Nine years ago, on Friday, January 13, 2012, in the calm Italian waters of the Mediterranean Sea, there was what could be called the biggest maritime disaster since World War II. The super liner Costa Concordia, a repeat of the Titanic, capsized and sank off the coast of Italy with more than 4,000 people on board, including more than 1,000 crew members. The accident killed 33 people, including 32 passengers and crew, and one rescuer; 64 people were seriously injured and the ship was scrapped. One survivor described the tragic situation as similar to that of the movie Titanic: glass flying everywhere, furniture flying everywhere, and people flying everywhere. Within two weeks of the accident, rescue divers searched the ship for missing persons and found most of their bodies. However, the last body was not found until two years later.
Today, we’ll talk about the tragedy that should never have happened.
January 13, 2012, Black Friday, seemed destined to be an inauspicious day. The Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia, departing from the port of Civitavecchia, outside Rome, was once again on a seven-day journey around the Mediterranean.
The cruise ship is massive, with 1,500 staterooms, of which, over 500 cabins have their own individual balconies to view the gorgeous style along the way. Once one of the world’s most luxurious cruise ships, Costa Concordia is known for its extremely luxurious facilities and high artistic standard of decoration. The ship has over 6,000 works of art, four modern pools and two retractable glass roofs, a theater and tennis courts and everything in between… it’s breathtaking! It is a total mobile vacation sanctuary at sea.
The captain, then 51 years old, is Francesco Schettino, an Italian name that may be a bit difficult for you to remember, so let’s call him Captain Schettino, or more simply, Captain Xie. Captain Schettino has been on this familiar route since 2006, and has been leading Costa Concordia safely for five years. This time, he still appeared with a big smile on his face and led the crew to wish all guests a pleasant journey.
The poet Dante said, “Just when you think everything is wonderful, disaster often creeps in.”
At about 8:00 p.m., Captain Xie abnormally directed the ship into the sea near the Italian island of Giglio and sailed off the planned course; by 21:45, the ship ran aground after hitting a reef on the port side. The incident happened only 800 meters away from Giglio port. 5 minutes later, the ship started to tilt. Damage to the left side of the hull caused water ingress and tilting, followed by an explosion of the diesel generator set, causing the ship to lose power and causing problems with the engine and steering system, and intermittent power.
A close call
In the nick of time, unfortunately, Captain Xie’s brain, which seemed to be controlled by a kind of ghost, short-circuited somehow, and he concealed the truth from the passengers, thus delaying the most critical time for evacuation. It was only after the constant urging of his men that the captain sent the signal to abandon ship.
Let’s look at the timing: the accident occurred at 21:45, the alarm was sounded at 22:33, the port authorities were notified only at 22:42, almost an hour after the accident, and the order to evacuate the ship was not issued until 22:50. This seems to be too much of a dilly-dally!
Immediately thereafter, the Italian Coast Guard on Giglio Island began rescue operations; the ship’s first lifeboat arrived on the island at 23:15. Most of the personnel were evacuated in the lifeboats within two hours, and very few swam to shore on their own. Captain Xie not only failed to do his best to save the ship after the failure, but also left the passengers and crew to take the lead in abandoning the ship and became a real “escape captain”.
Runaway captain
Runaway Captain Schettino eventually became Italy’s “most hated man” because he should have been the last to leave, but abandoned the ship ashore early, violating a century of sea navigation an unwritten rule of the jungle: in the event of a shipwreck, the captain must be the last person to leave the ship.
The rule that the captain must be the last to leave the ship began with the British captain Salmond. 1852, the Royal Navy’s HMS Birkenhead, ran aground off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. The troop carrier had 642 men on board, but was equipped with only three lifeboats, which meant that a maximum of 200 men could get out safely. As panic ensued over who would get on board first, Captain Salmond immediately ordered all soldiers to line up on deck and wait, directing that the women and children be evacuated first.
The ship soon broke in two, and as the crew and soldiers continued to fall into the water, Salmond still ordered them not to go near the lifeboats that were already in the water – which could have caused the already full boat to capsize. In the end, the entire crew, including the captain, was killed, with only 193 surviving. Captain Salmond and his crew were praised for their bravery, and “women and children first”, with the captain leaving last, has since become the accepted practice after a maritime accident. And that’s what we see as men, warriors, gentlemen and nobility.
