"Cruise ship sinking of Italy" Topic

Did you post the right link?

"He doesn't seem to be cut from the same cloth as Kennedy, Roope or Fegan does he?"

Or perhaps more appropriately, a Sharp, Pettigrew, Mason, Chappell, or Hawkins and Pollard.

Or even Ramsay Brown, Cossar, Williams, Gordon, Henderson, Pearce, Tuckett, Leslie, Thompson, and Wren, MacFarlane, Pinckney, and Riley.

Discussion of the requirements, compared to what actually happened:

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Significantly:

Effectively, the company has 24 hours to take you through a drill once you are on board. The Costa Concordia was only a few hours into its voyage. Some people arriving back at Heathrow started flashing their drill cards around. They had been scheduled for a rehearsal on Saturday afternoon, by which time the ship was lying on its side.

Regulations also state that a ship's systems should last for at least three hours because that is how long it is expected to take to completely abandon a large ship. It took a good five hours to get most passengers off the ship.

One former sea captain I spoke to had some sympathy with the crew in this situation. "Once the ship was listing heavily", he told me, "and the lifeboats were sitting on what had become the top of the boat, everyone just had to leave the ship any way they could."

We have also heard a lot about watertight compartments since the Costa Concordia went down. The theory is that if one side of the hull is breached, the other side can be flooded to keep the ship upright. The big question is then, why didn't it work in this case? The truth is we won't know until the investigation is finished.

But Professor Wilson (BSc CEng DSc FRINA, Professor of Ship Dynamics at University of Southampton) wasn't too surprised, saying: "Every ship will sink if you make the hole big enough."

He added, however, that something was "puzzling" him. "The hole in the hull is sticking out of the water. It should be under the sea, because that is where the water came rushing in. In other words, the ship seems to be lying on the wrong side."

The Master would have been engaged in serious posing, the 3rd Mate, or Chief Officer if they have 2 Mates to a watch as some people carriers have, would be Officer of the Watch, and would have been plotting the position. The Quartermaster would have been doing his job, either bridge wing lookout, or steering. Is a Quartermaster a navigator in the USN?

In the USN, the Quartermaster of the Watch is the guy plotting ships position and maintaining the log. The Navigator (Navigation Officer) is the QMOW's boss and is responsible for the maintenance of the charts and training the shipdrivers. The Nav is also supposed to be the Captain's nagging conscience about staying away from known rocks and stuff.

As always in these cases, a ship and a captain's career on the rocks at the same time.

When the USS Enterprise ended up on a sandbar in San Francisco Bay back in 1983, the captain's hopes of a flag went a-glimmering.

That is why, even in these consultative fuzzy feely touchy days, you are captain of the ship under god. 100% power = 100% responsibility.

Apparently the media report that the Captain claims the reason he left the ship before all crew and passengers was that he "FELL into a lifeboat and was carried away from the ship!!!"
A retired RN Capatin on the BBC radio yesterday view was that as Captain of a warship he had been trained to be put in harms way, as had his crew. Perhaps cruise ships should have less "Customer centric" training and a bit more on seamanship.

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The assigment of colors ws not arbitrary. Check to see if the Pulks in question changfed their inspections during this time. quite a few did.

How bizarre? That isn't what I posted at all!
What I wrote was, to paraphrase:
Warships and passenger ships are very different. All they have in common is that they are ships. Why the BBC chose to interview an RN Captain about the role of a Merch Master is beyond me. It's like comparing the role of a fighter jet pilot and a passenger jet pilot. They fly aeroplanes, but otherwise there's no comparison.
Lion in the Stars, in the Merch, the OOW plots the position, conns the ship, maintains the Bridge and radio Log, is the Radio/communications person, and, in port assists the Mate in loading and unloading the ship, whilst having other responsibilities. For example, as Second Mate I maintained all of the Nav gear, corrected and ordered the charts, was Medical Officer, and on two ships, was in charge of bonded stores.

And then there are Q Ships!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-ship
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"Apparently the media report that the Captain claims the reason he left the ship before all crew and passengers was that he "FELL into a lifeboat and was carried away from the ship!!!""

Very "Lord Jim" like

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No..NO…11th ACR. You misinterpred his lisp!

He said CRUISE SHIPS not QWOO ships!!!

@Chouan: Ah. I knew there was a serious failure to communicate going on… Hazards of using the same words in different cultures!

Why the BBC chose to interview an RN Captain about the role of a Merch Master is beyond me

Not beyond me. This is the same organisation who calls anything with tracks a tank.

I obviously need to go and spend more time at WMA talking about their courses :-)

I suppose the same reasoning applied when the BBC were making the "Sinking of the Laconia" drama/drivel, they got a retired admiral as their consultant to advise on getting the maritime procedures etc correct. What would he have known of structures and relationships on a merchant vessel. Almost exactly nothing, and it showed!

