Importance of Basic map reading and Navigation skills

Hi all
Reading the whole sorry saga of the cruise ship that capsized off a small Island off the Italian coast I can't help feeling that we are far far too committed to technology and blame THIS for accidents when it doesn't work.

ANY SAILOR worth his salt should be able to do simple navigation -- and saying the charts were out of date is a total exercise in futility. A Navigation chart of around 1886 of that area would have been accurate enough to pin point hazardous areas . (No typo --I MEAN 1886 too).

In any case if the Captain or even the ist Officer of the Watch really had a problem with equipment the ship should have come to a STOP as soon as the defects were noticed and help called in.

Moral to Motorists etc --NEVER rely on your Satnav 100%. USE SENSIBLY.

Actually also looking at some of these Ships --they look more like floating High Rise condos or apartment blocks rather than properly designed ships -- very very unstable if the side of the Hull gets opened up in any way.

I wonder if any sort of simulation was done for this type of event -- it also seems to me they built for maximum profit --safety was probably an afterthought.

Given that accidents DO happen the ship should have been be designed to sink "Gracefully" rather than "Titanic Like" --obviously nothing learned in almost exactly 100 years of shipbuilding.

I can't imagine that the radar / detection equipment wasn't working on a modern ship -- if this was the case the ship should have IMMEDIATELY STOPPED until the defect was fixed --or towed back to port if repairs couldn't be made.

Also -- you don't have to be a logistics guy --but evacuating 4,000 people off a QUICKLY sinking ship with traditional lifeboat designs is never going to work properly.

(Lower lifeboat --- 10 - 15 mins, get 200 people into one maybe another 60 mins if you are lucky and lower into sea --another 10 mins minimum so around 90 mins per lifeboat --- you could probably do around 5 simultaneously at various points in the ship -- say each lifeboat could hold 200 people -- do the maths 20 lifeboats @ 90 mins per 5 ---so it would take over 6 Hours to complete this type of evacuation -- and that's assuming everything went OK -- no panics / hassles / equipment problems etc etc.

(You might be lucky in getting 200 people into a lifeboat in less than one hour but that's only ONE person per 18 secs -- not unreasonable IMO - remember you could get all sorts of hold ups with scared kids etc etc delaying the embarcation process - and also don't forget time taken to get passengers to assembly stations etc etc).

Had this accident happened off the North sea coast near where some of the off shore Oil installations are located ("Forties field" Shetland / Norway) the death toll would have been utterly HUGE - probably several thousand making the TITANIC seem like tea party.


Cheers
jimbo

It is probably a bit premature to judge the situation but there has certainly been an almighty cock-up. Not all rocks are charted - if you look at some charts you can see the soundings of the boat that made them i.e. a straight line. Also even if the ship was equipped with forward-looking sonar it would probably be useless as the ship was reputedly travelling at 15 knots and the sonar would not look far enough ahead. There were probably some anxious faces on the bridge! As to the past, well they seem to have succumbed to exactly what happened to the 'unsinkable' Titanic, that is, too many compartments were damaged and flooded.

The third chart on this site seems to be closest to what happened from what has been said by the captain - typical brainfart

GeoGarage: Costa Concordia in previous close call

Can be embarrassing when you do it with your treasured yacht or motor launch but unforgivable when you have 4000 people to consider.