substances on board.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/costa/story-e6frg6so-1226253068002

Meanwhile the chief prosecutor overseeing the investigation said failings in safety procedures meant that Genoa-based Costa Cruises should also be investigated.
Beniamino Deidda, the chief prosecutor of Tuscany, pointed to "life boats that could not be lowered, crew that did not know what to do, inadequate preparation for emergencies and absurd orders such as the one for passengers to return to their cabins.
"For now, attention is concentrated on the fault of the captain, who showed himself to be tragically inadequate. But who chose the captain? Not all the shortcomings in safety procedures can be blamed on the captain's conduct.

I have no doubt that the shipping co. management is culpable in this disaster in some degree at least. But, at the same time, methinks Capt. Schettino doeth protest too much. As you've said, Tak, the final responsibility at sea is his (the captain's) and under maritime law he is quite free to disregard any "suggestions" or even direct orders from management on shore. His primary responsibility is to the ship, passengers and crew, not the whims of some desk-bound executive of the parent company.

Your argument is that same one that claimed that E-4's and E-5's w[h]ere responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.....an argument that I am pretty sure that you rejected at the time.

Costa Cruises, at any rate, is blaming Schettino. The fact that he diverged from the planned course was the result of "a maneuver that was not approved, not authorized nor communicated to Costa," the company's chairman said. He insisted that his ships would never come closer than 500 meters from Giglio.

The Boring Ocean

But that is not the whole story. Part of the reality is that many cruise-ship companies are faced with bitter competition and gamble with the lives of their passengers as a result.

The Concordia had already passed the island at very close range once before, last August. In fact, it was even closer that time, only 230 meters from the shore, which is highly dangerous for a ship that is 290 meters long. But that time the Concordia was coming from a slightly different angle.

Specialists with the insurance company Lloyd's of London keep the position data of ships on file, which allows them to reconstruct every voyage. On that day last August, the officers in charge of the Concordia took a great risk, because there was a big festival in the island's tiny harbor that evening and they wanted the ship to be part of it.

Cruise lines want to offer their passengers something special, because the open ocean is in fact pretty boring to look at. That was why, for example, Schettino also sailed the Concordia close past the island of Procida near Naples in August 2010.

In the wake of the Concordia disaster, the Italian government is now drafting a ban on reckless maneuvers in overly tight spaces. This could be disastrous for the booming industry, which is raking in billions.

Some of his colleagues see him as a daredevil. Last year, Schettino told a Czech journalist: "I enjoy moments when something unpredictable happens, when you can diverge a bit from standard procedures."

Almost exactly four weeks before the disaster, he demonstrated his approach to his crew. The Concordia was at anchor in the port of Marseille, while a storm with wind speeds of 50 to 60 knots raged out in the open water. "We expected that we would not sail that day," recalled officer Martino Pellegrino.

But Schettino assembled the entire crew on the bridge and ordered them to set sail. His words were met with icy silence among the officers. "We looked at each other," said Pellegrino, "but we didn't have the energy to disagree." Schettino then drove the Concordia through the choppy waters at full throttle. The 56,000-horsepower engines drove the 50,000-ton ship through the breakers, a show that few other men could pull off. Everything went well, and it seemed that Schettino was in control of his ship and knew what he was doing out in the open water.

The problem was that he didn't have enough fear of the sea.

Also something to keep in mind:

Quote:

Some of his colleagues see him as a daredevil. Last year, Schettino told a Czech journalist: "I enjoy moments when something unpredictable happens, when you can diverge a bit from standard procedures."

Almost exactly four weeks before the disaster, he demonstrated his approach to his crew. The Concordia was at anchor in the port of Marseille, while a storm with wind speeds of 50 to 60 knots raged out in the open water. "We expected that we would not sail that day," recalled officer Martino Pellegrino.

But Schettino assembled the entire crew on the bridge and ordered them to set sail. His words were met with icy silence among the officers. "We looked at each other," said Pellegrino, "but we didn't have the energy to disagree." Schettino then drove the Concordia through the choppy waters at full throttle. The 56,000-horsepower engines drove the 50,000-ton ship through the breakers, a show that few other men could pull off. Everything went well, and it seemed that Schettino was in control of his ship and knew what he was doing out in the open water.

The problem was that he didn't have enough fear of the sea.

Its reminiscent of playing Russian Roulette.
Most of the time, the player will probably be OK,
but even so, its not advisable, in my opinion.





David

"In my place, someone else wouldn't have been so benevolent to have gone right under there, because they have pissed me off, go, go there," Schettino said, in an apparent reference to getting close to the island, according to the newspapers. "The shallows were there but it wasn't signaled by the instruments that I had and I went through ... in order to follow what the managers wanted."

This is very interesting, wouldn't you say Andy?

hawkeye10 wrote:

This is very interesting, wouldn't you say Andy?

Yes, it is. It's also old news that's been rehashed on this and other threads a number of times. So what's your point?