Admiral, navy, sea, boats… see, perfectly logical.

He added, however, that something was "puzzling" him. "The hole in the hull is sticking out of the water. It should be under the sea, because that is where the water came rushing in. In other words, the ship seems to be lying on the wrong side."

That assumes that there is only one hole. If they ran over the rocks or between two it is quite possible there is a larger hole on the other side.

Of course, the captain may claim they opened the other hole to let the water out!

Current indications are that it only struck on one side, although I gather the amount of damage on the underside is surprising. Initial suggestions were that the inflow of water, combined with the ship heeling round, caused it to roll to that side. However if you look at some of the other footage she was pretty much upright when she arrived at the harbour, but rolled over pretty quickly afterwards.

the captain may claim they opened the other hole to let the water out!

Which…of course…he had to go ashore to organise!

He was just nipping down to the hardware store to buy a couple of pumps.

I wanna see the hardware store where I can buy a couple maritime-scale dewatering pumps!

No…you'd go to an Army & Navy store silly!

Having looked at the track of the Costa Concordia it looks as if after striking the rock on her port side she headed north then turned south and grounded and capsized on her starboard side. I am guessing that at this stage the engine room and other compartments were partially flooded, creating a dangerously unstable situation known as "loll", where large volumes of water are free to move about and can cause a ship to roll in either direction.

Now, here's something that's really confused me: Don't cruise ships have ballast&trim pumps? I know cargo ships do.

On the sub, even though we were designed with dry bilges in mind, we still had valves that we could open to pull water out of the bilges and pump it over the side.

Not quite, the situation is called "Free surface effect, which causes a list. The amount of list is called the "angle of loll". Once free surface effect has taken place a vessel will be unable to right itself, without doing something positive to increase stability.

I would suggest that it wasn't so much free surface effect as such, but a combination of factors, an effect of negative stability through too small a metacentric height; a vessel with a very small metacentric height turning sharply with free water in the ER causing an uncontrollable list, with no ability to right her using ballast, because thyere are no ballast tanks!

? No ballast/trim tanks? Seriously? No way to counteract a dangerous flooding/balance condition?

Is that a cruise ship thing, or is that a civilian ship thing?

Maybe that wasn't such a joke after all… My Dad asked me once how I could go to sea on a ship that's designed to sink. I replied back that I couldn't see how someone could go out to sea on a ship that's not designed to come back up!

There may be ballast tanks, but they'd be small, and only to balance fuel as it is used in order to maintain stability. It's a cruise ship and general cargo ship thing. Bulk carriers and tankers have ballast tanks, usually wing and hopper tanks, used to minimise longitudinal stresses whilst loading and unloading, and to maintain specific levels of buoyancy and stability whilst "in ballast". Box boats have trim and list tanks in order to keep the vessel exactly upright whilst loading and discharging cargo. The double bottom tanks are used for fuel oil in most ships.

There aren't the kind of emergency ballast/trim tanks that you describe as the principal is that you load your ship in such a way that a dangerous balance condition doesn't occur!

This might help:
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If flooding occurs, GS and bilge pumps should be able to control it, assuming that under-water water tight compartments haven't been excessively breached. For example, flooding in a hold, or 2. However, massive ER flooding in combination with a sudden list and a blackout might be something of a problem…..

True, I am used to dealing with ships that can … very rapidly unload quite a bit of mass, so the balance systems need to be able to keep up (to the tune of thousands of lbs/second of water flow)!

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So, any guesses on design lessons learned from this?

Aside from probably requiring enough lifeboats to handle the entire complement of passengers and crew per side, I would suspect that they might require additional compartmentalization down low.

Very wide water wings?

And not sailing so close to the shore?

It wouldn't matter how good or how many the watertight compatments are, if there is a tear along a third of the length of the hull serious flooding will occur!
The current requirement for merchant vessels is that the boats on either side should be capable of carrying all of the crew, and on passenger vessels, the boats AND LIFERAFTS on each side should do the same for all the passengers and crew.
The only lesson to be learned is, as GeoffQRF suggests, don't go too close to the shore!

Interesting reconstruction by Dutch software firm QPS, which used the Concordia's own navigation data to create a reconstruction of the incident. It says it is only the last 18 minutes, but from my understanding of the timeine looks more like the last 30-40?

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Note at about 00:25 where the ship appears to cross the marked area, skewing as it does so. After that the ship heads back out to sea with some degree of fish-tailing (excesive speed was reported, perhaps hat is what we are seeing?). It then appears to be wallowing with considerable lateral movement as it drifts sideways back into the shore (I'm assuming some sort of side thrusters)

Chouan, your experiences may be able to understand what we are seeing much better.

