Italian Cruise Ship Disaster

I was late for work today.
I told them instead of getting on the subway, I tripped and fell into a lifeboat.

Joe(They said "Okay, then.")Nation

However, unless I am mistaken I thought I saw a TV documentary that showed the building of Titanic in Belfast, and there were even comments about some young men fallen in between the narrow space of the hull and they apparently died inside the hull.
By the way I don’t want to divert the focus of my post to Titanic even though it is quite relevant and even if it happened a century ago.

Do u mean that the builder
refused to rescue them and abandoned them to starve ??

Damn those life boats - always getting in the way

Quite honestly if you are really interested - I've heard good things about this cruise line - they are a much smaller ship and seem to be a higher level of service without all the filler crap that you see in the mega cruise lines.

http://www.seabourn.com/luxury-cruise-vacation-onboard/Main.action

I have heard that is a good cruise line as well.

Nobody who's criticising the cruise ships here has as yet mentioned the aesthetic aspects of these monstrosities designed to carry a couple of thousand people. When I first came to Hilo, I lived in a condo on the harbor, just across from the pier where most of the cruise ships docked. Those are the ugliest pieces of junk to sail the high seas. They don't even look like ships. A tug-boat, at least, has some grace compared to these monstrosities which resemble poorly-designed office structures in downtown Manchester, NH. A ship should look like a ship. The Queen Mary was beautiful.

I know that's off-topic but I just had to vent.

In April, it will be 1OO years since the sinking of the Titanic.

Speaking as an optimist,
I note that, relatively speaking, things went better for this ship than that one.





David

had this ship been in the North Atlantic, this would have made the Titanic look efficient and well organized...

I lived in NYC for a year as a kid and in that year I saw the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth and many other liners several times. Who knew then those kind of ships would pass away, in time. Well, not eight year old me.

There are recent articles on giant cruise ships scouring the seabeds of Venice.
In itself, that's bad news. Picturing them even near Venice gives me the willies.

I remember many years ago on one of my visits to Venice, a megaship passed by San Marco Square, and everybody was staring at this huge monster passing by this mid-sixteenth century plaza.

That area, Piazza san Marco, started in 8oo, the Campanile in the late eight hundreds.
You can take me as not fond of the floating monsters.

The crew of the Ttianic on the whole acted bravely and well.

The engine crew deep in the sinking ship kept the pumps and the power running to the end and the band kept playing to help calm the passengers and the Captain went down with his ship.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16641592



That link includes a video.

We don't know that the crew on this ship didn't perform well overall. That probably 33 lives were lost is quite tragic, but they did help almost 4200 people off the ship.
Some of the chaos was created by the passengers who were in a panic to evacuate, and I doubt that a band playing music, or much else, would have helped to calm them. If anything, the fact that all those people were familiar with what happened on the Titanic, would have heightened the sense of panic among them even more.

There are limits to how quickly you can get that many people off a ship, particularly when it is already tilting, and passengers may be too agitated to behave in an orderly manner. Given the circumstances, including the delay in issuing the evacuation order, this crew may have reacted quite well.

From the statements of the passengers so far the crew as a whole did not act well and the whole bridge crew seems not to had been found.

As far as it being the same situation as the Titanic they was a few hundreds yards from shore and some of them swim to shore under their own power as a matter of fact.

If the crew had been train and if the bridge crew had done their duty I see little reason for anyone to had lost their lives in this grounding.

Hell most of the ship is still above water.

It is difficult to fully now especially until all the data is collected - did the crew act appropriately, did the captain really fall into a lifeboat and was unable to get back on board, is the cruiseline at fault for allowing previous cruises to get too close to the island, etc.

All we currently have is many reports from some of the cruise passenagers who experienced it. Unfortunately for the crew, the passengers, at least at this stage, seem to feel the crew was clueless and of no help and the only help them seemed to get were from those individuals with the least knowledge - like cooks and kitchen help.

But honestly it is hard to know - knowing the media - they are going pull the stories that make the most exciting stuff - so saying that all the captain's crew helped and did their job is less exciting than saying the cowards went and saved themselves and the lowly workers were heros saving the terrified passengers.

I think it's quite amazing that out of 4200 passengers, 33 people lost their lives. Especially since the passengers were told "everything will be okay," and told to return to their cabins.

But bodies were found in the part of the ship that is still below water, and there are reports of bodies still in the water. And several crew members are among the dead and missing.

It's not just what the bridge crew did or didn't do. There were 4200 passengers on a ship that had a power failure, went into darkness, began taking on water, and began tilting, all relatively quickly. There are limits to how fast a crew can locate those who couldn't make it to the deck and lifeboats, and how fast you can fill and lower those lifeboats and get people off the ship. And passengers were panicking, and agitated, and frantic, and not always orderly, and speaking different languages, adding to that difficulty.

It's glib of you to say, "I see little reason for anyone to had lost their lives in this grounding," but you weren't there and you don't know what actually went on. Some loss of life in this situation might have been inevitable once the evacuation order and the distress call for rescue help were delayed, because there were just too many people to get off the ship and not enough time to do it in a more orderly way that might have saved everyone.

I think the crew has to be given credit for all the lives that were saved.

Not sure about giving them credit yet - the jury is still out on that one- but I agree some of the deaths would still had occurred. In one situation, at least a woman had a heart attack - the simple fear caused it so even if the crew did the best job possible that would not be avoidable.

If water rushed in where the hole was and there were crew in that area - those deaths may have been unavoidable as well.

Although I'd imagine at least as much as we know now - that some that we told to go back to their cabins instead of going to the life boats may have survived.