A week after Costa Concordia ran aground in Italy, Carnival Corporation has launched a comprehensive audit and review of all safety and emergency response procedures across all of the company’s cruise lines. The company owns nine cruise lines including Costa Cruises, Carnival Cruise Lines, Princess Cruises, Holland America, Seabourn Cruises, Cunard Line, P&O Cruises, Aida Cruises.
“This tragedy has called into question our company’s safety and emergency response procedures and practices,” said Micky Arison, chairman and CEO of Carnival Corporation & plc.
At least 11 people are known to have died in the disaster, and 21 are still missing, according to the Italian Crisis Unit. Poor weather and movement of the vessel hamper retrieval of bodies. And, salvage operators are trying to prevent a half million gallons of fuel from escaping the ship and causing a major environmental disaster.
There are several remaining mysteries.
** A major criticism of rescued passengers was that they were not told what to do and the crew was noticeably absent during the crisis. While a few crew members helped evacuate people, most passengers report that they didn’t see crew or the crew didn’t know what to do. Seven bodies were found at muster stations (where passengers meet to board lifeboats) in life jackets. This is the procedure passengers are told to follow during lifeboat drills, although crew weren’t present to tell them how to proceed.
** Costa Cruises CEO said Concordia made a close pass of Giglio Island last August although not closer than 500 meters. However several days ago the British shipping journal Lloyd’s List Intelligence said that its satellite tracking information indicated that Costa Concordia sailed within 230 meters in August, even closer than it did last Friday.
** Costa Concordia is on a fixed itinerary, sailing each week to ports in France, Spain and Italy and passengers embark and disembark in each port. The ship’s lifeboat drill was scheduled the following morning and roughly 600 passengers who boarded that day in Rome didn’t know how to proceed in an emergency. At present maritime law stipulates cruise ships must schedule lifeboat drills within 24 hours of leaving home port. Should laws be changed so than drill must take place before the ship leaves the port of embarkation?
** When Costa Concordia listed and sank into the water, most lifeboats — which hang out from the side — couldn’t be launched.. Should cruise lines be required to build ships with lifeboats sitting on deck instead of hanging over the side on davits?
** Why did the crew tell passengers to return to their cabins or walk in the hall, that it was an electrical problem — after water began pouring into the vessel?
** There was a 45 minute wait between the accident, when passengers were told it was an electrical problem, and the order to abandon ship was given. During that time the situation deteriorated rapidly. Why weren’t passengers immediately told to return to their cabins, get life vests and proceed to muster stations?
** Perhaps the most important question: Can cruise ships be evacuated in 30 minutes (from the time when the abandon ship signal is given) which stipulated by international maritime law. Costa Concordia’s passengers were stuck on board for five hours and longer. It was 14 hours before the last person stepped off the ship.
20 January
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ShipCritic Blog is a labor of love by Anne Campbell, a journalist who has been covering the cruise industry since 1993. Why a blog? This newfangled technology is the best way of interacting with cruisers, both first timers and veterans, who also share a passion for seeing the world by ship.
7 Comments Costa Concordia: Unanswered Questions Remain
Patricia Dempsey
January 20th, 2012 at 8:53 am
1The fact people died at their muster stations is annoyingly being overlooked by the media. It is frightening to think we, as passengers, do as instructed and there is no one there to help us. I have mentioned this numerous times during arguments with those who claim to know the facts from misleading and contradictory press reports. Myself, I prefer to wait for the conclusion of the investigation. There are too many questions to answer, including from Costa. Did you know many crew had left due to their pay being cut? There were a lot of new crew aboard. How much safety training had they had? Far too many ship inspections mark safety drill as a deficiency, even being ground for detention in rare cases (Seven Seas Voyager had 8 grounds for detention in Southampton last June). People pay a lot of money to cruise and expect to get off alive if there’s an emergency. I think too, muster needs to be standardised. It’s ridiculous some require you to have your life jacket, some do not. Some do rolls calls, some do not. Some do muster before sailing, some do it the next day. If someone only cruises with a line where you’re not putting on your life jacket, they’ll be in trouble during an emergency.
