Cruise search continues as blame game begins
Day after day we witness the slow, piecemeal dismantling of a luxury cruise-liner off the Italian coast. It is like watching the corpse of some vast behemoth slowly decompose. And all this with – as I write – perhaps anything up to 29 people still in there including a five-year-old child.
Even as that search – rightly – takes precedence at sea, on land a bizarre, demeaning spectacle of very public blame-throwing is going on.
Yesterday, the company chairman Pier Luigi Foschi, who is also CEO of Costa Cruises, used a press conference to blame the Costa Concordia’s Captain Francesco Schettino for making an “unapproved, unauthorised manoeuvre”.
I revisited this specifically now, to set it in context. Captain Schettino is in police custody potentially facing charges of manslaughter and abandoning his ship – both carry possible long prison sentences. He is in no position to answer this. But that is the least of it.
Such comment would rightly be illegal in this country as blatantly prejudicial to any forthcoming trail Captain Schettino might face.
Also, there has obviously been no time for any police or marine accident investigation into what happened – and why? And yes, there are precedents for captains of vessels being blamed and vilified in public, only to be rather more quietly exonerated at a later date when people are in possession of the facts.
Simply leaving the accused captain well alone might now be a wise course of action.
Not least because of some uncomfortable facts for the company. We know this had happened before. For instance, last summer where YouTube video shows her steaming very close indeed to the island. We know local seafarers complained in public at that time, that she was steering a dangerous course. We know this fatal course was also flagged up beforehand by various people on the vessel.
Read more from Channel 4 News: How safe are cruise ships?
If all this was happening, if steering close to the shore was something so widely known, the obvious questions are did the management know about this – and if not, why not.
The loss of the Costa Concordia will likely be one of the biggest marine insurance write-offs in human history. These things do not come cheap. Once she is secured in terms of body-retrieval and the pressing matter of 2,000 tonnes or so of heavy bunker oil in her tanks, she will be either refloated to be cut up on some distant Pakistani or Indian beach – or possibly dismantled on the spot over many months.
And then someone will have the mother of all insurance bills. Which takes us back to where we started. For if the company can materially prove negligence of someone aboard, then its legal position might be rather better buttressed.
Bluntly – does the captain go down or does the company?
All that may be a factor in why we’ve seen so much public mud-slinging, even as 29 bodies are still unrecovered from the perilous reefs off Giglio Island.
Follow Alex Thomson on Twitter: @alextomo