Complete coverage: Costa Concordia
Links to
Travel Weekly articles relating to the Costa Concordia capsize off the coast of
Italy have been
collected here.
In the aftermath of the Costa
Concordia tragedy, CLIA, Congress and two former Costa Cruises executives last
week were revisiting assumptions about cruise safety, taking into account the
perfect storm of events that led to the loss of life and the harrowing
experiences of survivors in the waters off the Tuscany coast.
Meantime, cruise lines took action
independently. Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. tightened passenger muster rules for
all its brands.
And on Thursday, Carnival
Corp., the parent of Costa Cruises and nine other cruise brands, announced a
“comprehensive audit and review of all safety and emergency response procedures
across all of the company’s cruise lines.”
CLIA called upon the International Maritime Organization (IMO),
which sets global standards for ship safety, to undertake a “comprehensive
evaluation from the findings” of the accident investigation currently being
conducted by Italian authorities.
And in
Washington, lawmakers are poised to review safety measures in light of the
Concordia accident. Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said his committee would conduct a
hearing on the subject.
“The Costa
Concordia tragedy is a wakeup call for the United States and international
maritime organizations to carefully review and make certain we have in place all
appropriate standards to ensure passengers’ safety on cruise ships,” Mica said.
The CL
IA announcement was made by the organization’s CEO, Christine
Duffy, before introducing a panel at the Passenger Ship Safety Conference
currently under way in London.
Tom Allan,
a member of the panel and chairman of the Cruise Ship Safety Forum, who has held
a number of senior positions in the IMO, said that after the Italian authorities
conclude their work, other member states may want to propose international
guidelines.
The process may take years,
but he said that the industry will likely be proactive and go forward with its
own initiatives in a shorter timeframe.
After the panel, which was simulcast to journalists in New York,
J. Michael Crye, executive vice president of CLIA who liaises for the
organization on regulatory matters, said “The Italians will be the ones who make
determinations about what went wrong and what needs to be improved, if anything.
The results will be taken to the IMO, where it will be debated and discussed by
international experts among the 170 member nations. They will look to see if the
treaty needs to be modified, and will take into account any recommendations
made.”
CLIA has two seats on the IMO
board.
Crye agreed that the lines may move
forward on their own. “Each (line) has an affirmative obligation to seek out
means to identify and improve [safety],” he said. “No one in the industry wants
to have this type of blot on the cruise industry. We will identify best
practices and apply them. It has already begun within each individual cruise
line.”
Bruce Nierenberg, who served as
president and CEO of Costa Cruises before Carnival Corp. bought a controlling
share of the line in 1997, said, “There is a dynamic that is in play here that
several senior execs in the business used to discuss 10 to 20 years ago when the
ships were really starting to get big. Even the technical and maritime
engineering experts at the companies where I worked were concerned that
regardless of the safety equipment onboard and the modern technology of the
ship, the industry was beginning to build ships that were too big to be really
safe in emergencies.”
“The industry, in
its drive for profits has not been considering enough of the problems that can
be created by enclosing thousands of people in a confined space, by expecting to
evacuate upwards of 6,000 to 8,000 passengers in the largest ships, and by
ignoring the basic human instinct to panic in such a situation,” he said.
The Concordia was carrying 3,200 passengers
and about 1,000 crew. There were 26 nationalities represented on the ship.
Panelists in London felt that a ship’s size
did not make it inherently less safe. Both Allan and Captain William Wright,
senior vice president of marine operations for Royal Caribbean International,
suggested that larger ships might actually have their own benefits in an
emergency situation.
Bigger ships, Allan
said, were designed to include more flexibility in the subdivision of safety
options and in some ways provide a “bigger” and “better” platform to survive.
“The safety standards are no different,”
he said. “Smaller ships have certain advantages over larger, and vice versa.”
Wright added that as ships grow larger,
the evacuation routes and lifeboats are scaled accordingly.
Also on the topic of large ships, panelist
Vice Admiral Alan Massey, CEO of the U.K.’s Maritime and Coast Guard Agency,
said “we are satisfied ... that we’re in touch with what the industry is doing
and the risks associated with it. Safety standards have kept pace.”
Nierenberg said, “There will be regulation changes, I’m sure,
because of this accident, in terms of crew language requirements and training.
And I’m sure it will become law that lifeboat drills have to take place before
the ship leaves the harbor.”
In London,
Wright said that “the vast majority” of muster drills occur before sailing. He
noted that while the Concordia’s actions were “in keeping with regulations,” the
practice will come under scrutiny.
According to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Cruise Ship National Center
of Expertise, the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS)
requires an evacuation drill within 24 hours of port departure.
“Each cruise line has its own business
practice, and in most cases the drill is held soon after departure,” a spokesman
for the center said. “That’s the spirit of the regulation, but we can’t require
ships to do that.”
In the case of the
Concordia, two embarkation ports were offered to passengers: Barcelona and
Cititavecchia, the Italian port about 50 miles from Rome. The nearly 700 people
who boarded the ship in Civitavecchia on the day of the accident had not yet
participated in a safety drill. Their drill was to have been held the next day.
