From unsinkable to unthinkable

To compare 'Costa Concordia' to 'Titanic' is not just tabloid fancy: both disasters involve poor leadership and the pursuit of profit, writes MICHAEL McCAUGHAN

WHEN THE HUGE Italian cruise ship Costa Concordiafoundered on the rocks of Giglio last weekend, it was not long before survivors began invoking the most famous shipwreck in history. Reliving their nightmare for reporters, passengers declared that "it was just like Titanic". In newspaper headlines this became a key reference – one especially resonant alongside images of the capsized Costa Concordia. There was no need for comparison with Titanic's death toll, mercifully, but lives have been lost, and, for all those aboard the stricken ship, death was a frightening prospect in the chaos. Essentially, it was the nearness of land and of rescue services that ensured so many survived. Titanic, in contrast, was short of lifeboats and sank almost two hours before the first rescue ship arrived.

In Titanic's centenary year, how close are the parallels between the two disasters? Although separated by 100 years, both vessels were at the leading edge of ship design, and both were mortally damaged by unexpected collisions.

Like Costa Concordia, Titanicwas built to the highest standards of safety at the time. With its double bottom and a system of bulkheads that involved 16 virtually watertight compartments, Titanicwas designed to be its own lifeboat. The owner, White Star Line, declared it "practically unsinkable". But the iceberg it struck opened a 90m fracture in the hull, and it was impossible for the ship to remain afloat as water flowed through the compartments over the top of the bulkheads. The tragedy of Titanicwas that it had too few lifeboats and even those were not filled to capacity. Although Titanicmet all the regulations of the board of trade, the board's lifeboat rules were out of date.

In 1912, consideration of safety at sea principally related to improvements in ship design. It was only after the Titanicdisaster, in which more than 1,500 people died, that the idea of lifeboat space for everyone on board a ship became accepted and enforced practice, together with lifeboat drills on every voyage.

When it was inaugurated in 2006, Costa Concordiawas designed to be Europe's largest ever cruise ship. In recent years the dramatic rise in popularity of cruise holidays has been reflected in the building of bigger and bigger cruise ships. This is comparable to the situation around 1912 when bigger Atlantic liners such as Titanicwere being built.

Bigger ships mean bigger profits. At present, the world's largest cruise ships are Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seasand Allure of the Seas. Each carrying around 8,500 people, passengers and crew, they are effectively seagoing towns. In 2010 the worldwide cruise industry generated revenue of $24 billion (€18.5 billion) with about 21 million passengers, compared with about 500,000 passengers in the early 1970s.

Costa Concordiaat 290.2 metres was only slightly longer than Titanicat 269.1 metres. However, Titanicmeasured 46,328 tons and Concordia, with its 13-deck superstructure, measured 114,500 tonnes. Like Titanicin its day, Concordiamet all safety regulations, including the number of lifeboats and inflatable life rafts for its maximum 3,700 passengers and 1,100 crew.

As floating palaces, both ships provided the latest leisure facilities for passengers. Titanichad Turkish baths, a cold-water swimming pool and a gym with mechanical horses; Costa Concordiaincorporated a Grand Prix simulator and a spa.

For the cruise lines, the high-rise apartment-style ship is the most efficient revenue earner in an extremely competitive market. However, there have long been concerns outside the vested interests of the cruise companies about the ability to evacuate these ships safely and quickly in an emergency, due to their vast interiors and huge number of people on board, speaking different languages.

These issues, and concerns about crew competence and training, have come to a head in the Costa Concordiadisaster. It has been a wake-up call for both the shipping industry and maritime regulators. It is likely that there will be pressure for new regulations to redress a perceived imbalance between maritime safety and profit, particularly in the cruise industry.

Nautilus International, the maritime union that represents 23,000 shipmasters, officers and other shipping-industry staff, campaigns for improved standards of safety at sea. The union’s communications director, Andrew Linington, has said, “The alarm bells have been ringing with many of us for well over a decade now . . . We believe a lot of basic safety principles are compromised to maximise the revenue.”

In a sense, regulations are often behind the curve, as accidents and human fallibility are unpredictable. In short, there will always be disasters at sea, with new regulations to follow.

Facing the perils of the sea, there are often problems in launching lifeboats from a sinking ship, as was the case with the listing Concordia; lifeboats could be lowered from only one side. By contrast, and more unusually, Titanicsank slowly on an even keel, due to its particular design of subdivided hull, and so all the lifeboats could be lowered on both sides, although not without accident.

