Cruise Ship Tips Over

The course deviation may have been unauthorized and selfish but was not necessarily unsafe since it closely fit an approved deviation that had been followed August 14th. The UK Hydrographic Office charts do not show the rocks on which the ship initially went aground.

The ship was holed on the port side but very promptly listed to starboard and it seems that the cause of the fatal list was the hard turn to starboard ordered to bring the ship into a nearby port. A more gentle turn and the ship would not have listed.

Quote: FleaStiff

The ship was holed on the port side but very promptly listed to starboard and it seems that the cause of the fatal list was the hard turn to starboard ordered to bring the ship into a nearby port. A more gentle turn and the ship would not have listed.

The ship left Civitavecchia roughly 50 miles away and hit the rock at 9:42 p.m. Looking at a map,it looks like the rock was 500 yards north of the Island harbor. I assume that the Captain was trying to turn around and pull into the island harbor? Could that small island (population 1500) port have handled a huge cruise ship carrying 4200 people? I understand it was one of the largest ships in Italy.

Harbor on Isola Giglio

Ship hit a rock off Isolo de Scolo. The rocks were not on the UK Hydrographic Office charts.

The ship came to rest on rocks off Punta Gabbianatta after the vessel had proceeded to a point off Lazaretto and then executed a turn to starboard to head past point Gabbinaatta and into or near the small Giglio Porto which would have at least been more sheltered waters for the launching of life boats.

A turn into Giglio Porto would have been a turn to port, but the captain may have felt a turn to starboard would be safer as well as faster. However, the resultant sloshing of the water in unbaffled areas apparently shifted the center of gravity causing a 20 degree list to starboard which proved fatal as she never righted herself from it.

Waters were dangerously shallow and course was unsafe but did closely mimic an earlier course that has passed very close to the Isolo de Scolo rocks but had somehow avoided hitting them.

"The rocks were not on the UK Hydrographic Office charts."

The UK charts are 1:300,000 scale and not (according to them) designed for shoreline work. I believe the UKHO recommend that people use bigger scale, local charts for anything close to land.

Quote: FleaStiff

Ship hit a rock off Isolo de Scolo. The rocks were not on the UK Hydrographic Office charts.

The ship came to rest on rocks off Punta Gabbianatta after the vessel had proceeded to a point off Lazaretto and then executed a turn to starboard to head past point Gabbinaatta and into or near the small Giglio Porto which would have at least been more sheltered waters for the launching of life boats.

A turn into Giglio Porto would have been a turn to port, but the captain may have felt a turn to starboard would be safer as well as faster. However, the resultant sloshing of the water in unbaffled areas apparently shifted the center of gravity causing a 20 degree list to starboard which proved fatal as she never righted herself from it.

Waters were dangerously shallow and course was unsafe but did closely mimic an earlier course that has passed very close to the Isolo de Scolo rocks but had somehow avoided hitting them.

I understand now, I got a bad lat and long out of wikipedia. The ship hit the rock before reaching the island port. Had he responded immediately it would have been a quick port turn into the harbor. Instead he sailed past the harbor and made a starboard turn and attempted to return to the harbor, and that flooded the spaces. That's why there was over 4 hours between the crash and the ship to shore radio communication.



That does look bad for the captain. Not just that he hit the rocks, but that he doesn't appear to have responded quickly and competently to the crash. I think he is toast.

You can see from the times that he would have had about 15 or 20 minutes to make the correct decision. If he waited, then it was too late.

>I think he is toast.
A certain 24 year old ballerina is standing by him. I don't think anyone else is. However the track he followed while unauthorized is one that had been followed and authorized the previous August and which took him only about a hundred feed away from that rock.

The passengers telephoned the police, the police called the vessel and someone on the bridge told the police that it was only an electrical problem despite the knowledge that they were taking on water and that the boats had been ordered lowered two minutes earlier. Even a prompt MayDay would have brought dozens of smaller vessels and two large ones.

Quote: FleaStiff

Even a prompt MayDay would have brought dozens of smaller vessels and two large ones.

What Captain Schettino himself told investigators is that he tripped and fell into a lifeboat accidentally while trying to help others. However, the No. 1 and No. 2 next ranking Concordia officers must have tripped and fallen also, since they were all in the same lifeboat.

While I think the "Captain going down with his ship" is more of a saying than an actual law, it does not seem to me that there was imminent danger unless you were below deck. Possibly I have the certainty of hindsight.

I doubt that anyone would expect him to actually go down with an empty ship, but he seems to have left when there were still a significant percentage of the passengers still evacuating.

At this point Carnival should just write off the ship, and give it to some third world country as a show of good faith. It would be better than repairing it and struggling to fill it with passengers for the next two decades.

No law requires a captain to go down with his ship or to be the last to abandon ship.
The only laws that apply to an Italian flagged vessel in Italian waters is Italian law, which means an Italian court and that means more theater than law anyway.

The International Laws of the Sea do NOT require women and children to be first nor do they require that it be passengers first, crew members may legally take to the lifeboats while passengers are still aboard a vessel that is in distress. Of course in this situation, the Concordia crew were simply cowards who knew boats would be less and less available and decided to "get while the getting was good" rather than wait until the getting was more honorable and fewer passengers were still aboard.

The ship is clearly a total writeoff but the five marine insurance carriers involved will probably be making that decision.

This sad incident fans the flames of ancient prejudices, e.g. "Italian man = histrionic COWARD,"

hey how can you tell the italian navy.......oh, never mind.