If anyone hadn’t heard of Costa Cruises before this weekend, they sure do now. Although, as of Monday, the story has moved to the inside of the front sections of U.S. newspapers, the repercussions will reverberate through the cruise industry for months if not years and it is still front-and-center in Europe.
In Britain, where I spent the weekend. The ship’s grounding on rocks and subsequent semi-sinking is the subject of front page news and 24/7 television, even though, there were only 35 British nationals on board (23 passengers and 12 crew). Of course, the incident happened in Europe, and since the ship is so close to shore, it continues to be a riveting visual spectacle.
The situation is ongoing — at the time of writing this post the damaged ship is apparently in danger of sinking to the ocean floor — but here are some collected and somewhat random thoughts for now.
It’s certainly a horrible story, all the more so because the reports are increasingly indicating, as the Costa chairman said “significant human error.” Or, if some of the stories circulating in the tabloids are true, better known as “significant human stupidity.” A headline in the U.K. Daily Mail screamed, “Was the captain showing off?”
(For anyone interested in a LOT more on the story, the Daily Mail Online is continuing with very in-depth coverage.)
It does appear like the captain was deliberately steering the ship close to shore either to salute a friend or a headwaiter who had family ashore. Or maybe it was just the equivalent of a cocky pilot buzzing people on the ground. Whatever the reason, after the fact, the decision was certainly a mistake.
The captain has also not helped his own cause with the public by having been seen ashore before many of the rescued passengers. (The Concordia also ran into the dock in Palermo, Sicily, in 2008, albeit with no injuries, just damage to the bow.)
One question going forward, however, is how this might affect cruising in future. Over the years after airline crashes I’ve had plenty of people ask about the type of plane they are flying on, or tell me they don’t want to take commuter planes, or fly with a particular airline.
It’s probably too soon to see how many people might end up canceling. As awful as the experience might have been, so far the death total is limited to six, albeit with up to 29 people missing. Whereas over 30,000 people are killed every year driving in the U.S. alone.
Curiously enough, the biggest fear for traveling Americans, or at least the one that has received the most press coverage lately, seems to be the violence in Mexico. Even though few tourists have been affected, many ships have pulled out of the Mexican Riviera, and there are reports of many passengers just staying on board.
Ironically, one of the few ships still sailing the 7-day Mexico cruise, however, is the Carnival Splendor, a sister ship to the Concordia.
Safety issues will no doubt become a big part of the story. We were actually joking on our last cruise in December about how short the lifeboat drills have become, and passengers haven’t even needed to wear lifejackets. For whatever reason, the Concordia, which had just sailed a few hours earlier, wasn’t going to have their drill until the next day.
Although it’s questionable, since the ship started listing so quickly, if a drill would have helped, as the lifeboats became increasingly difficult to operate. (On one side they couldn’t be lowered because they would hit the side of the ship, and on the other they had to be dropped quickly before being overrun by water.)
And in a perverse way, I have to wonder if the hint of danger, especially since over 4,000 people did escape, might actually for some make the idea of a cruise more enticing. (Attempts to climb Everest actually increased after the publication of “Into Thin Air,” which dramatized the stories of many deaths.)
No doubt there will be future changes in cruise line policies, and we haven’t even gotten into the insurance issues. Costa will almost certainly give payouts to passengers, but there are plenty of other side stores that hasn’t received much coverage such as an electricial failure after the ship first hit the rocks rendered the keycards inoperable, so most passengers weren’t able to retrieve so much as their jewelry and other valuables.
In some ways as sad as it would be, I hope the whole disaster was a stupid bit of hubris, because at this point that’s the least likely thing to be repeated. As opposed to a major design flaw. But no doubt we will be hearing a lot more in the weeks and months to come.
