Costa Concordia

    Last class we talked about disasters and what makes a disaster a natural disaster. One of the points, in the Strömberg reading from last week, said about natural disasters was that humans set the stage for the high death toll in natural disasters, “nature did not construct twenty thousand houses of six or seven stories there.” (Stömberg, 199). This can be applied not only to natural disasters, but also other examples of disasters. In the past a cruise disaster, involving the Costa Concordia, was caused by a single man.

     On January 13th, 2012, the Costa Concordia took off for a seven night cruise, off the coast of Civitavecchia, Italy, but before making it out into the sea, it hit a rock off of Isola de Giglio. The rock made a long gash on the side of the ship and water started to come into the cruise. As more water poured inside the lower part of the vessel and the winds grew stronger, the cruise capsized close to shore. With the cruise being half way sunk to the side, it was difficult to get life boats off the side of the cruise and into the water. The rescue efforts took an entire weekend to complete. The cruise was carrying close to 4200 passengers and crew members on board, and 32 people died.
  
Compensation for each passenger was $34,000. In September 2013 engineers started an operation to raise the wrecked cruise. The operation to rotate the ship into an upright position took 19 hours to complete and the cost went over $729 million dollars to do so. There was also ecological effects from the sinking. The ship tilted over onto a coral reef and there was risk of a fuel leakage. The ship has been salvaged and brought to a junkyard for scrapping. 

     The biggest controversy of the entire ordeal was the fact that the captain of the cruise, Francesco Schettino, abandoned the ship before any of his passengers. It was later discovered that he was not supposed to be steering the cruise so close to shallow water and when the ship did hit a rock he did not immediately drop the anchor. He also did not sound an alarm soon enough. This week he was convicted of four counts manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the vessel. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison, which was ten years less than prosecutors expected. Survivors from the disaster were very upset by the sentencing and felt like the captain should be given a much longer sentence. There will be an appeal, but for now the captain is not yet going to prison.

 References
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/world/europe/captain-convicted-in-italy-for-role-in-costa-concordia-disaster.html?_r=0
www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16563562
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/costa-concordia-survivors-blast-insulting-sentence-captain-n304926
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-16597720