The arrest of the captain is very shocking

[Nebr.cruiser]

With all due respect, it would be nice if it were as simple as people should pay more attention during muster drills. Absolutely this disaster reminds us that anything can happen, even in this day and age, to "modern" cruise ships and we all should pay attention. Likewise, I would hope that cruise lines may rethink how they may be doing their muster drills to make sure passengers and staff are well informed on safety procedures. However, in this case people have reported being at their muster station in lifejackets while staff turned them away. Reports from survivors indicate that staff were not guiding people and that they were disorganized, increasing panic and risk. No matter how people (passengers) may act during a disaster, it is the crew that need to lead and take control in such a situation. It is scary to think that they themselves were so unprepared.

 

I agree with what you say. It does 'sound' (with facts so uncertain) as if this particular disaster, with the ship close to shore but listing so badly that life boats could not be used, was perhaps something that crew was not prepared for. They had people at the muster stations but nowhere to put them.

 

I bet if it had been the more normal meet at the muster station and get on the lifeboats, confusion would have been much less.

 

It looks like crew needs more training in different scenarios that might happen, and I'd like to think that passengers would not only get more intense briefings at muster drills and pay more attention, but knowing people they probably won't.

[McDebbie]

I just saw that on CNN! How freaky that would be, trapped there for all those hours. And another report had said that the rescue operations had been terminated for tonight to pick up tomorrow morning. (maybe it IS tomorrow morning there?)

 

As for the Captain's arrest, remember Italy does have a different kind of justice system than we know as indicated by the young lady who was finally released from Italian prison this year after being held for 4 years in her room mates murder. Also, there is no way the captain could physically inspect the entire ship himself so he had to rely on others to tell him the ship had been evacuated which may have happened. We need to wait to get the entire facts before jumping to judgement.

[reefisher]

 

 

Studies have shown that on the first day passengers concentration for something like a muster drill (which is compulsary to attend) is very low, they are tired from travelling, embarkation, want to unpakc and go to dinner. The next day passengers are relaxed and the attendance will be much higher than if held the first day.

 

Ron

 

I'll bet studies would show that passenger attentiveness would be increased even more after having experienced the emergency. But that would be a little late huh? I would wager that no such study was ever done with the intent to determine the ideal time for a PREparedness drill.

[OneOneNiner]

(maybe it IS tomorrow morning there?)

EST +6.

That means it's currently 1.30am

More than 24 hours after the accident.

[justcake]

Here is the link to the CBC story and an interview with one of the Canadian passengers that was onboard:

 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/01/14/cruise-italy.html

[MMastell]

There is more to this story and it may be months or years before it all comes out. The one thing that will doom the Captain is if he left the ship before all passengers, who could be rescued, had been evacuated.

 

"Initial" reports state he left the ship on one of the first lifeboats to supposedly coordinate shore side rescue. Not a valid reason. A senior officer would have been designated to do this.

 

Take care,

Mike

[ghstudio]

Two corrections/clarifications:

 

The ship was not sailing between the Tuscan coast and Gigiio when it hit a rock...it was passing between giglio and a very small island thru a passage marked on the charts as deep enough and wide enough for the ship.

 

The ship most likely hit a charted ledge/shelf about 7' below sea level on the left side of the north side of the passage..

 

No one yet knows why the ship was there at all unless there was a serious problem on board which called for them to get to shallow water ASAP.....but nothing i've read to date indicates that this was the case.

[YII]

I feel bad for the captain and his fellow officer arrested as well. Who would want to be in his shoes now ...

 

It will take a couple of months until an official report, hopefully honest will be presented in public with the causes that led to this unfortunate accident.

 

I'm positive that it was a confusion onboard (between him and other officers/workers) and the captain is not the only one complete guilty for this situation, maybe during the investigation everyone who was responsible will be served their punishment accordingly.

[Starlight Durban Cruising]

 

Why would the captain abandon ship before all of his passengers are off? Some reasons may be that he needed to coordinate actions of shore agencies to assist his evacuation and care for his passengers. I'm sure that he had good reason.

 

Now, if this captain made selfish self-preservation decisions, and was incompetent in executing his duties, then, fry him. But, somehow, I don't think that's how this investigation is going to play out.

 

Sorry, this is starting to sound more and more like the Oceanos which sank off South Africa in 1991 (see Cruise Critic articles on that one). In that instance:

- Captain/crew abandoned ship/passengers.

