An Italian cruise ship’s deadly debacle

What happened

An Italian cruise ship captain whose $450 million vessel ran aground, killing at least 11 people, was arrested this week on suspicion of manslaughter and abandoning ship. Capt. Francesco Schettino was four miles off course when the Costa Concordia hit a submerged reef about 150 yards off the Tuscan island of Giglio, tearing a 160-foot gash in the hull. Prosecutors suspect that Schettino deviated from the 17-deck ship’s preprogrammed route as a favor to a crew member who wanted to pay tribute to family members who live on the island. After the accident, the ship listed heavily to starboard, and many of the 4,200 passengers and crew were forced to scramble up near-vertical ship corridors to escape the rising sea. “Have you seen Titanic? That’s exactly what it was,” said Valerie Ananias, 31, a Los Angeles schoolteacher. “We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life vest strobe flashing,” her mother, Georgia, added.

On deck, passengers battled for places on lifeboats, which few crew members knew how to operate. “It was everyone for themselves,” said Spanish passenger Juan José Quevedo. Schettino made it onto a lifeboat early but claimed that he hadn’t deliberately abandoned ship. “I tripped and ended up in one of the boats,” he told prosecutors. The local coast guard commander, Gregorio Maria de Falco, repeatedly demanded that Schettino return to his half-submerged vessel, but the captain refused, saying it was dark. “Schettino, maybe you saved yourself from the sea, but I’ll make you have trouble for sure,” De Falco was recorded as saying. Search teams were looking for 21 missing people, including two Americans.

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What the editorials said

This wreck could spell disaster for the $34-billion-a-year cruise industry, said the Toronto Globe and Mail. These voyages are popular in part because they supposedly offer “one of the safest, and most comfortable, ways to see the world.” But the chaotic evacuation of the Costa Concordia and the absence of even basic safety precautions will surely lead many would-be cruisers to change their vacation plans.

They shouldn’t, said The Miami Herald. While the loss of life is tragic, let’s remember that accidents on this scale are incredibly rare. More than 13 million people take cruises each year, and the industry has one of the best safety records “among major passenger carriers of all kinds.” That might offer little comfort to the families of the dead, but anyone considering a cruise “should keep the incident in perspective.”

What the columnists said

This was an accident waiting to happen, said Gwyn Topham in the London Guardian. In recent years, cruise liners have become floating skyscrapers with “ever more upper-deck cabins, shopping malls, and pools.” But the vessels’ draft—the depth below the waterline—has been kept shallow so that they can dock at picturesque harbors. That top-heaviness makes mega ships like the Costa Concordia less stable than traditional cruise liners and could explain why it listed after running aground.

Lax regulation of the cruise industry allows ship owners to get away with such flawed designs, said Nigam Arora in Forbes.com. The International Maritime Organization hasn’t issued any major new safety recommendations since 1988, “even though the cruise industry has totally changed” in the meantime. The Costa Concordia disaster should finally wake regulators from their slumber.

For Italians, this disaster is yet another cause for embarrassment, said Massimo Gramellini in the Turin La Stampa. Just two months after the resignation of our playboy prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, we’re an international laughingstock again thanks to Schettino. He is the perfect embodiment of “a certain Italian stereotype we can’t pretend not to recognize”: a peacock who struts around with bravado, but is the first to flee when things go wrong.

No one came out of this accident looking good, said Rich Lowry in the National Review. When the Titanic sank a century ago, chivalrous men gave their lifeboat places to women and children, knowing they were dooming themselves to a watery grave. On the Costa Concordia, burly male passengers and crew trampled women, seniors, and kids in “their heedless rush for the exits.” In just 100 years, “we’ve gone from ‘Women and children first’ to ‘Dude, where’s my lifeboat?’”