Costa Concordia capsizing spotlights cruise ship safety
It"s a cruise vacation, promising lots of fine dining and drinking, new adventures and relaxation. What could go wrong?As the 4,200 people aboard the cruise ship Costa Concordia found, just about everything. The Jan. 13 capsizing of the Concordia off the coast of Italy, in which at least 11 people died, caught the world — including the cruise ship industry and its passengers — off guard and is shining a spotlight on cruise ship safety.
Is it possible for today"s megaships — some hold as many as 6,000 passengers — to deal with emergencies effectively? And don"t passengers bear some responsibility as well for ensuring their own safety?
The answer, cruise industry experts said last week, is yes to both. The accident is a reminder of the importance of safety procedures and a wake-up call for the 16 million or so cruise takers worldwide who embark each year, some of whom may have become complacent about those nettlesome safety drills.
Concordia passengers with late seating were at dinner Friday when the Italian ship, carrying 3,200 passengers and 1,000 crew, hit a reef. Mayhem followed, survivors said, with the captain accused of abandoning ship and passengers struggling to get in lifeboats. .
How did it happen? Citing "significant human error," Pier Luigi Foschi, chairman and chief executive of Costa Cruise, said Capt. Francesco Schettino might have wanted to pass closer than prudently possible to the island of Giglio, off the Tuscan coast, to show off the megaship, one of the largest in the Costa fleet. Schettino has been charged by Italian police with manslaughter and abandonment of ship.
The Concordia had held a lifeboat drill, in compliance with law, within 24 hours of embarking from Savona on a seven-day Mediterranean round-trip cruise. But there had been no drill for the 600 passengers who boarded Jan. 13 at Civitavecchia, the port of Rome.
Buck Banks, spokesman for Miami-based Carnival Cruise Corp., of which Costa is a subsidiary, said it was not known whether any of those 600 were among the victims.
The mandatory safety drill, in which passengers traditionally line up on deck in their orange life vests, is probably the least popular on-board activity, one that many passengers dismiss as regulatory nonsense. "I think it takes something like this to make people pay more attention," Banks said.
On Monday, the International Maritime Organization, through its Secretary-General Koji Sekimizu, said the IMO needs to "seriously consider the lessons to be learnt [from the accident] and, if necessary, re-reexamine the requirements on the safety of large passenger ships." The IMO, a United Nations agency, monitors standards set by the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), which have been continually revised since being established in 1914 in response to the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. (Although ships of U.S. registry must comply with Coast Guard safety standards and pass annual inspection, the Italian-flagged Concordia, part of the Carnival fleet, is not underU.S. Coast Guard jurisdiction if not embarking passengers at U.S. ports.
Royal Caribbean, which owns Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas, the largest cruise ships afloat, has streamlined the process for these 6,000-passenger ships. When I sailed on the Oasis in December 2009, the drill was by way of video in the ship"s theater, with no physical donning of vests. Attendance was checked by scanning of onboard identification cards, which hold muster station information. And life jackets were stored at muster stations, not in staterooms, so passengers had a better chance to get to those vests. This system is in effect on the Allure and the Oasis.
How big an issue is passenger count? "When you have 4,000 people, I think you"re looking for trouble — an accident waiting to happen," said Francine Dumont, a travel agent at Plaza Travel in Encino who books mostly cruises. She cites crowd panic and, in the case of the Concordia, the confusion of announcements in multiple languages. She said smaller ships tend to attract seasoned passengers who take the drills seriously, rather than "drinking, chittering-chattering and taking pictures of themselves in their life jackets."
But Mark Murphy, a Philadelphia-based travel expert, editor in chief of Markmurphytravels.com and veteran cruise-taker who has sailed on the 6,000-passenger Oasis, has no misgivings about the safety of cruise ships, including megaships. "The cruise industry has a tremendous safety record," he said.
But cruisers needs to help supplement safety measures. When cruisers are asked to attend muster drills, Murphy and others, say the passengers think safety demonstrations are big yawns. They"re like the evacuation instructions on the back of a hotel door — but how often do we read them? Muster drill instructions were available on TVs in the Concordia"s staterooms and on stateroom doors. But mayhem was almost inevitable, travel industry experts say, because it was dark and the ship was tilted.
Carolyn Spencer Brown, editor in chief of CruiseCritic.com, was cruising aboard the small Azamara Quest off China when reached Monday by phone. A "sloppy" safety procedure, not ship size, was the issue on the Concordia, she said, adding, "It was a perfect storm."
Cruising is "nothing to be scared of," Brown said, but passengers "need to respect the muster drill. I"ve seen people drinking beer and talking like it"s a cocktail party. I think [the drill] is a pain in the butt, but I think it"s a necessary pain in the butt." A journalist once boasted to her that he hid in his bathroom to avoid the drill.
A super-sized ship can be a super-safe ship, Brown said. On the Oasis, she said she was "absolutely blown away by the steps Royal Caribbean took in designing the ship. I"d put my life in their hands any day of the week."
CruiseCritic.com"s followers tend to be veteran cruisers, Brown said, so she doubts they"ll be put off by the Concordia tragedy, but, she said, people who have never cruised may have second thoughts. She doesn"t expect long-term problems but thinks bookings may fall for a while. "I don"t think people will forget as long as that ship is visible in the water," lying on its side, she said.
In an unscientific evaluation by SodaHead.com, an opinion-tracking website, 1,200 people were asked whether they would now be less likely to cruise. Of these, 25% said yes, 52% said no and 23% said they were not planning to cruise.
Murphy anticipates changes in international maritime law to require ships taking on passengers mid-cruise to have life drills before leaving port. And he expects passengers to pay more attention to those drills.
Too often, Murphy said, passengers have taken a "just let me get on with my vacation" attitude toward muster drills, confident in the safety of modern technology and reasoning that technology has improved in the century since the Titanic went down, taking 1,500 passeng