Lucky to get away with it - by Richard... Saturday, January 14, 2012

Lucky to get away with it - by Richard... Saturday, January 14, 2012

To add to the questions already raised on the safety of the Costa Concordia, we read from the latest Reuters report that:

Passengers crowded into lifeboats, but the mainly Asian staff, few of them able to speak Italian, struggled to bring order to the evacuation. "It was complete panic. People were behaving like animals. We had to wait too long in the lifeboats", said 47-year-old Patrizia Perilli.

This is by no means the first time that there has been chaos reported during the evacuation of a stricken ship. Most famously, there was the tragedy when the liner City of Benares (see also news report – click to readable size) was torpedoed in the Atlantic on 18 September 1940. In total 260 of the 407 souls on board were lost, including 77 of the 90 child evacuees who were being taken to the safety of Canada.

Contemporary reports spoke of the crew rushing to the lifeboats, heedless of the safety of their passengers. In the last lifeboat to be recovered were approximately 30 Indian crewmen, a Polish merchant, several sailors, three passengers and only six evacuee boys.

In wartime Britain, there might be some excuse for hiring half-trained Asian crewmen to man ships, but in the supposedly affluent Europe of the 21st Century, one might expect safety-critical posts to be staffed by fully-trained and competent personnel.

There is a parallel here with hospitals, where foreign staff – sometimes with limited language skills- are put in charge of patients, giving rise to safety-critical communication problems, while indigenous personnel go unemployed.

With the Costa Concordia, one suspects that the operators have been lucky to get away with it. Had the challenge been more demanding, the casualty rate might have been considerably higher.

COMMENT: "LEFT FROM RIGHT" THREAD

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Telling left from right - by Richard...

Already the comparisons are being made with the Titanic, as the Costa Concordia runs aground off the island of Giglio, on the Tuscan coast. Such comparisons are inevitable, as this is the hundredth anniversary of the Titanic sinking, it having collided with an iceberg on 14 April 1912.

The similarities, however, are only slight – particularly in terms of the casualty rate - although both ships sustained underwater damage to the beam. The Titanic suffered a gash of nearly 300 ft on the starboard side, but the damage to the Costa Concordia is reported to be more modest, on the port side.

This latter intelligence seems to be based on a report by Coast Guard Commander Francesco Paolillo, who says the vessel "hit an obstacle" - it wasn't clear if it might have hit a rocky reef in the waters off Giglio - "ripping a gash 50 meters (160 feet) across" on the left side of the ship, and started taking on water.

True to form, the Mail then religiously captions a picture (above), informing us that: "About half of the vessel on the left-hand side is underwater". The picture, however, shows the vessel with a substantial part of the starboard side submerged. Associated Press gets it right though. Unhappily, it reports 69 people missing.

Confusion in this case is understandable, especially as a Reuters photographs (immediately above and below), shows the damage to the exposed, seaward side.

Counter-intuitively, the vessel has listed to starboard – the opposite side of the damage, which says little for the integrity of the ship and the effectiveness of watertight bulkheads (unless there is additional, hidden damage). After the Titanic, one always assumed that design changes in ships meant this could not happen.

Thus, we are going to hear more of this episode – and you can be assured that it is only a matter of time before the EU is on the act, with proposals from improving the safety of cruise liners. The "colleagues" are not known for letting benefical crises go to waste.