Nierenberg said it takes time for
passengers to become acclimated to a large ship. Expecting them to find their
way around almost immediately after boarding — without a muster drill, in the
dark and with language barriers between passengers and crew — is a stretch.
Following the Concordia accident, Royal
Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (RCCL) directed its fleet — including all ships operated
by Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Azamara Club Cruises —
to hold passenger muster drills on the day of departure.
Until now, all RCCL vessels have held muster drills 30 to 60
minutes prior to departure on the day of embarkation or turnaround, the company
said. But on “rare occasions,” primarily due to very late departure times, the
drill could be held to the following morning.
Not anymore.
The Concordia
crew had intended to meet the 24-hour rule, with its drill planned for the
following day.
Mitch Schlesinger, vice
president of sales and marketing at Voyages to Antiquity, agreed that the timing
of lifeboat drills in the wake of the Concordia disaster will become an industry
issue.
“And,” he added, “there will be
other issues tied to that. For example, on some ships it’s now optional to bring
a life jacket to a boat drill. People were tripping over the straps, and cruise
lines were trying to do this with 3,000 or 4,000 or 5,000 people. Was that new
regulation the right thing to do?”
The
bottom line, said Schlesinger, an industry veteran who formerly was a marketing
vice president at Costa, is that “you need to understand how to put on your life
jacket.”
On some large ships, including
Royal Caribbean's Oasis-class vessels, passengers report to a designated public
area, such as a lounge or a theater, to watch a safety video while a crew member
demonstrates how to don a life jacket. On others, passengers still are required
to report to their assigned lifeboat station, sometimes wearing their life
jacket and sometimes not.
“It will be like
the airports after 9/11,” Schlesinger said. “And I think it will happen for the
right reasons. It might seen inconvenient, and you might only need them in the
rarest of circumstances, but you need to know where to go and what to do.”
Schlesinger also asserted that in the
Concordia case, the captain “invited a problem” by taking the ship too close to
Giglio.
At the CLIA panel, the captain’s
decision to attempt to bring the Concordia closer to shore after a rock tore
through the ship’s hull raised the question of whether current thinking that
“safe return to port” standards would be reviewed.
(According to Crye, “safe return to port” standards apply to
ships built since June 2010. He said that improvements in stability and
redundancies of systems has increased the likelihood that it may be safer for a
damaged ship to attempt to get to a port rather than deploy lifeboats. He said
what procedure to initiate — return to port, deploy lifeboats or go to deep
water and initiate counter-flooding — is up to the captain’s discretion.)
The decisions and behavior of the Concordia’s
captain, Francesco Schettino, contributed to what Nierenberg referred to as a
“perfect storm.”
“It used to be that it
took 25 years to get promoted to captain,” he said. “But today, the lines
probably are under pressure to accelerate training because there are so many
slots to fill.”
Nierenberg added that the
Concordia accident also argued for psychological evaluations of ship captains.
Schettino faces multiple charges and is
under house arrest in Italy after steering the ship into the rocks and allegedly
abandoning the vessel while passengers and crew remained onboard.
“How does a guy like that get to be captain?”
Nierenberg wondered.
Perhaps, he
suggested, large ships should have more than one captain.
“Now that the big-ship animal has been created, we have to figure
out how to deal with it,” he said.
Journalists at the London panel also questioned crew readiness
for an emergency, from the captain down to cabin stewards.
Richard Evenhand, managing direct of V.Ships
Leisure UK, the world’s largest third-party ship-management firm, said on the
panel that the IMO sets standards for seafarers and that competencies are
required before they can join a ship. He said there were further “comprehensive
packages of training.”
He added that the
ability to speak relevant languages was part of the selection process, in
reference to some criticism that language played a role in confusion aboard the
Concordia.
Wright said that all ships have
emergency plans that are reviewed every week, and every member of the crew has a
specific duty. For example, there are crew members who have instructions to
bring life jackets to muster stations, he said.
Crye noted that “a bartender who is taking muster would not
necessarily have the expertise to lower and operate a lifeboat,” but is trained
in some aspect of emergency procedure.
In New York, Bud Darr, CLIA’s director of environmental and
health programs, observed that “there are specific training standards and
requirements applied universally across the maritime world.”
The CLIA panel was questioned about whether
there were regulations regarding voyage plans and the discretion that a captain
has in straying from the preplanned route.
Wright said that there are standards for “bridge resource
management,” and that those require that if one varies from a voyage plan, the
change must go through a two-person check to verify its appropriateness. “Not
just the captain, but the entire bridge team,” he said.
In London, a journalist asked if the notion of a captain going
down with the ship was outdated. Massey said there is no basis in international
law for the concept. “Individual companies may have policies, but in the context
of law, it’s more myth than reality.”
And women and children first?
“There is a requirement to take specific note of accessibility
issues of passengers and accommodate them on a personal basis,” Crye said.
“They needed to immediately reassure people that [cruise
passengers] are in good hands, that it’s business as usual, that the lines
operate under strict regulations,” said Simon Hudson, who holds an endowed chair
at the South Carolina Center of Economic Excellence in Tourism and Economic
Development at the University of South Carolina.
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — With Cinderella Castle as a backdrop and under a cloudless blue sky, President Barack Obama on Thursday issued a message to the world: “America is open for business.”