Italy cruise ship Costa Concordia aground near Giglio

i think the ship hit a reef/rock , and the capt tried to get as close to shore as he could maybe in an effort to prevent capsizing or further sinking , or to give people in boats less distance to shore.

I would be interested in finding out the time gap between the initial strike and the severe listing,there are several contradictory /confusing statements

Imo the ship was hit rock , lost electricity(and propulsion)and when was restored tried to make nearer to shore.

I dont think it hit the rocks where it is now situated until after.



"The boat started shaking. The noise - there was panic, like in a film, dishes crashing to the floor, people running, people falling down the stairs," said survivor Fulvio Rocci.

Those on board said the boat suddenly tilted to the left.


Cabin steward: 'We jumped into the sea'
"We told the guests everything was ok and under control and we tried to stop them panicking," cabin steward Deodato Ordona recalled.

It was about an hour before a general emergency was announced, he said.

Then the ship rolled again, now listing to the right, and the captain ordered the ship to be abandoned"

source:www.bbc.co.uk...

so from this witness statememnt there was approx an hour between the initial impact and the final listing/sinking

reply to post by pause4thought


I have been considering this significant event since becoming aware of it early this morning (0900 hrs GMT).
Since then I have been searching sources and gathering information including conflicting accounts and relevant facts etc.

I conclude that it is unlikely an 'accident' given GPS, mapping of the sea beds , crews familiarity with the route etc. The account of an explosion may be exagerrated , it certainly appears the ship collided with rocks as the photo/video evidence clearly shows a large rock protruding.

Given the Israeli-American part ownership of Carnival PLC (the CEO in particular) and the prescence of about 100 Americans on board - and the current tension with Iran v USA v Israel , a cruise ship would be a credible Soft Target to induce panic, financial loss and show capability to carry out larger showcase events.

Likely it will be covered up that someone posing as a crew member or passenger sabotaged the high tech navigation and/or controls to cause the collision .

Certainly there are many questions to answer . One being that the Captain stated he deliberately sailed the ship into shallower waters after it started listing and a power failure in order to make evacuation easier - yet how does a ship hit rocks in deeper channels?

reply to post by tarifa37


The video / photos today show a harbour and the ship but the harbour is that of the island rather than civitavecchia where it had sailed from much further south.

Unbelievable ...almost...

I've been following this most of the day. Quite a shock really. Such a modern ship with all the best high tech gear and this happens...

One radio news report was saying how some maritime expert of some description explained that this type of event is extremely rare...

Yeah, once every one hundred years type of rare.. (Titanic)

I hope this is nothing more than a technical fault... but I just can't get the idea of an insurance scam out of my head....

My thoughts are with everyone involved.

Can a ship like that even run it's engines without electric power? sounds like the backup generators didn't last very long at all, no doubt because the ship was filling with water.
wow, those poor people.
the survivors are now stranded without personal possessions, including their passports to get back to their homes.
and since the captain ordered all the passengers back to their cabins after the initial impact, surely many were trapped in their cabins when it started listing.
so many questions.
My thoughts and prayers are with them all....

I saw the pictures of this.

Looks like the ship hit the rocky shore of the island. In one of the pics I saw there two lighthouses very near, like right next to the listing ship. How does the ship capt not see the lighthouses? So the lighthouse was out of operation AND the ship's GPS was malfunctioning? Or was the crew drunk?

Sounds like someone wasn't manning the underwater navigation system. Those areas around the ports should already be mapped out thoroughly. Someone is going to lose their job and be held accountable for those deaths.

Link

Rome (CNN) -- The Italian captain of the cruise ship that ran aground -- killing three person and injuring 20 more -- was arrested late Saturday and is being investigated for manslaughter and abandoning ship, said a local prosecutor in Grosetto, Italy.

reply to post by TheRealTruth84


Very interesting.

Another quote from the same article:

"We can confirm that the ship has a breach on the hull of about 90 meters, and that the right side of it is completely under water...

...The coast guard said 50 to 70 people could be missing..."

This story gets more bizarre the more you read.

Originally posted by WeRpeons Someone is going to lose their job and be held accountable for those deaths.

Police Arrest Italian Ship Captain

Who ever was steering the boat was either negligent, drunk or completely innocent due to an unknown change in the channel.

If this crew was following the channel, just as the computers and GPS tell them to I suspect something had changed on the sea floor. I don’t believe the satellites can continuously read the sea floor depths. Ships with side-scan sonar are needed to map out these safe routes. The earth is constantly changing due to movement of magma under ground. This movement is usually slow but eventually any uplift in rock could impact large sea vessels like the one mentioned here. I wonder how long it had been since this sea floor channel was last measured with side-scan sonar. There is an area in eastern Oregon, USA that has been seeing an 9.8 inch (25 cm) uplift of earth since 1996. The area that is uplifting is 230-square-miles (600-square-kilometers).

The European Space Agency's European Remote Sensing and Envisat radar satellites revealed that the terrain deformed in three distinct phases since this uplift began. From 1996 to 1998, the ground rose by 0.4 inches (1 cm) per year. Then, from 1998 to 2004, uplift grew to 1.2-to-1.6 inches (3-to-4 cm) annually. However, for the rest of the decade, uplift declined to only a few millimeters per year, for a total of 9.8 inches (25 cm) of uplift so far.
"The most important implication of our research is that the ground appears to still be uplifting," said researcher Susan Riddick, a geodesist at the University of Oregon. "Previous researchers believed that the ground uplift, a result of the input of magma deep in the Earth's crust, had stopped at around 2006. We found that the ground is still uplifting as of late 2010 and may still be uplifting, but at a slow rate."

www.ouramazingplanet.com...

