Cruise Ship Sinks due to Facebook Stunt

He may have been under orders to sail close, but Costa would be pretty crazy to come out immediately afterwards and say he was off-course and acting outside of instructions. That would only get them in complete hole if the investigation later proved otherwise. Costa's statement is clear and well documented, not a subject for much conjecture, so I'm just basing that aspect on a pretty solid foundation.

I'm not particularly judging him, that's a matter for the official process. Also, what I say has no relevance other than provide a foundation for debate on a forum.

But, I would be still interested to hear a plausible explanation for how else this tragedy could have happened. I haven't heard one yet though.
 
Viktor said:
Reminicent of the 'Edwards' the Landlord media speculation after his arrest Christmas a year back.....yes I agree Channa even go arounds by aircraft are not liked by the operators when the cause is someone elses fault as the fuel used is a few extra hundred quids worth and eats into profits, so I doubt the skipper of a cruise liner can just go off on a joyride off course without huge explanations to the owners/operators....was it not said that the strike took place further away from the island and the Captain immediately headed for shallow water aware sinking was inevitable....if that is correct he got pretty close to the shore before it sank.
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Firefox said:
Yes the ship hit the rocks further out than where it finished. He then steered the ship away from the island and tried to turn it into the harbour when he realised the damage was too great and it was sinking fast. When he realised he wasn't going to make the harbour, he beached it on the nearest land just outside the harbour. The course of the ship was tracked by satellite and published so it's not a subject for much conjecture.

The Captain stated after the accident that he had taken a course to save as many lives as possible. In this he appears to have done as good a job as possible under the circumstances.

He later seems to have disgraced himself that he didn't stay with the ship till the evacuation was complete there being a few hundred to be taken off when he left. In this respect it doesn't seem to be as bad as thing as a sinking at sea, as the ship was effectively beached and there was a lot of external help available eg Coastguards, lifeboats and other competent personnel from shore were on hand. I guess he still should have been on the ship though, as he has knowledge of the ship that they don't.
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Sorry firefox i did not see this post before i did mine
 
Hello
I'm prepared to await the enquiry as to the cause of the collision and the action the captain took to beach the ship close to the harbour, however his action in abandoning his ship while hundreds of passengers were still on board beggars belief.
The recording played on tonights BBC news of a radio message from a very angry port official ordering the captain to return to his ship does not leave much room for conjecture.

Blue Skies
 
I also herd sumthing on the radio that last year the mayor of the island requested and got the ship to pass closer to the island than normal for some sort of festival. Could it be he requested again and just got too close. I carnt see any person making such a detour and possibly grounding the ship, surley other senior staff on the ship would have questioned his decsion.
 
***** said:
To be fair, if you look in the forum headers, General Chat is supposed to be M/H related.
Maybe it should have been put in the Travellers Rest
But when do we ever do anything right!
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:scared: i stand corrected, yet agen,
 
Firefox said:
He may have been under orders to sail close,
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That in itself is a pretty interesting notion.

If Maritime laws are akin to that of aviation which I believe they are, then once manifest, pre departure checks are signed off the ship becomes soley the responsibility of the captain and his word for better or worse goes.

Any deviation from the company instructions is an internal disciplinary matter .. but the fact still remains the Captain is in complete control without hinderance until successful dis embarkation.

Only after an impartial inquiry that ascertains the facts, in reality can pointing of fingers apportion of blame be cast.

Slightly OT but the Kegworth disaster at East Midlands would support this course of action. It turned out the press speculation and reality were totally different.

Channa
 
Alien intervention would be the closest I could get to another explanation. Or some kind of thought control, or drugging, so the Master was not thinking correctly.

The ship has a very shallow draught (26 feet) so maybe he deluded himself that there was no risk. Or that sonar would protect him when the speed was too great to change course in time. It seems to be significant that the waiter is reported to have told him he was too close. Having been brought up on a small island, it's not unreasonable the waiter would have had anecdotal local knowledge of hidden reefs that the Master did not.
 
