Hi everyone!
The drama surrounding the wreck of the Costa Concordia continues. Rescue operations were suspended due to the threat of incoming storms and rough maritime conditions that caused the ship to dangerously shift on the ocean floor, hampering divers from continuing their search for survivors...or, now more likely, bodies of the deceased.
The latest toll: eleven confirmed dead with twenty-one still missing.
The big question that's on everyone's mind is, why was there an hour's delay from the time the Costa Concordia struck the rocks to the start of emergency/evacuation procedures? To Captain Schettino's credit, he did attempt to steer the doomed ship closer to land assumably to ease the difficulty of rescue operations. But what isn't clear is whether or not the Concordia's operator, Costa Crociere--a division of Carnival Corp, the world's largest cruise ship line--was in contact with the ship's captain during this time and, if so, what was the exact nature of their contact?
We all know by now that Mr. Schettino somehow ended up in a lifeboat when he should have been directing evacuation procedures on board the ship. According to Mr. Schettino: "I had no intention of escaping. I was helping some passengers put some lifeboats in the sea." I suppose there is some credibility to his claim that he tripped and fell, given the ship was listing at a 60-70 degree angle moments after the initial impact, but eyewitness reports of passengers and fellow crew members further attest to the chaos that ensued on board and the accusations that the Concordia's crew were poorly trained on how to handle a crisis such as this.
Mr. Schettino continues to state that the rocks upon which his ship ran aground were a surprise to him, given the fact that only a few weeks before he had successfully completed a similar maneuver to that which got him in trouble on Friday. Top brass at Costa Crociere concur that they were knowledgeable of Mr. Schettino's prior recklessness...not only knowing of it, but admittedly signing off on it. Costa Crociere's chief executive, Pier Luigi Foschi, says he didn't give Mr. Schettino permission to steer the ship through the risky maneuver that got it into trouble. According to an article in today's Wall Street Journal, Mr. Foschi said that Mr. Schettino and Roberto Ferrarini, director of marine operations, were in phone contact around 10:05pm, at which time Mr. Schettino said he was dealing with an "emergency" but didn't specify what exactly that emergency was, because he claimed he didn't know.
A timeline of events released by the Italian investigators puts the initial impact between the ship and these mysterious rocks at 9:45pm. The evacuation alarm didn't sound until 10:58, more than an hour later. At 12:42am, Mr. Schettino is now on a lifeboat. Presumably one hour later, at 1:46am Gregorio De Falco, the coast guard's commander, barked the now immortal lines that will forever represent the disaster: "Vada a bordo cazzo!" Get back on the effin' boat...
Almost a week later, Mr. Schettino is under house arrest and concerns are mounting that there's an ecological disaster-in-waiting. The ship is apparently sinking in an environmentally-protected zone which is leading to fears that its oil is going to seep into the water, thus endangering wildlife in the area.
This story is far from over.
What really bothers me about this event is not so much that the crew couldn't handle evacuation procedures calmly or effectively, but that Costa Crociere--aka Carnival Corp.--knew from recent experience that Captain Schettino was a hotshot, that he'd successfully completed his "Ferrari-like" moves in this same exact area, and yet seemed to have either approved or turned a blind eye to it. What does this say about Carnival? What does this say about the cruise-line industry as a whole? The level of negligence and outright incompetence is shocking, especially when thousands of lives are at stake.
A hundred years after the sinking of the Titanic, you'd have thought these companies would have learned their lesson. On a trivial note, I can't help being struck by the irony that this is happening just a month before James Cameron releases the 3-D version of his Oscar-winning film "Titanic." You couldn't have asked for a better publicity stunt.
Ciao.
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