Magma causing uplift in Oregon

There’s more than one person running a ship of this size, along with computer navigation equipment so I doubt it was negligence. It was either a terrorist plot or earth uplift due to magma.

During the attack on Pearl Harbor the Nevada was intentionally beached as it was sinking and they did not want to block the channel. Maybe skipper thought if he could get it in water shallow enough it would settle on the bottom and make rescue/ salvage easier.

Port Royal hit a reef near Pearl Harbor in 2009. Skipper wanted to use the small boat to go ashore to play golf.

Have to pay attention to where you are, and how deep is the water. Clearly, they were somewhere other than where they thought they were. All that nav gear does no good if you ignore it.

On a Navy ship they are constantly measuring the depth under the keel and if it unexpectedly decreases, you stop the ship.

Skipper will never work again. Should have gone down with the ship.

reply to post by kawika

Have to pay attention to where you are, and how deep is the water. Clearly, they were somewhere other than where they thought they were. All that nav gear does no good if you ignore it.

You seem knowledgeable in these matters. Surely a ship that size has a) a whole team of people monitoring events and b) some kind of a warning/alarm system that would wake up anyone not paying attention. So how on earth can this situation arise in calm seas, so close to harbour?

reply to post by pause4thought


A Navy ship does have a large crew, rotated in 4 hour shifts (watches), who are paying very close attention to their assigned station. A civilian ship probably has fewer people involved working longer shifts. No alarm system on the Navy ship that I recall, a human is assigned to watch the fathometer and call out when asked depth under keel. But on the civ ship there is probably some kind of alarm on the fathometer and would warn (too late) of shallow water.

A ship, like the one you see as my Avatar, has many people involved in sailing the ship. My watchstation was CIC (combat information center) supervisor. In CIC we have two radar stations, the DRT (dead reconing tracer), a chart table, and MoBoards (manuvering boards). THis was in the 80's. Some of that gear has been replaced by GPS I imagine. We actually used an older system LORAN.

In addition to CIC there are people on the bridge, there are lookouts, port, starboard and aft, all hooked up and talking to each other and CIC and the bridge phonetalker.

Frequently, the Navigation officer would make an estimate of our exact position using inputs from all these available resources. If close to an island, she could even use radar to triangulate the position from known landwarks. Lots of ways to skin that cat.

The officer of the deck is responsible for the safety of the ship and should give the order "all stop" if the depth changes unexpectedly shallower. Skipper is sometimes on the bridge, sometimes not. If there is trouble the officer of the deck would call skipper to the bridge.

Tragic...

reply to post by kawika


Thanks for the full reply. In effect it only deepens the mystery. Something is very wrong about this. So much technology. So many people paid to keep watch. The experts almost seem to be saying it just can't happen like this. You can hear it in the voice of the commentator mentioned in this post.


reply to post by Extralien

but I just can't get the idea of an insurance scam out of my head....

I have to admit the possibility of an insurance scam crossed my mind too, particularly in the current economic climate. But surely not.

there was supposed to be the safety evac drill tomorrow, people joked "what if something happens today". oh the irony,,,, it's a sad situation for sure....

reply to post by pause4thought


Sailing in and out of San Diego the Navy ships would always carry a pilot.

A pilot is a paid consultant, usually a retired skipper, who knows the area very well. He would give the orders to safely get the ship in or out of port. He would actually have the authority of skipper as far as orders to steering and engineering when he was on board for the short time to get in or out of port.

Sailing close to land is always risky compared to open ocean.

If the electric power did fail, they have a mechanical device to manually shift the rudder. It is a ton of work but possible to do in an emergency. We did that once on USS Dixon. We had a failure in the steering system, they had to manually shift the rudder for an hour or so sailing on the open ocean. It was not possible to stop due to heavy weather. They use a handle with a great mechanical advantage, meaning many turns are necessary to have a small effect on the position of the rudder. The communication system works without power so orders can be transmitted from the bridge to engineering or after steering in an emergency.

A symptom of the times. They use inexperienced people, because they work cheap. They do little or no training, because it is too expensive, and then wonder why these things happen.

Old people, teaching young people, is the way to do it.

reply to post by kawika


Some very shrewd comments there. Here's more food for thought along the same lines:

Nautilus International, a maritime employees trade union, called the accident a "wake-up call" to regulators.

"Nautilus is concerned about the rapid recent increases in the size of passenger ships -- with the average tonnage doubling over the past decade," said Nautilus general secretary Mark Dickinson in a statement. "Many ships are now effectively small towns at sea, and the sheer number of people onboard raises serious questions about evacuation."

The ship was 2.5 miles off route when it struck a rocky sandbar, according to the Italian Coast Guard. Local fishermen say the island coast of Giglio is known for its rocky sea floor.

Gianni Onorato, president of Costa Cruises, expressed "deep sorrow for this terrible tragedy," but said the cruise line was unable to answer all the questions that authorities are now investigating.

Source (—article referred to by an earlier poster)


And what was it doing 2.5 miles off route?!

reply to post by pause4thought


People get complacent and depend too much on the high tech systems.

On the Dixon, NAV would mark a pencil line on the chart, that was the planned course. Then every fifteen minutes or so we would check to see how close we were to being on course. We had a LORAN which like a GPS would give a position in Lat/long. And other ways to fix our position. If we were off course, the thing to do is STOP, and figure it out. Any time there is a question of ships safety the thing to do is stop.

Today they probably have a display screen, like star trek and they blindly trust it to be correct.

Probably only a couple people on the bridge, OOD and helm. Helm might even be automatic. No CIC, maybe 1 or 2 lookouts, goofing off.

It is not a little speedboat. Even if technology makes it possible, why would you trust such a large vessel to be sailed by one or two people. Humans should be double checking the course constantly.

Link to Navy page, more pics of Attack Tender USS Dixon AS37

sounds fishy