It's worrying that in the 21st Century a ships design doesn't allow for possible massive damage, and sudden influx of water, causes a ship to capsize, or sink. My guess is: superstructure too heavy + centre of gravity too high + hull too thin = disaster. There's a lot of similar ships been built in the same yards, including the new Queen Elizabeth, how safe are they?
 
fofeg101 said:
It's worrying that in the 21st Century a ships design doesn't allow for possible massive damage, and sudden influx of water, causes a ship to capsize, or sink. My guess is: superstructure too heavy + centre of gravity too high + hull too thin = disaster. There's a lot of similar ships been built in the same yards, including the new Queen Elizabeth, how safe are they?
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I suspect not many ships architects: builders factor a 70 metre gash to the hull in their designs

Channa
 
Those ships are more stable than they look, as they have a big tube running along the bottom, and also flattish bottom sections which gives a lot more bouyancy than there looks. I think the supertankers have a very similar profile

Whereas a conventional liner tapers toward the bottom so you lose buoyancy, and need to increase draught to compensate.

But if you make a long gash in the hull, most ships will struggle, even the unsinkable ones like the Titanic. You need a double hull thickness or a multi hull design like a trimaran to cater for this possibility.
 
Just thought I'd share this shipping anecdote.............

Several years ago I found myself on the deck of a freighter, helping to deal with a major fire in the cargo hold. We worked through the night, but our efforts were severely hampered by the mixed hazardous materials on board. Added to this, the vessel began to list heavily, due to various factors including losing power to some of her pumps. It became a race against time to deal with the fire before it reached the critical degree of list where it would have to be abandoned. (I remember the steel decks being so hot that if we stood still too long, our feet would get burned through our boots!)

Anyway, the interesting part came after dawn. As the skies got lighter we could see the huge plume of black smoke drifting over the sea. A pair of American planes (F15's or F16's, I'm not sure) that had been training in the area, appeared over the horizon and headed straight towards us. For the next ten or twenty minutes they used the burning ship as a "target" to practice their bombing and strafing runs! It was a very interesting, if eerie, experience and I'm still not sure if they were having a genuine training session or just had a very dark sense of humour!
 
One lesson to be learnt is that it appears to be that these ships which recently have had a problem and sunk over the last number of years all seemed to have rolled before sinking...therefore it seems that one should get to a muster station on the top deck preferably the back of the boat where you normally have a clear walkway from side to side so when it starts to roll you hopefully have a chance to stay above water....

Travelling on any boat from here on in I'm going to be painfully aware of not to just head for the nearest muster station especially if it is in a lounge somewhere mid ships and two or three decks down from the top deck. The one off Greece rolled, Zeebrugge rolled, one recently at sea rolled stern up....I seem to remember all these pictures of rolled ships.....none settling gently into the water and then going down stern first as the usual film would have it.
 
According to a BBC report, the ships owners' statements failed to mention that the ship actually sailed closer to the same shore last August....with the owners full authorisation... to mark a festival on the island. Who knows what other snippets of info will be uncovered by the investigation, so best not to jump to any early conclusions?

BBC News - Concordia disaster: House arrest for Captain Schettino
 
Talking of unsinkable ships, I did a fair amount of work this year on calculations of buoyancy and tilting of pontoons designed to moor vessels in a luxury marina. These are not normal marina vessels but ocean going yachts (think Roman Abramovich and similar tycoons). These yachts are huge by any normal standards.

Anyway the design of the pontoons is interesting. Firstly the floating concept for pontoons and linkspans is good for a big tidal range as it allows for constant relationship between freeboard and pontoon with automatic tide following. Secondly it allows berthing forces to be partially absorbed by the inertia of the pontoon and then by fendering on guide piles. But one of the great features of these pontoons is they are unsinkable. They are made of a polystyrene core surrounded by 150mm (6 inches) of concrete. Even if the concrete is breached by storm or berthing impact the polystyrene will not allow water in. You could hit these with 20 torpedoes or a 70m gash and they wouldn't begin to sink.

