Francesco Schettino testifies at manslaughter trial

Oh, that explains everything, so it was fine.

Instead, he managed to kill 32 people with 1 stupid decision.

The miracle is that the loss of life wasn't 10, 20 times that.

No one on the Titanic died as a result of the initial collision with an iceberg either. But that doesn't mean either captain was innocent of making a piss poor decision causing death. Hence the manslaughter charge for Schettino.

I still love the story that as the ship tipped he, a seasoned sailor, fell in the bridge, somehow then fell out of the bridge and somehow fell in or right next to a life boat. I think the coast guard guy said it all about this captain.

Agreed. When I first heard of this I expected to eventually hear of several hundred people being dead.

Agreed. When I first heard of this I expected to eventually hear of several hundred people being dead.

It seems the only good thing he did that day was beach the ship.

No. That's comparing oranges and hydrogen.

Given time and enough of it, hydrogen makes oranges. Recipe taken from the Carl Sagan cook book.

~

From my understanding the ship was of a lesser legal class of cruise ship with far lower safety standards, and that a top level ship would have been damaged but not require an evacuation.

I'm not real crazy about the continental legal system, and the whole thing seems like a shake up to someone from a common law background.

Agreed. When I first heard of this I expected to eventually hear of several hundred people being dead.

It seems the only good thing he did that day was beach the ship.

Had it not stayed stuck on the shelf that holed her in the first place, she would have rolled right over and sunk like a brick.

Yep - and then we'd have had hundreds of casualties because the blasted crew refused to lower the boats. Seems to me it's not just the skipper who should be in the dock but also a fair number of the crew who told passengers to clear the decks and return to their cabins.

How many of those crew buggered off into the boats like Schettino? I distinctly remember the rescued passengers saying that the entertainment staff, food servers, etc. guided them off of the ship. The "professional" seamen were nowhere to be seen.

They were probably trying to find someone ashore to surrender to.

I recall it was an Italian crew that did much the same thing with the ship that sank off of South Africa some years ago. At least they're consistent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTS_Oceanos

Yep - and then we'd have had hundreds of casualties because the blasted crew refused to lower the boats. Seems to me it's not just the skipper who should be in the dock but also a fair number of the crew who told passengers to clear the decks and return to their cabins.

That's pretty much what happened. The crew got no information on what was going on, and took too long to get people to to the life rafts (just like the Korean ferry) and they couldn't launch half them when the ship started to list. People were jumping off the deck into the water out of desperation.

Me and my wife were on the Concordia two years earlier and I say it's a safe bet the crew did exactly that!

I have never seen a more disorderly, unprofessional crew than that of the Concordia and have been on several cruises with other companies.