For the charge of AWOL, Captain Xie also said with an innocent face: “I did not want to abandon the ship to escape, is the bottom of the foot slipped into the lifeboat, and I was also on shore to direct the rescue.” The marine police who came to rescue the ship, on the spot, angrily denounced his behavior shameful!
On January 15, 2012, Italian authorities arrested Captain Schettino and his first officer for negligence, manslaughter and abandoning the ship before the passengers were fully evacuated. At the time of the incident, Captain Schettino, instead of living with the ship as the captain of the Titanic had done, was the first to flee the scene, creating the biggest scandal in cruise ship history.
The cowardly captain deceived not only the passengers but also the Italian Coast Guard by replying to the Coast Guard’s inquiry, “It was only a temporary power outage!” When Coast Guard officials called again at 42 midnight on the night of the incident to inquire about the condition of Schettino’s boat, Schettino actually said, “I’m no longer on board, we’ve abandoned ship!” The officer barked, “You must get back on the bow immediately! Climb the emergency ladder and coordinate an evacuation immediately! You must tell us exactly how many children, women and passengers are on board! Is that clear?!” But the captain stammered and didn’t say anything. After about an hour, the Coast Guard officer noticed that he still hadn’t returned to the ship and issued an ultimatum: “What are you doing? Are you abandoning the rescue? This is an order! You have to go back to the boat! There are bodies there!” The escaped captain asked, “How many bodies are there?” The Guard officer replied, “That’s for you to tell me! What are you doing! Are you going to escape home?”
He did intercept a cab and told the driver, “Drive me as far away from here as you can!”
Photo caption: The incident took place 800 meters from Giglio Port
The disaster and the heroes of the disaster
The accident killed 33 people, 32 passengers and crew and one rescuer, and from January 14 to 30, 2012, rescue divers searched the ship for missing persons and recovered most of their bodies. However, the last body was not found until November 2014.
The youngest victim of the Costa Concordia disaster, five-year-old Italian girl Dajana Alodi, and her father, William Alodi, were sleeping on the night of Jan. 13 when they believed the captain’s radio message and woke up in a state of shock! It was a month before their remains were recovered.
Photo caption: 5-year-old Dayana and her father, who were killed in the capsize
The day of January 13, 2012 is not only one of the greatest cruise ship disasters in modern maritime history, but also highlights the heroism and humanitarianism of the crew members whose lives were on the line and who will be remembered forever in history.
At the age of 30, Giuseppe Girolamo was a cruise ship musician, one of the 32 victims of the shipwreck. When he was ordered to abandon ship, part of the lifeboat was rendered unusable because the ship’s hull was tilted to one side. Without hesitation, Giuseppe gave up his place of escape to a child and went to the aid of other guests, whose body was found on the Concordia more than two months later, on March 22, 2012.
Costa Concordia’s Chief of Staff, Manrico Gianpedroni, who helped hundreds of people escape aboard the lifeboats and continued to search the decks for more survivors until he fell and broke a leg. Fortunately, after a 36-hour nightmare, Manrico Gianpedroni was rescued from the bottom bin area of the ship.
Tomas Mendoza, a cleaning supervisor from Peru, who helped a group of passengers board a lifeboat after they fell into the freezing water, died of hypothermia himself.
Petar Petrov, a cruise technician from Bulgaria who made six round-trip rescues from lifeboats to move more than 500 survivors to safety, was one of the last three crew members who did not leave the ship before the Italian Coast Guard took over. Petar Petrov was awarded the European Order of Citizenship by the European Parliament for his act of heroism.
Sándor Fehail, a 38-year-old violinist from Hungary, helped many children and children put on life jackets during the shipwreck and then returned to the ship to retrieve his violin, which was later found dead on the lower deck.
Did the disaster originate with the blonde’s “mistress”?
On October 29, 2013, the trial of Captain Schettino began in an Italian court. On the opening day, a 26-year-old blonde appeared as a witness and stated that she and Schettino had been lovers. What is even more surprising is that on the night the Concordia ran aground, Schettino was busy “romancing” her.
Photo caption: Dominika Chemoldan
The woman from Moldova in Europe, Dominika Chemoltan, testified in court, not only admitting to her lover’s relationship with Captain Schettino, but also revealing that she had been invited to dinner with him on the night of the incident. She was a Moldovan dancer who joined Costa Cruises in late 2011 and “fell in love” with the married Captain Xie.