With a steel or even concrete surround this would make a robust ship design. But pontoons are designed to be occupied on the top deck only whereas it would lose a lot of valuable space in a ship. Especially modern cruise ships which are big money making machines. Every space is either cabins, support staff, support machines, or communal space aimed at extracting money from the passengers. It would be unthinkable to devote 30% to polystyrene. Far better to have an economical ship and take care of the hull.
 
Firefox said:
Talking of unsinkable ships, I did a fair amount of work this year on calculations of buoyancy and tilting of pontoons designed to moor vessels in a luxury marina. These are not normal marina vessels but ocean going yachts (think Roman Abramovich and similar tycoons). These yachts are huge by any normal standards.

Anyway the design of the pontoons is interesting. Firstly the floating concept for pontoons and linkspans is good for a big tidal range as it allows for constant relationship between freeboard and pontoon with automatic tide following. Secondly it allows berthing forces to be partially absorbed by the inertia of the pontoon and then by fendering on guide piles. But one of the great features of these pontoons is they are unsinkable. They are made of a polystyrene core surrounded by 150mm (6 inches) of concrete. Even if the concrete is breached by storm or berthing impact the polystyrene will not allow water in. You could hit these with 20 torpedoes or a 70m gash and they wouldn't begin to sink.

With a steel or even concrete surround this would make a robust ship design. But pontoons are designed to be occupied on the top deck only whereas it would lose a lot of valuable space in a ship. Especially modern cruise ships which are big money making machines. Every space is either cabins, support staff, support machines, or communal space aimed at extracting money from the passengers. It would be unthinkable to devote 30% to polystyrene. Far better to have an economical ship and take care of the hull.
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Very clever stuff FF, could have done with your help when i was trying to make a pontoon for my boat on river Trent, made one out of oildrums in end but when river was in flood it wasnt the easiest thing to walk on, and the access to pontoon well see attached
 
Like many things we use these days, they are perfectly safe when used within the design criteria.

However my experience in both the marine and aviation areas is that electronic aids ie GPS, instruments etc are taken as gospel, ie they become the primary method of navigation, enabling the brain to be disengaged and the faithful old mark 1 eyeball to be retired.

Paper charts have inaccuracies being a flat representation of part of a sphere (actually an oblate spheroid). I've seen pilots draw their planned route on a chart then input start and finish co-ordinates into the GPS and off they go. If the route goes close to an obstacle on the paper chart, the GPS may well sail/fly you right into it.

Same for our satnav, how many stories of people going down narrow roads and getting stuck etc, the mark 1 eyeball should register with the old brain and something done about a situation before it gets serious, but our faith in all things electronic gets us into serious problems.

They are an AID to navigation and common sense coupled with experience should avert most disasters.

From my experiance, charts, GPS, satnav all have inaccuracies. Possibly a giant liner's navigation system wouldn't show a small reef close to shore, because no one in their right mind would go there in such a large vessel.

A commercial airliners chart doesn't show every little airfield in the country because they're not going to go there and should be too far away to cause problems.

But we're only human, most of us will have taken actions that in retrospect were stupid or ill advised. Usually we've got away with it!!!
 
***** said:
Polystyrene is often confused with Expanding Foam, I am not sure what the difference is, possibly Polystyrene is little pellets bonded together where expanding foam is two products when mixed then expand.
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For the pontoons I worked on, it was a closed cell polystyrene core as this is part of the formwork for the concrete. For a steel outer design I guess it would be the other way round with the steel shell forming the mould for the expanding foam filler.
 
kimbowbill said:
Very clever stuff FF, could have done with your help when i was trying to make a pontoon for my boat on river Trent, made one out of oildrums in end but when river was in flood it wasnt the easiest thing to walk on, and the access to pontoon well see attached
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Whoops - the pontoon seems to have held up quite well, but the gangway is the worse for wear! Usually the gangways on the super marina's are like a trussed bridge hinged at the shore end and the pontoon end has a rock/roll bearing which allows movement of the pontoon up and down as well as tilting in all directions. A bit much for a single mooring. I guess if you get a really bad flood damage is difficult to avoid.
 
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