It wouldn't matter how good or how many the watertight compatments are, if there is a tear along a third of the length of the hull serious flooding will occur!

True. But if your engineroom is the entire width of the hull, that's a whole lot more water than a compartmentalized hull would take on.

The current requirement for merchant vessels is that the boats on either side should be capable of carrying all of the crew, and on passenger vessels, the boats AND LIFERAFTS on each side should do the same for all the passengers and crew.

So what the heck happened in this case?

The only lesson to be learned is, as GeoffQRF suggests, don't go too close to the shore!

Sometimes, you don't have a choice. In this case the Captain did, and cost the company a ship plus an enormous amount of bad press because of his own arrogance.

So what the heck happened in this case?

The usual – once the lights went out and everyone realised it was sinking the panic meant any contraol plan was pretty much out the window.

Combine that with the rapid rate of list and you now have half the boats submerged, the other half on the top of the ship.

And Geoff, depending on how the currents were flowing, I have seen a ship's heading greater than 60* off of the course track. That could easily explain some of those very odd moments when the ship is pointing almost directly away from the island and moving laterally.

The biggest lesson is that they need to shoot the odd captain, por encourager les outres.

I've just looked at the schematic reconstruction. I would suggest from that that there was a strong current setting in towards the coast, and a strong "sail" effect from wind on the upperworks giving an enormous amount of leeway, when broadside on to the wind at low speed.
I would guess that they lost power from the main engines, not that they stopped necessarily, but there was a significan reduction in power at the very least. There then looks to have been an attempt to go hard a starboard on the wheel, which, at low speed can act as a brake, as well as turning the vessel's head in the indicated direction. But, if on low power with a current and leeway setting towards the rocks, she could easily move broadside first, as it were, then as the rudder finally has the needed steering effect, she goes to far to starboard, and the wheel is put hard a port to compensate, and all that does is minimise the effect of the engines and allow the onshore current to take her even closer to the beach. So, in the end, with engines stopped an ineffectual rudder she has drifted beam on to the rocks. This looks like a reaction of panic with excessive helm being used, in both directions which simply kills the effect of the engines and places her at the mercy of the current. There's also the effect of "squat", where a bottom that is close to the ship's bottom has an effect of making the draught of the ship greater than it actually is, and reduces control, almost like a car's tyres skidding on ice and losing directional control for the driver. The car points one way but moves in another.
The crew's management of the abandonment was actually quite good, 20-30 casualties out of 4000 souls isn't bad.
Essentially it was the idiocy of the Master in taking such a large vessel in so close so unnecessarily, no matter how often Costa ships had been in close to that coast.
The ER would have been the full width of the hull, so compartmentalisation would only be lateral, not longitudinal.
There clearly were enough boats and rafts, but, as GeoffQRF pointed out, the rapidity of the loss of stabilty and the rapid flopping over meant that few of the LSA on either side could be effectively deployed quickly enough.

That's right, merchies like single-screw designs for minimal crewing… if she'd been a twin-screw with a longitudinal watertight bulkhead that might have exacerbated the list, too.

The crew's management of the abandonment was actually quite good, 20-30 casualties out of 4000 souls isn't bad.

I would have said excellent, since 4000 people panicking is likely to result in at least 10 dead just from being trampled (which the crew can't really control). Even if no-one was trampled (ie, crew was completely at fault for loss of life), 0.75% fatalities is outstanding for a large-scale goat-rope.

There has been some criticism of the speed with which the crew ordered the passengers off the ship, after initially saying there was nothing wrong and to return to their cabins. Always a difficult call, and a fine line between the right time and too late. I wonder what the reaction would have been if they had all been in the lifeboats when they decided there was nothing really wrong?

There was a Channel 4 programme about it on Monday night. The Italian authorities said that the first they knew of the problem was the Coastguards being called by the Police, who'd been called by passengers on their mobiles!

A comment here from another rather more expert forum, from a former Master, Lloyd's Surveyor, and retired journalist on Lloyds List:
Before sailing:

"The ship embarks passengers at more than one port so some passengers had not had a boat drill. That is allowed for in SOLAS. The voyage date recorder ("VDR" – the "black box") was reportedly, according to Captain Schettino in need of attention and had been reported as such – that does happen- but we now know that the problem was an error reading about the casing. The VDR data is being analysed and will be released in early March.

The AIS data:

It is well to be cautious in interpolating between the recorded positions. However it does tell us something.

As the ship approached the point where she routinely altered course to close Giglio, there was another vessel overtaking her on her port side, so she allowed that vessel to draw ahead before altering course. This meant that the COSTA CONCORDIA approached the island on a broader bearing than she had usually done. The effect was that the alter course position, and perhaps also the amount of helm applied, should have been changed. This may not have been, or been made, sufficiently apparent to Captain Schettino by the two officers already on the bridge as he entered the wheelhouse and took the con.