Ships can very quickly be destabilised by water rushing in, as with the Lusitania, the liner torpedoed in 1915; the Herald of Free Enterpriseferry, which sank in 1987 when bow doors were left open; and the Antarctic cruise ship Explorer, which hit ice in 2007.

Like Concordia, Titanicrapidly became an international news story. As survivors began to tell their stories, every conceivable aspect of the disaster was documented and debated. Scapegoats were found and heroism acclaimed. Capt Smith was widely believed to have rescued a child before he went down with his ship. The wireless operators had stayed at their posts to the end, as had the engineers and the ship's band. The designer of the vessel, Thomas Andrews, and a team of Harland and Wolff workers also perished with Titanic.

Self-sacrifice, heroism, duty and stoicism in the face of death were key messages that came out of the disaster.

By contrast, public opprobrium was heaped on Bruce Ismay, chairman of White Star Line, who had saved himself by getting away in one of the lifeboats.

In human terms, the established Titanicnarrative and the story of Costa Concordiaintersect with individuals deserting the ships. If Ismay was scapegoated for leaving the sinking Titanic, the master of Concordia, Francesco Schettino, has been branded "Captain Coward" because he took to a lifeboat, abandoning his passengers and crew in the capsized ship. His behaviour and bizarre exchanges with a coastguard officer seem inexplicable. The officer ordered Schettino back on board his ship, repeatedly demanding to know the number of passengers still to be evacuated, and specifically referring to women and children – but to no avail.

Capt Schettino failed in his duty and responsibility in the worst circumstances facing a shipmaster; his infamy was to abandon his post.

Today, as in 1912, the captaincy of a cruise liner is a highly responsible post. The captain is ultimately accountable for ensuring the safety of the ship and all on board, its navigation and its compliance with all aspects of national and international law. As master of the ship, the captain is also directly responsible to its owners.

The captains of both Titanicand Concordiamade regular judgments on weather and sea conditions, suitable speeds and routes. On the evening of April 14th, 1912, Capt Smith decided to maintain his speed in an area where ice was expected, as was the custom at the time. On January 13th, 2012, Capt Schettino decided to steer a route close to the island of Giglio, as he had done previously.

News of the Titanicdisaster was transmitted throughout the world not much more slowly than modern reporting of the Concordiadisaster. However, in 1912 there was no visual record of the tragedy as it unfolded, unlike last week's incident during, which passengers used their mobile phones to record and share the horror of being on board their fatally damaged ship. The last messages sent in Morse code from Titanichave parallels in personal messages sent from Concordia, such as that posted on Facebook by Rose Metcalf, a 22-year-old dancer: "Pray for us to be rescued."

Enshrining the values and social fabric of its time, Titanicwas a microcosm of western civilisation and its misplaced certainties in a gilded age before the first World War. It has become the dominant symbol of disaster in our collective imagination. Titanic, both real and imagined, is one of the great metaphors of our time.

The drama of the wreck of Costa Concordiahas also seized our imagination. But whether the symbolism of this shipwreck assumes an international mythic status and takes on layers of metaphorical meanings about western culture, its certainties and anxieties, remains to be seen. However in Italy, the fate of Costa Concordiais already being interpreted as a metaphor for the country adrift and heading to the rocks of a eurozone debt crisis. Capt Schettino's handling of his ship is being compared to the time it took former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to make vital decisions for the country in the face of economic disaster. With Costa Concordiacrashed on the rocks of Giglio, Caterina Soffici, an Italian blogger, comments "We've gone straight into the Titanicnightmare."

Michael McCaughan is a maritime historian. His book, Titanic, Icon of an Age, will be published by Blackstaff Press in April

'A young man tells me I will have to come back when he has killed the captain'

YOU CAN SEE it from several kilometres away. As you approach the Isola del Giglio from the Italian mainland, you see a discordant plastic-white mass, in contrast to the terracotta, olive and granite of the island. That discordant note, of course, is ‘Costa Concordia’, which ran aground off the island eight days ago with the loss of 11 lives. Twenty-one people are still missing.