On Jan. 13, 2012, just hours before the Costa Concordia cruise, Chemolta boarded the ship as a passenger, but her name did not appear on the passenger list.
Chemoldan admitted that she and Captain Shea were dining in the cockpit the night of the incident. After the grounding, she ran to Schettino’s private room and changed out of her dinner attire into civilian clothes, and brought out one of his laptops. Shettino told her to “take care of herself” and warned her to take care of a high-ranking member of the ship’s crew, who was the brother of Costa Cruises’ former managing director.
The presence of a “mistress” is obviously very detrimental to the sentencing of Captain Sheffield. The British newspaper The Independent said that the captain of the ship brought his mistress on board the passenger ship to meet with her, which was already a violation, not to mention the fact that the captain brought her into the cockpit. The Italian prosecution seized on this fact, saying that the “unrelated persons” in the wheelhouse of the Concordia caused the captain to be distracted and in “confusion”, which was clearly counterproductive in dealing with the emergency. This was clearly counterproductive to the handling of the emergency. Many local media also took the time to report that “the captain was probably distracted while he was busy dealing with and showing off his beautiful mistress”.
Although Schettino admitted to negligence, his legal team was working hard to get his sentence reduced and argued that the sinking was partly due to a mechanical failure of the passenger ship’s watertight doors, which did not effectively resist water ingress into the hull. Schettino had also blamed the ship’s Indonesian helmsman for the reefing accident, claiming that the latter ignored his instructions to “turn left and slow down” as he approached the reef. However, an Italian naval expert said that what Scetino mentioned was not the key cause of the accident, and that even if these factors were excluded, the reefing would still have happened. So the captain’s claim that the helmsman made a mistake is to absolve himself of responsibility.
Unlike the natural disaster of the Titanic, the perpetrator of this man-made disaster of the Costa and Concordia was Captain Schettino! Although killing was not his original intention, he was faint and incompetent, corrupt and stupid, he was selfish and self-serving, cowardly and shameless, and what he got in the end – 16 years of imprisonment and the world’s scorn and contempt.
The Costa Concordia shipwreck, and the legal dispute it caused, attracted the attention of the world’s people and the major media, as well as the enormous amount of work and the huge cost of recovering the wreckage. The Costa Concordia was built in 2004 at a cost of $612 million, and the salvage process cost $2 billion, more than three times the cost of the ship’s construction.
After the accident, Costa Concordia lay on its side in the sea for two years, out of sight, until it was salvaged and towed to Genoa in July 2014.
The Costa Concordia salvage project was described as the most spectacular salvage operation in history, and the wreckage was recovered using complex equipment such as custom platforms, inflatable air cylinders and months of manpower. It was not until two years later that the wreck was recovered. What was once a magnificent luxury liner was now salvaged with its interior in shambles, like the eerie ghost ship in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean.
Lessons from the Accident
The captain’s error was at the root of the Costa Concordia accident, but in the process of taking stock, attention was drawn to the issue of evacuation after the accident. The accident investigation revealed that the failure of people to abandon the ship in time and the delay in evacuation were also important factors in the disaster.
As a result, the Cruise Lines International Association recommended that lifeboat drills be conducted within 24 hours before sailing, and the IMO made this a mandatory rule in January 2015.
Secondly, this accident exposed the widespread behavior of large cruise ships sailing close to shore. Since the year of the incident, several cruise lines, led by Costa, have been subject to stricter oversight by the Cruise Lines International Association, which requires ships to install real-time monitoring equipment to ensure that they follow planned routes.
In addition, the sealed compartments were the location where important equipment was installed, and the rapid ingress of water into the five sealed compartments greatly increased the extent of damage to the ship, well beyond what could be controlled. Furthermore, the modern crew’s over-reliance on computerized systems and inadequate training for emergency response contributed to the accident.
Inspired by this accident, the Emergency Medical Services Agency (EMSA) conducted a study on the stability of breakout compartments for passenger ships, and in June 2017, the Maritime Safety Committee of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) adopted amendments to SOLAS 2020 to increase the requirements for breakout stability, i.e. the ability of a ship to remain stable and buoyant after a collision into water.
May such a tragedy never happen again!
Recent Comments