After impact, which lasted just over 4 seconds at 15 knots, the ship's engine room (or engine rooms – there may be two engine rooms, as on a near sister vessel) -, containing her six Wartsila prime movers and their alternators, must have flooded very fast, so that she lost all power. Fortunately, although, as a Class 1 passenger ship, the engine room would have been manned, the engine room staff on watch were probably all in the control room, and seem to have escaped.

Between the initial grounding and the capsize:

As a Class 1 passenger ship, her emergency generator(s) must give power to the steering engines as well as providing lighting, etc., but the emergency power circuit would not include the thrusters. Slowing down, and flooding aft, the ship seems to have turned, or been turned, to starboard, and she seems to have lost way and stopped in the eye of the North-Easterly F3 wind, described by Captain Schettino as a "gregale", which blew the bows off to starboard, with the ship pivoting on the stopped fixed pitch props and the increasing draft aft. She then drifted, lying across the wind, until she reached pretty much the position where she is now. Both anchors were dropped, obviously when the foredeck was still tenable, roughly in the ship's present position.

Embarcation of the passengers into the boats began. This was sucessful; if 99% of the passengers and crew of an aircraft walk away from a crash landing, we call that a sucess.The officers and crew deserve great credit for this.

Suggestions by passengers that they did not see the officers are not surprising, there are a lot of passengers and not many officers, some of whom have other things to do, such as keeping the lights on and summoning help, and those members of the hotel staff who have been trained and who have lifeboat certificates (a specified number) supervise and carry out the embarcation into the boats. In a plane which crash lands, would you wait for the Captain and co-pilot to show you to the emergency exits or would you do what the cabin staff tell you to do?

(Power is not required either to drop an anchor or to lower a lifeboat.)

It should be noted that all but three of the boats got away.

The flooding:

As the ship continued to take water, she developed an angle of loll, reported as initially a heel to port, then to starboard. Given her very high sides and relatively shoal (8.3m) draft, the cause of the heel may have been the wind, coupled with loss of stability due to free surface in the flooding spaces. She continued to flood, espescially, aft – the photos of the starboard side boats going away show her drawing roughly six metres more aft than forward. By the time the last of the starboard boats were leaving the ship, the edge of the boat deck was almost immersed aft, but the mooring deck aft was one deck below the boat deck.

An engineer officer has commented that he expected the ship to remain afloat with three compartments flooded, (not sure why he thought that, most of us would say "two") but that five spaces (not clear if he means watertight compartments) appeared to be flooded or flooding.

The capsize and second grounding:

Soon after the boats got away, the ship capsized to starboard. It may be that, due to the increase in draft aft, which is evident in the pictures, she had grounded on her afterbody and this may have created an additional capsizing lever due to continuing flooding. The emergency generator(s) would cut out as the heel exceeded 20 degrees. She would roll quickly until she assumed a new stable position, flat on her side, as shown in the helicopter infra-red videos of the crew disembarking. She would float in that position, downflooding rapidly through the passageways, stairwells and windows until she settled in the position that she is in now.

This could have been the moment when Captain Schettino left the vessel; he may have assumed everyone was off and with his wheelhouse at 90 degrees it is hard to see what he could usefully have done by staying in it.

The aftermath:

Costa found themselves with ten 747 loads of people shivering on a little island in the middle of the night . They handled the care and repatriation of all these people very well."

Further reports suggest that the Master reported that he was 300m from the coast, which put him 150m from known rocks! Her L.O.A is 290m, so he had put her at about half his ship's length of known rocks at 15knots! If he altered course substantially the stern would have swung towards the rocks, ie got closer, before the forward motion took her away.

So, Chouan, as another sailing professional, how would you describe the captain's behavior for getting that close to rocks?

(I had thought they were saying 300m from the rocks, and I'm used to a ship with enough installed horsepower to stop in it's own length!)

Shocking! Appalling! Grotesque! Any other expression that fits in with those! Even if Costa had instructed him to go close to the island, as they have done in the past, he went far too close, so it is his responsibility, absolutely.

…he may have assumed everyone was off and with his wheelhouse at 90 degrees it is hard to see what he could usefully have done by staying in it

I think that may be a fair comment. However getting a 290 metre ship within 150 metres of known rocks at 15 knots would seem to toying with trouble, which clearly came up and bit him on the ass.

Especially when said 290m ship doesn't have the ability to stop within it's own length or less.

Or even twice its length, I hazard to guess.

What sort of turning circle are we looking at for a ship that size moving at 15kts?