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[leoniejangstra]

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/costa-concordias-captain-francesco-schettino-was-showing-off/story-e6frg6so-1226245841882

Costa Concordia's captain Francesco Schettino was 'showing off'
From: AFP
January 17, 2012

A risky practice by cruise ships of passing close by to the Tuscan island of Giglio in a foghorn-blasting salute to the local population led to the sinking of the massive cruise liner Costa Concordia with the loss of up to 22 lives.
The captain, Francesco Schettino, is said to have been showing off, steering the 114,500-tonne liner just 150m from shore -- and then afterwards abandoning ship before everyone had been safely evacuated.

Before the rescue was suspended last night because of the bad weather, a sixth body was discovered in the vessel and the number of missing was raised by two to 16 after relatives of two Sicilian women originally listed as safely evacuated said they had not heard from them.

The capsized liner was lodged last night on a rock and mud shelf at a depth of about 20m.

Experts feared it could slide down the adjacent slope if disturbed by the heavy seas, becoming totally submerged and ending all hope for anybody still trapped inside.

There were also concerns about the 2500 tonnes of fuel in 17 tanks on board, but no leaks into the pristine waters had been reported and a Dutch firm has been called in to help extract the fuel.

"The environmental risk for the island of Giglio is extremely high," said Environment Minister Corrado Clini. "The goal is to avoid that the fuel leaks from the ship. We are working on this. The intervention is urgent."

The chief executive of Costa Cruises, Pier Luigi Foschi, blamed "human error" on the part of Captain Schettino for the grounding last Friday night local time (early Saturday AEDT).

Mr Foschi said while Costa Cruises would provide Captain Schettino with legal assistance, the company disassociated itself from his behaviour.

He said Costa ships have their routes programmed, and alarms go off when they deviate.

"This route was put in correctly. The fact that it left from this course is due solely to a manoeuvre by the commander that was unapproved, unauthorised and unknown to Costa," he said.

Italy's Defence Minister, Giampaolo Di Paola, a former admiral, blamed "gross human error" for the disaster.

Corriere della Sera reported last night that Captain Schettino had passed close to the shore to please the ship's head waiter, Antonello Tievoli, who was from Giglio.

Shortly before the grounding, Captain Schettino called Mr Tievoli to the bridge saying, "Antonello, come see, we are very close to your Giglio," said witnesses quoted by the newspaper.

Mr Tievoli, standing on the bridge, reportedly said to the captain just before the accident happened: "Careful, we are extremely close to the shore".

Residents of Giglio said they had never seen the Costa come so close to the "Le Scole" reef area. "This was too close, too close," said Italo Arienti, a 54-year-old sailor who has worked on the ferry between Giglio and the mainland for more than a decade.

Captain Schettino, 52, is under arrest for multiple manslaughter and abandoning his passengers on the ship, and is being held in custody for fear of being a flight risk.

Coast Guard officers had spotted Captain Schettino fleeing the scene even as the terrifying evacuation unfolded. The officers said they had urged him to return and honour his duty to stay aboard until everyone was safely off the vessel, but he had ignored them.

Costa Cruises said 3216 passengers and 1013 crew members had been on board at the time. Witnesses said the ship had been indulging the local population with a parade past the island in what is known locally as an "inchino", or reverent bow, its siren blasting three times and its upper decks ablaze with light as many passengers sat down to eat.

Adding weight to the theory, the newspaper La Stampa published a letter dated last August in which Giglio Mayor Sergio Ortelli thanked a former captain of the Concordia for the "incredible spectacle" of a previous close pass.

Francesco Verusio, the Tuscany region's chief prosecutor, said the ship's captain had "approached Giglio in a very awkward manner", which led the ship to "hit a rock that became embedded in its left side, causing it to list and take in an enormous amount of water in the space of two or three minutes".

Investigators have found one of the two "black box" recorders that track the ship's movements. It was reported to show a one-hour lag between the time of the impact at 9.45pm local time on Friday and the first call to the coastguard at 10.43pm.

Captain Schettino apparently left the vessel in a lifeboat at about 11.30pm while there were still about 230 people aboard, including two newborn babies and four disabled people who were not rescued until 2am. At 5am, according to reports, he called his mother and told her: "There has been a tragedy. But be calm. I tried to save the passengers."

A French couple, Ophelie Gondelle and David Du Pays, said they had seen the captain in a lifeboat, huddled in a blanket, well before all the passengers were off the ship.

[leoniejangstra]

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/coast-guard-call-sinks-costa-concordia-captain-francesco-schettinos-credibility/story-e6frg6so-1226246863156

Coast guard call sinks Costa Concordia captain Francesco Schettino's credibility

by: James Bone, Giglio Island

From: The Times

January 18, 2012


THE captain of Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, allegedly refused an order by the coast guard to return to his stricken cruise ship to oversee the evacuation.

Black-box recordings recovered from the wreck undermine Captain Schettino's insistence he did not desert his post, and show he delayed issuing a mayday call and that the 114,500-tonne Italian liner drifted rather than was steered to the shoreline after it was holed by a reef.