- Captain said he was going to coordinate the rescue from shore (although in that case the shore was a good few miles away). Oh, and they have him recorded on the TV news from the shore saying so the next morning.

 

The Oceanos entertainment team (that's right the entertainment team) took over when they found no one on the bridge, they put out mayday alerts, and then helped the SA Airforce helicopters safely evacuate all of the passengers during the ensuing hours. While the Captain was charged and jailed upon his return to Greece, and then removed from duty, it wasn't long before he was assigned to command a ferry in the Greek Isles.

 

I think the Italians are a little stricter.

[OneOneNiner]

"Initial" reports state he left the ship on one of the first lifeboats to supposedly coordinate shore side rescue. Not a valid reason. A senior officer would have been designated to do this.

 

:D

Yeah...

And he left without making a mayday call...

The left behind crew had to do this while the evacuation was already under way...

Whatever happened, this captain should have never become the captain of such a cruise ship... if just half of the reports are true!

On TV he said the rocks were not on the map... Maybe he can be a comedian instead...

[kenish]

I'm neither European or a maritime law expert. But I believe there's a basic legal/ cultural difference between Europe and the US when a disaster occurs. In the US, the accident investigation focuses on what went wrong. Once that's determined, if any negligence was involved, criminal and civil action can be taken against the companies or individuals.

 

In Europe, the assumption is there are almost always people responsible. After an accident it's very common for charges and arrests to be made very quickly. The investigation focuses on who's to blame....and what happened follows.

 

I'm a pilot and follow aviation accident investigations since there's always lessons learned. I was just reading an article by a US NTSB investigator assisting in a European airline accident. He commented they have to be very patient, and understand investigations work very differently in Europe and most other parts of the world. (Recall that the Concorde crash was blamed on Continental Airlines maintenance and the company and several employees had charges filed against them. The Indian government put a warrant out for the then-CEO of Union Carbide for the Bhophal disaster).

[YII]

A mayday call was made by the safety officer. It will be stared clear in the final raport who made the call and when.

 

Stop bashing the captain. He was a good captain for a number of years, maybe some of us have been one of his passengers.

 

He will eventually pay for everything but stop reading every new article in the media for a couple of days. The media tends to create more panic and confusion among the public.

[Cancruizer]

A mayday call was made by the safety officer. It will be stared clear in the final raport who made the call and when.

 

Stop bashing the captain. He was a good captain for a number of years, maybe some of us have been one of his passengers.

 

He will eventually pay for everything but stop reading every new article in the media for a couple of days. The media tends to create more panic and confusion among the public.

 

I don't think people are "bashing" the captain on a personal basis, but rather on the decisions he made and the actions taken in his role as a professional with certain duties. His ship, his crew, his passengers are untimately his responsibility. As for not listening to the media, if we all didn't then we wouldn't have even heard of this story. I do agree, though, that media sometimes report things wrong and we surely will find out much more over days, weeks or months. Most accounts right now are coming from passengers and crew onboard and I think their personal stories are compelling and are certainly worthy of listening to.

[YII]

Most of the people who posted or who will post in the following hours/days are influenced strictly by what's being said online or on televisions. That's all.

 

They don't approach this situation as it should, imho. We are just bystanders who keep refreshing the news websites and watch news broadcasts that repeat again and again blaiming the same person over and over. It's simply not fair, not that it would actually matter to anyone what's our opinion here.

 

I'm not saying the media doesn't help. It does help somehow for most of the individuals to make an ideea, but we have to take a break sometimes from listening to them. They'll say anything to get traffic, it takes just a few minutes for the word to spread. Who knows, maybe a couple of hours later someone stands up and says it was a terrorist attack, the next minute everyone will forget about the captain and blame the arabs.

 

I'm pretty sure *SOME* of the passengers will skip the actual shock and say everything for some benefits (aka cash) It needs just 1 passenger out of 4200 to appear on the news with a thermal blanket on it saying whatever the news want ...

 

I'll wait for the final report though.

 

---

 

By the way. I'm not related to the captain or company in any way. I'm simply a new freshman navy officer myself and maybe approach the situation different. (i'm not even italian not that does matter). I'm also a regular passenger during my holidays but I do know how to keep away speculations and conspiratorial theories out of my head.

[OneOneNiner]

No!

I see the pics, I see the route he took... and I read and listen what is reported.

The reports only complete the picture.

This captain should have never been captain of a cruise ship. Just after looking at the position, the route, the accident site... Human error!