Anne Campbell
January 20th, 2012 at 9:46 am
2I imagine the crew also panicked. I’ve sailed on over 100 ships, know the procedures well and I would have panicked. Add to that on Costa ships announcements are made in five languages (a huge problem in an emergency) plus the normal chain of command seems to have broken down quickly. In the old days the crew was all seamen but today the people assisting with lifeboat drills are entertainers, steward, cooks, people who work in the shops, hair dressers. And while they are trained (the crew has its own fire drill once every three weeks), when the lights go out, water is pouring in and the ship is listing passion spreads like wildfire. Most of all, ships aren’t built to turn on their sides and sink, they are supposed to sink straight down. No one has a procedure for that eventuality.
Stuart Falk
January 21st, 2012 at 9:17 am
3While most travel agents are more focused on commissions than the safety of their clients,, my concern is that by Costa management and the powerful coalition of Italian shipbuilders, labor unions, investors and politicians putting all the blame on human error, there will be a cover up in the investigation of why the safety systems, intended to maintain balance and avoid or postpone listing, didn’t operate, which prevented the life boats from being deployed on both sides of the vessel. If this reflects a fundamental design flaw, then the implications for the industry are significant indeed.
Lisa Dwyer
January 21st, 2012 at 2:01 pm
4My husband is a jazz pianist who worked on a Costa Cruise ship as a Music Director in 1996-97, sailing out of Port Everglades, FL. When he reported for duty, one of the management team told him he was a now “safety officer”!! My husband said, what the hell do I know about safety? I’ve never been on board a ship before in my life. (The closest he came to water during his career was playing at the Casinos in Atlantic City, NJ.) They then reassured him that it wasn’t a big deal — all that he had to do was to watch a safety film and he would be “certified.” Well, my husband told me he tried to watch the safety film, but it was in ITALIAN. Apparently, the sound was turned down and everyone in the room who was supposed to be paying attention to the film was playing cards and smoking. So much for COSTA’s safety training program. Shame, shame.
Anne Campbell
January 21st, 2012 at 3:48 pm
5Sad to say, I believe it……..
Patricia Dempsey
January 21st, 2012 at 4:10 pm
6I found Lisa Dwyer’s comments most interesting. It was pre-Carnival but you can’t help wondering if it’s still like this. Perhaps it forms part of Carnival’s over-doing about safety certificates and the finger pointing within 48 hours of the accident.
Peter M.
January 26th, 2012 at 1:14 am
7It looks as if there are no readers from the Deck Department, so I’ll do my best to answer a couple of questions from a purser’s point of view.
Q: Should cruise lines be required to build ships with lifeboats sitting on deck instead of hanging over the side on davits?
A: AFAIK, ships ARE built with lifeboats sitting on deck. They don’t hang over on davits until they are launched. They must be secured somehow, and launched somehow. The only answer is davits. Even the rafts have to be launched, from a single davit. It’s the only way to get passengers into them before lowering; otherwise there’s no way to abandon ship but to jump into the water first. On older ships the boat deck was topmost. In later designs boats are secured on lower decks, with the advantages of lowering the ship’s center of gravity, and reducing the angle of the dangle (so to speak). Of course, boats and rafts can be lowered only while the ship is relatively upright.
Are you thinking of something like rafts that can be launched with an explosive charge, and that will inflate automatically once they hit the water? Sorry, I haven’t the tech knowledge to answer that one, but I suspect that if it was practical, it would have been done already.
Q: Why did the crew tell passengers to return to their cabins or walk in the hall, that it was an electrical problem — after water began pouring into the vessel?
A: This is a judgement call. As a crew member, if I knew we were holed and taking on water, no way would I head down to my cabin. There are plenty of lifejackets stored in lockers on deck. But this judgement call should not be necessary. The captain should know before anyone else how badly we are holed, should signal abandon-ship stations right away, and announce for passengers to grab jackets if they’re in their cabins, or otherwise head UPWARDS to open decks and/or to topside public rooms. It seems to me what this captain did wrong was wait too long to sound the alarms and to close the watertight doors. What he did right was to steer for shore and deploy the anchor. (At least, from the photos it looks to me that he deployed it, but on this I stand to be corrected by a true sailor).
Q: In an earlier blog post someone wrote that ships are designed to sink “straight down” and not roll over.
A: I imagine what the writer meant was that watertight doors are intended to keep water in ‘compartments’ and distributed so as to keep as even a keel as possible. I don’t think ships are ‘designed’ to sink in any particular way at all. In this case there is a VERY long gash that seems to extend across several compartments. If the ship had sunk in deep water, it would probably not only have rolled over as it did, but finally have gone down aft first.
One important question I cannot answer is whether the ‘electrical problem’ prevented closing watertight doors.
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