As you pull into the port of Giglio, with the ferry dodging the fleet of navy vessels, rescue ships and tugs that circle the wreck, you pass right beside the grounded monster. The 70m gash low down in the side of the ship is all too obvious. Remarkably, a huge piece of granite, three metres by three metres, is still jammed into the warped and mangled hull, a grisly reminder of the liner’s violent collision with rocks last Friday night.

Normally, about 1,500 people live on this lovely island. In ancient Roman times it was a resort for wealthy people, but today’s two- and three-star hotels suggest that modern tourism is lower key. It is not the place for a holiday of beach raves, late-night discos and karaoke.

Even as you approach from the mainland, travelling on a coast road through the old Etruscan sea port of Orbetello, the nature of the area is all too evident. Much of this area has been declared a nature preserve, run by the World Wildlife Fund, and the lagoon is considered an important breeding ground for birds.

The island has a barren look. Small terraced vineyards are carved out of the tiniest corners. Even if the white wine produced by these grapes is good, this is still terrain where life has clearly often been hard. In such a context, tourism is the obvious economic lifeline.

With that huge, 290m-long beached whale lying just metres offshore, it is unsurprising that islanders are nervous. They are terrified that the tragedy of a shipwreck that has cost at least 11 lives could yet become another tragedy if the ship’s 2,300 tons of fuel leak out and destroy both tourism and nature reserve.

You get an idea of the dimensions of the potential environmental disaster if you compare the situation on Giglio with the oil spill in the Bay of Plenty, in New Zealand, last October. There, the ‘Rena’, carrying about a quarter of the amount of oil that is still in the 17 tanks of ‘Costa Concordia’, ran aground about 22km from the coast, provoking New Zealand’s worst maritime disaster, killing 20,000 birds and causing as yet untold ecological damage.

Francesco Schettino, the captain of ‘Costa Concordia’, is not the most popular man in these parts. In a bar up in Giglio Castello, a young man tells me that I will have to come back and interview him when he has killed the captain.

Capt Schettino currently stands accused of manslaughter, shipwreck and the abandonment of his ship. In the eyes of international public opinion, he stands accused not only of unforgivable irresponsibility in provoking the original collision with the rocks but also of failure to handle the subsequent emergency, rounded off by the claim that he left the ship about two hours before the last of the surviving passengers and crew got off.

On Giglio, islanders suggest he must have been drunk. Why else would you sail a 114, 500-tonne, 290m-long, 30m-wide juggernaut, carrying 4,200 people, just 200m from a rocky island? Yesterday the newspaper ‘La Repubblica’ gave substance to that bar talk when it claimed that the captain had been seen at dinner with Domnica Cemortan, a Moldovan woman and former hostess on the ship, in the exclusive Club Concordia restaurant until 35 minutes before the collision. Other witnesses claim he had been drinking.

The veracity of such allegations will be tested by the investigations opened by the Grosetto public prosecutor’s office, the coastguard service and the Italian government. What is sure, however, is that last Friday night was not the first time a luxury cruise liner had sailed perilously close to land. The practice of the ‘inchino’– a bow or salute – whereby a ship would sail close to land, sounding its horn, is nothing new. On Thursday, ‘La Repubblica’ claimed that Costa Cruise, the Genoa-based company that operates the ship under the ownership of the US cruise giant Carnival, had this week removed a blog post from its website that celebrated other “sail-bys” by Capt Schettino, including one close to Procida, near Naples, in 2010.

Some industry analysts argue that a ship’s captain may be under pressure to stage these sail-bys because of the obvious promotional value. When you are trying to sell your Mediterranean cruise, for example, how much is a photograph of your liner sailing past Piazza San Marco in Venice worth?

One of the coastguards who had attempted to block this practice was Gregorio De Falco, commander of the Livorno port authority, who, audibly furious, ordered Capt Schettino back on to the boat during the shipwreck last Friday night. The much-heard exchange between De Falco and Capt Schettino is regarded by many as a clash between the best and the worst of Italy, between those public servants determined to do their duty and those who, in the time of bunga bunga, do not give a damn.

T-shirts with De Falco’s furious exhortation “For F***’s Sake, Get Back on Board, Captain” are already doing the rounds. If anything good has come out of this sorry mess, it might be the quality of work done by De Falco, the entire complex rescue operation and by the ship’s crew, many of whom risked their lives to save passengers. Here’s hoping that the Dutch salvage company Smit can create another positive side to the disaster by recovering the fuel.