[YII]

I see the route myself. I'm pretty sure everyone on bridge saw the route on their monitors. Don't worry about that. Even if the captain was on crack the rest would have seen the course of the ship, never doubt that.

 

Many things can go wrong in a couple of minutes when some equipment malfunctioned. Remember the first news that were reffering to some electrical malfunctions ?

 

Once again, never doubt the crew did not see the actual course of the ship. I never ever heard of a mass human error on the bridge of a cruise ship.

[Iluvcruising2]

Fact of the matter was that the captain has been arrested.

 

Apparently he ordered the ship to sail through a very narrow passage of water! If that is true, then he is entirely at fault. You do not take such risks with a huge ship.

[YII]

Apparently it wasn't the first time when he passed through that passage.

 

I see that you are from Singapore, nice place by the way. However, in Europe in situations like this police has to take the toughest action and make an arrest, unless you want some civil unrest (which is very popular lately in Europe) and irritate the media.

[OneOneNiner]

Apparently it wasn't the first time when he passed through that passage.

 

But this time he was off track 4 miles. ;)

Why did the original course was changed?

That's the question!

They changed the course and headed towards the island at 15 knots!

In a last minute decission they changed course again to get back on track and crashed...

[YII]

Like I said here :) http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showpost.php?p=31966399&postcount=66

[ghstudio]

Fact of the matter was that the captain has been arrested.

 

Apparently he ordered the ship to sail through a very narrow passage of water! If that is true, then he is entirely at fault. You do not take such risks with a huge ship.

 

There is a scenario where sailing thru that passage made sense. If the ship had a major problem that caused them to feel they needed to head to shallow water for passenger safety, then he was approaching from the south and he reached the nearest shallow water. Looking at the chart, the passage is wide and deep enough for the ship to proceed to the harbor on the island so it might have been reasonable to go to the harbor. That does not explain why he went thru the narrow passage at 15 knots vs dead crawl.....and to date, we haven't seen anything that would have caused the captain to head to shallow water for safety.

 

Still lots of questions....but sailing thru the passage was not necessarily the wrong decision, under the right set of circumstances.

 

I doubt that the captain had taken the ship through that passage before.....there would be no reason to do so since it's so easy to just go around the smaller island/pile of rocks.

[Iluvcruising2]

There is a scenario where sailing thru that passage made sense. If the ship had a major problem that caused them to feel they needed to head to shallow water for passenger safety, then he was approaching from the south and he reached the nearest shallow water. Looking at the chart, the passage is wide and deep enough for the ship to proceed to the harbor on the island so it might have been reasonable to go to the harbor. That does not explain why he went thru the narrow passage at 15 knots vs dead crawl.....and to date, we haven't seen anything that would have caused the captain to head to shallow water for safety.

 

Still lots of questions....but sailing thru the passage was not necessarily the wrong decision, under the right set of circumstances.

 

I doubt that the captain had taken the ship through that passage before.....there would be no reason to do so since it's so easy to just go around the smaller island/pile of rocks.

 

Ok. Clearly the decision to sail through was a deliberate one. And the captain is alive. So he will have to explain his actions.

[YII]

Still lots of questions....but sailing thru the passage was not necessarily the wrong decision, under the right set of circumstances.

 

;)

 

I doubt that the captain had taken the ship through that passage before.....there would be no reason to do so since it's so easy to just go around the smaller island/pile of rocks.

 

Apparently a video emerged a few hours ago with the same ship being spotted through that passage, or at least that's what I understood, however, if this isn't true, we get back to the "under the right set of circumstances".

 

Captain was not an enemy on the ship.

[ehfl]

Here is what I read on aol news ANSA quoted two Italian journalists who happened to be among the passengers taking the Mediterranean cruise as saying the accident happened during dinner hour"We were dining when the lights went out, and suddenly we heard a bang and the dishes fell to the floor," ANSA quoted one of the journalist-passengers, Luciano Castro, as saying.

 

 

 

This will be an extremely important part of the investigation. Did the ship lose power, and therefore hit the rocks? Or did they hit the rock first causing the power to go out.

 

It's still not clear which happened first.

[ehfl]

All crashes/sinkings are due to human error. When a pilot flies into bad weather, and the weather causes the plane to crash, it's still human error...the pilot should not have flown into bad weather.

 

If an electrical problem causes propulsion to fail, it's still human error. The systems should have been inspected and checked, and have proper backups to make sure that there would be no electrical problems.