[leoniejangstra]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16604154


17 January 2012 Last updated at 23:50 GMT


Cruise captain given house arrest


A phone conversation of Capt Francesco Schettino being ordered to get back on board to co-ordinate the evacuation has been released

Italian judges have put under house arrest the captain of a cruise ship that crashed into rocks on Friday.

Prosecutors say Francesco Schettino caused the crash and also fled the Costa Concordia while passengers were still stranded.

A recording of a call between Capt Schettino and a port official after the crash appears to support this, though Capt Schettino denies the claims.

Rescuers have recovered 11 bodies and are searching for 24 missing people.

The local authority says 20 passengers are still missing. They include people from Germany, Italy, France and the US.

Four crew members - one each from Italy, Hungary, India and Peru - are also missing following the incident, just off the coast of the island of Giglio Porto.

Meanwhile, new satellite information shown to the BBC's Newsnight programme shows that the vessel had a "near miss" even closer to the island last August, in a diversion that was apparently approved by the ship's owners, Costa Cruises.
'It's too dark'

A recording of a call between Capt Schettino and a port official shortly after the crash appears to support the prosecutors' accusation that the captain left the vessel while passengers were still on board.

In the recording, released by the Corriere della Sera newspaper, Livorno Port Authority chief Gregorio de Falco can be heard repeatedly telling the captain to get back on board the ship to help the stranded passengers.

"Schettino, maybe you saved yourself from the sea, but I'll make you have trouble for sure. Go aboard," says Mr De Falco.

The captain appears to refuse, replying first that there are rescuers already on board, and then that it is dark and difficult to see.

Mr De Falco replies: "Do you want to go home, Schettino? It's dark, so you want to go home?"

Coastguards believe he never went back to the ship. He was arrested shortly afterwards and has been held in jail since.
Bodies discovered

But during a court hearing on Tuesday, the captain said he could not get on board the vessel because it was lying on its side.

He argued that after hitting rocks he had executed a difficult manoeuvre that had saved many people's lives.

His lawyer Bruno Leporatti later announced that the judge had decided to release the captain from jail and place him under house arrest.

Prosecutor Francesco Verusio, who had argued that Capt Schettino was a flight risk, said he did not understand the ruling.

"I'm keen to read the reasoning," he said.

Meanwhile, rescuers found six more bodies in the wreck of the ship on Tuesday, bringing the confirmed death toll to 11.

"The five victims are a woman and four men, who could be passengers, but we are not sure," said coastguard spokesman Filippo Marini.

He added that the dead people were between 50 and 60 years old, and were wearing life-jackets.

The bodies were found near one of the assembly points where people were told to gather in an emergency.

The authorities are also battling to avoid an environmental disaster, amid fears that the cruise ship's fuel tanks could break apart and shed thousands of tonnes of diesel into the sea.

Specialist salvage teams have been drafted in, and are due to start pumping the fuel out in the coming days.

The BBC's Peter Biles: "Footage shows the passengers dwarfed by the vastness of the ship"

The ship, carrying 4,200 passengers and crew, had its hull ripped open when it hit rocks late on Friday, just hours after leaving the port of Civitavecchia for a week-long Mediterranean cruise.

Some people were forced to swim for shore as the angle of the ship made launching lifeboats impossible.

Infrared footage taken from a helicopter showed lines of people climbing ropes down the exposed hull of the vessel to reach rescue boats on the water.
'Near miss'

Meanwhile, satellite tracking information given to the BBC by the shipping journal, Lloyd's List Intelligence, shows that the Costa Concordia sailed closer to Giglio island on a cruise last August than it did on its disastrous voyage on Friday.

Lloyd's List told the BBC that the vessel passed within 230m of the island on 14 August 2011 to mark La Notte di San Lorenzo - the night of the shooting stars festival on the island.

The route deviation on that occasion had been authorised by Costa Cruises - the company which owns the vessel.

The company said on Monday that the ship was never closer than 500m to the coast when it passed on 14 August.

Lloyd's List describes that occasion as a "near miss" and says the ship's route would have been less than 200m away from the point of collision on Friday's voyage.

Costa Cruises said on Monday that the route deviation last Friday had been "unauthorised, unapproved and unknown to Costa".

But Richard Meade, the Editor of Lloyd's List, said: "The company's account of what happened, of the rogue master [Capt Schettino] taking a bad decision, isn't quite as black and white as they presented originally."

"This ship took a very similar route only a few months previously and the master would have known that."

Costa Cruises says it is looking into the claims, but stands by the statement it gave on Monday.
Nautical charts

Meanwhile, Lloyd's List says the issue of which nautical charts the captain of the vessel was using looks likely to be critical to his defence if he does face a criminal prosecution.

The UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) has issued a statement declining to comment on whether its charts were being used. No rocks are shown on the UKHO's chart at the position where the Costa Concordia sank.

The UKHO points out that its charts are only at the 1:300,000 scale and that Italian charts are available on a much larger scale.

"It should be noted that this small scale chart is considered to be unsuitable for close inshore navigation," the UKHO told Lloyds.

