Costa Concordia

2012

Giglio, vada a bordo, the largest parbuckling Location: off Isola del Giglio, Tuscany, Italy · Coordinates: 42.36°N 10.92°E · Casualties: 32 · Survivors: 4,197 · Depth: 18 m (as grounded) · Cause: grounding — Struck a submerged rock off Isola del Giglio at 21:45 on 13 January 2012 while performing a 'salute' maneuver too close to the island. A 53-metre gash opened along her port side. She heeled against the shore of Giglio; Captain Francesco Schettino abandoned ship before all passengers were disembarked. · Fate: parbuckled 2014 · scrapped 2017 · Type: cruise ship · Concordia class · Tonnage: 114,147 tons · Crew: 1023 · Flag: Italy · Launched: 2005 Italian cruise ship, 114,000 tons. On 13 January 2012 her captain, Francesco Schettino, steered a 'salute' too close to the island of Giglio and struck a submerged rock. 32 dead; Schettino abandoned ship before passengers were off, prompting the coast guard's famous order, vada a bordo, cazzo. Parbuckled upright in 2014 in the largest salvage operation ever attempted, scrapped in 2017. The Vessel The Costa Concordia was the first of the Concordia-class cruise ships, built at Fincantieri's Sestri Ponente yard in Genoa and entered into Costa Crociere service on 7 July 2006. She was 290 metres long, 114,147 gross tons, with 1,500 passenger cabins across thirteen decks and a certified capacity of 3,780 passengers and 1,100 crew. At the moment of her delivery she was the largest Italian-built passenger ship in history. She was operated by Costa Crociere, the Italian cruise subsidiary of the American Carnival Corporation, on seven-day Tyrrhenian-Mediterranean itineraries departing from Civitavecchia and Savona. Her regular route called at Marseille, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Tunis, Palermo, and Civitavecchia; the route was operated in both summer and winter seasons and had been essentially unchanged since her entry into service. The practice of the "sail-by salute", in which a cruise ship would alter course to pass close to a specific coast for the benefit of passengers and of shore-side residents watching, was an established custom in Italian cruising. Costa Crociere had standardised a sail-by of the island of Giglio off the Tuscan coast in 2010 at the request of Mario Palombo, a retired Costa captain who lived on Giglio. The sail-by was nominally conducted at a minimum charted depth of 150 metres; Costa's fleet manuals specified a half-mile stand-off from the Giglio coastline. The Disaster At 21:45 on 13 January 2012 the Costa Concordia struck Le Scole, a submerged rock formation 300 metres off Giglio's east coast, at 16 knots. The rock tore open 53 metres of her port side between frames 52 and 124, rupturing five watertight compartments against a design envelope of two. Two generators shorted almost immediately; the ship lost power, then emergency power, then partial emergency power as the generators came back on line. She drifted on her momentum for 30 minutes, turning through 120 degrees, and came to rest against the shore of Giglio at 22:17, listing to starboard at an angle that increased through the night. Schettino's conduct in the following five hours became, in the subsequent Italian trial, the most documented failure of shipboard leadership on video in the history of commercial cruising. He delayed issuing the abandon-ship order for 62 minutes after the impact. When he did order abandonment, the ship's list had already exceeded the angle at which half of her lifeboats could be deployed. He then left the ship himself, boarding one of the last usable port-side boats, while several hundred passengers remained aboard. The Livorno Coast Guard station commander Gregorio De Falco reached Schettino by ship-to-shore phone at 01:46 and ordered him repeatedly to return to the ship and coordinate the rescue. Schettino's refusal, and De Falco's increasingly furious demand (the phrase "Vada a bordo, cazzo" — "Get back on board, damn it") — became one of the most-hea