Costa Concordia
With the international media wildly speculating about the cause of last week’s Costa Concordia disaster, cruiseastute.com takes a more restrained look.
We know that the cause of the tragedy was hitting a rock – this much is obvious from the pictures emerging of the ship with a 160ft gash in the side. But why did it hit the rock?
Engine/Power Failure
I think we can rule this one out. The Concordia was over a mile off course but made no attempt to contact the coast guard. The rock was struck at high speed evidenced by the large gash in the side. Passengers apparently called the coast guard who then contacted the bridge. It was the bridge who blamed power failure. We are expected to believe that the ship had lost power, drifted over a mile and hit a rock at high speed with no power and no-one contacting the coast guard. I think not.
Navigation Systems/Steering Failure
The Concordia is a modern ship using Electrical pods under the ship for propulsion. These pods also steer the ship in contrast to the traditional main propellor and rudder system.
What are the chances of all the pods failing at the same time? Yes, it could be a computer problem, but if it was, why did the Captain not realise the problem and alert passengers and coastguard long before hitting the rock? The Captain also says that he turned the ship to avoid hitting the rock. Whilst he blames his charts for not showing the rock, he makes no mention of navigational systems failure – why would he do this when the position of the rock on the charts would not be relevant if he was experiencing computer problems. I think we can forget this one.
Human Error
Ruling out the first 2 possibilities leaves us with Human Error as the likely cause of the disaster. The first question is why was the ship so far off course. The course would have been pre-programmed into the computer and would be monitored by GPS. An alarm would have sounded immediately, so why didn’t it – or had the system and alarm been manually overridden?
Even if the computer had failed to alert the crew – surely someone on the bridge would have noticed a large inhabited island which they were supposed to miss by over a mile. It has become known that ships in the Costa fleet had taken to sailing very close to the island to show off – was this why the ship was there?
We could also question why the Captain left the ship so quickly – most Captains would have remained until all passengers had left. The ship wasn’t even fully sinking and was close to shore, so it’s not likely that he panicked about saving his own life – was he subconciously trying to get away from his or a crew member’s mistake?
So, it’s probable that the cause was human error, but we’ll keep an eye on things as events unfold and report back if other factors become obvious.