[leoniejangstra]

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/confusion-over-costa-concordias-unregistered-passengers/story-e6frg6so-1226251024518


Confusion over Costa Concordia's unregistered passengers

From: The Australian
January 23, 2012 9:53AM



ITALIAN authorities said that there could have been unregistered people on board the shipwrecked Costa Concordia cruise liner, as they struggled to put a number on the missing.

As divers pulled a woman's body from the wreck off the Tuscan coast, raising the death toll to 13, officials admitted to uncertainty over how many people were still missing.

Divers were searching for some 20 people still officially missing, but there may have been people on board who were never registered as either crew or on passengers lists, said the head of Italy's protection agency Franco Gabrielli.

"Passengers may have been invited on board at the last minute by a crew member," the agency's spokeswoman Francesca Maffini said.

Gabrielli said relatives of a Hungarian woman have claimed she telephoned them from the ship, but there is no official record that she was on board.

This case showed up a wider problem, said Gabrielli. If it turned out that she had been on board unofficially, then there could be any number of other people who were on the ship but about which the rescue teams knew nothing.

Sources suggested that since the massive liner hit rocks just two hours after setting sail from the port of Civitavecchia, it was possible that the names of last-minute passengers had not yet been added to the relevant lists.

But the ship's purser Manrico Giampedroni ruled out that theory.

It was "impossible there were clandestine or unregistered people" on board, he told ANSA news agency.

"They are registered and photographed on boarding. It's all electronic. The Costa is a serious company," he added.

[John.hergy]

Italy divers recount nightmare search at Costa Concordia

From: AFP
January 24, 2012 4:17PM


THE chaos in the bowels of the shipwrecked Costa Concordia is the worst diver Fabio Paoletti has ever seen and the terror of navigating through an underwater labyrinth is hard to shake off.

"It is always scary, every time I go down to search the wreck, the unknown is frightening," Paoletti said on the shores of the Tuscan island of Giglio after his latest dive in search of bodies in the cruise liner.

Paoletti, 43, who specialises in cave diving, has pulled more than a few decomposing bodies from shipwrecked trawlers over the years, but has never had to tackle anything close to the the size of the vast 17-deck Concordia.

"Making our way through the debris is difficult and tiring. Visibility ranges from 80 centimetres to 10 centimetres, and we have to check everything - floating tablecloths, discarded clothes - for bodies," he said.

The divers search the ship in pairs for security reasons and inch their way through the murky waters at a painstaking pace, often having to squeeze into confined areas where the risk of becoming trapped is great.

They navigate in a zig-zag movement to make sure they cover every area.

"We go down for 50 minutes at a time, with three oxygen tanks strapped to us, and leave one or two along the way in case we start to run out of air. If we're not back in that time, our back up races to find us," Paoletti said.

The ruddy-faced diver from Viterbo near Rome said he has always had a passion for caving and he goes regularly in his spare time. He also attends rigorous training courses with the fire service six times a year.

"One of the biggest risks is that you get tangled up in electrical cables snaking in the water. Scissors are one of the most important bits of equipment. During training, they cover your eyes with a mask, and wrap ropes around you.

"You then have a really short amount of time to cut yourself free... without cutting through your own safety cord -- because that's your life-line, you have to follow that cord back to find your way out of the labyrinth," he said.

The Concordia, which boasted four swimming pools, a spa, five restaurants, 13 bars, and an array of entertainment and shopping facilities, lurched on to its side when it hit rocks off the Tuscan coast on Friday, January 13.

So far, 15 people have been confirmed dead.

While the search for survivors among the 17 missing people officially continues, Paoletti said he was not hopeful someone could still be alive.

"If there was by a slim chance anyone down there knocking or calling out for help, we would hear it, but it's unlikely. Sometimes we think we've found a body, but it can just be a bundle, a jacket and a pair of glasses," he said.

The divers use two head lamps to scour the freezing water and navigate an obstacle course of tables and chairs as well as items abandoned by terrified passengers as they rushed to evacuate, from wheel chairs to baby buggies.

The Costa Concordia had 4229 people on board from more than 60 countries when it hit rocks and keeled over, prompting a chaotic evacuation. The bodies, wearing life-jackets, have largely been found at emergency meeting points.

Paoletti's nine-man team wait for Italian navy to blow holes in the side of the ship with micro-explosives before heading in. They photocopy the relevant part of the vessel's plans, laminate the map and take it with them, he said.

The thought of getting cut off from his safety line and getting lost in the ship's entrails does not panic him -- mainly, he says, because he can't afford to worry about it, as losing self-control during the dive can be fatal.

"Panicking makes you do things you shouldn't, it's difficult to get back out if you lose it," he said.

Though there is a psychologist on hand to speak divers, Paoletti, whose wife also works for the fire brigade, said he has not needed him yet.

"There's no time to think of anything but the job when you're down there, and when you get back you're exhausted, too tired even for nightmares!"

The atmosphere inside the boat is ghostly and despite the pressures of the search, there are surreal moments: "I saw a bottle of red wine that had survived the crash intact, and I thought, I might take that back up with me!"