a sinking feeling

[Babs]

This picture completely wigs me out. Claustrophobia, anyone?

[myboynoah]

This picture completely wigs me out. Claustrophobia, anyone?

Me too. Exactly where you want to be as the ship sinks.

[Omaha 680]

Just saw this on Yahoo!:

http://news.yahoo.com/coast-guard-or...124134509.html

The Italian coast guard angrily ordered the captain of the capsized Italian cruise ship to go back aboard to oversee the evacuation, but he stalled, according to an apparent recording of their radio exchange played on national television.

The article has the translation of the whole recording. If it is authentic, this looks worse than I imagined. The whole thing seemed horribly organized from the first reports. Now it appears that there was indeed extreme dereliction of duty by high ranking crew members.

My wife and I went on our first cruise just a month ago. The evacuation drills and safety instructions before we left port combined with the crew doing lifeboat drills a few times during the trip made me feel quite secure. But this whole episode with the Costa ship makes me wonder how many cruise ship crews could handle the pressure of a real emergency.

[Omaha 680]

I caught most of a show on Discovery last night about the Costa Concordia shipwreck. They interviewed passengers and investigators, and showed video taken by passengers of the evacuation. The videos were terrifying.

The data analyzed shows that after striking the rock and tearing a 150' +/- gash in the hull, the generators were flooded and the Concordia was dead in the water. because of the momentum from the hard starbord turn they were making combined with currents, the ship began to float out to sea and got farther than a mile away from the coast in deep water. However, strong winds (20 mph+) blew the Concordia back toward the shore where it eventually sank and came to rest in shallow water.

Hundreds of passengers were evacuated from the dry (port) side after the boat tipped over because it had already listed too much to launch the lifeboats from that side when the abandon ship order was given. Others jumped from the starbord side before it was submerged and swam to shore because they were close enough and the lifeboats weren't coming back in time to get them. Investigators said that if the wind hadn't blown the ship back to rest in shallow water, a minimum of hundreds would have died and perhaps more than 1000. Also, the abandon ship order wasn't given until over an hour after impact.