USA Today reports that eight people have been confirmed dead in the horrific Costa Concordia shipwreck that caused the luxury liner to list so badly to the right that hundreds couldn't reach their lifeboats to get to safety.
Two days after it ran aground, the ship was still lying flat, and Concordia crew members joined Coast Guard to see how many of the missing were still trapped with the sinking cruise ship.
"There are some 2,000 cabins, and the ship isn't straight," said Italian Coast Guard Commander Franceso Paolillo. "I'll leave it to your imagination to understand how they [the rescuers] are working as they move through [the cruise ship]."
As the search continues for the missing, however, more and more people are moving beyond the icy facts of those still lost in the shipwreck and moving on to questions of how the Costa Concordia accident occurred in the first place.
Why didn't the ship stay clearer of the rocks? Why did the captain, as he is alleged to have done, abandon ship when there were still so many passengers on board? How could this happen to a modern-day vessel like this, almost a century after the Titanic made shipbuilders and captains swear "never again"?
It's exactly toward the Titanic that so many people, observers and victims alike, are turning.
But while the two great ships do share some superficial similarities, what both binds these two tragedies together and sets them apart is in the problem of evacuations.
The Titanic's sinking is largely agreed to be the result of human hubris. The Concordia, however, is already acknowledged to be the result of human error. Both in both cases, 100 years apart, the unpreparedness for a sudden sinking continues to be starkly apparent.
The Titanic and the Concordia
Both the Titanic and the Concordia were monstrous ships whose size would prove to be their undoing. The Titanic was the biggest ship ever built in the British Empire, and crashed into an iceberg. The Concordia was the largest ship ever constructed in Italy, and ran aground on either a reef or a large rock.
And like the Titanic, the Concordia, the best and most luxurious of the Costa cruise lines run by Carnival Corp., boasts some of the flashiest and most exclusive amenities of its time.
Both vessels even had oddities with their christening, a fact pointed out by AP reporters and sure to feed the fodder for superstitious folk looking into the tragedy. Both the Concordia and the Titanic were not christened before their maiden voyage, and the Titanic even carries the (false) legend that a bottle of champagne meant to christen it would not break.
'Excessive Speed'
But when discussing the Titanic and the Concordia, one stark difference appears: the engineering hubris that doomed so many passengers on the vessel's maiden voyage in 1912.
The Titanic sported 16 separate compartments divided by watertight doors, with the idea that even if four of those compartments were breached, the ship could still stay afloat.
But engineers, believing a ship so large and powerful was unlikely to sink anyway, neglected to take into account the fact that the bulkheads dividing the 16 compartments came up only 10 feet above the waterline, meaning water could still flood the closest compartments even if intact.
The British inquiry into the sinking confirmed that the Titanic's sinking was exacerbated by the ship's "excessive speed" in its collision with the iceberg, and by the appalling lack of safety precautions instituted at the time.
What lifeboats there were on board (not nearly enough for the thousands of passengers) had never been used, in drills or otherwise, and many boats left the scene of accident filled to one-third capacity for fear they would break.
Radio operators aboard the ship, meanwhile, didn't relay messages about icebergs to the ship's officers before it was too late, and there was no announcement system in place to let passengers know when the situation became grave.
All these limitations, along with the lack of set-down regulations at the time, were borne from the hubris that the Titanic could take on anything.
'As far as I am concerned, we were in perfectly navigable waters'
Compare this to the sinking of the cruise ship Concordia.
From what we know so far, the issue was not human hubris, but plain human error, particularly that of Capt. Francesco Schettino.
Schettino told maritime investigators that his charts indicated he was in water deep enough to navigate safely. He then struck an unidentified rocky outcrop of Giglio, a nearby island.
Once he realized the extent of the damage, he tried to change course and head for Giglio harbor. He then stayed on board until every passenger on deck was rescued.
"The area was safe; the water was deep enough," he was quoted by Italian news sources as saying. "As far as I am concerned we were in perfectly navigable waters."
Those on board the Costa Concordia, however, report the captain leaving the ship before almost any of the passengers had gotten off, findings supported by Francesco Verusio, chief prosecutor in the Tuscan city of Grosseto.
"[Captain Schettino] very ineptly got close to Giglio," he told ANSA news agency. "The ship struck a reed that got stuck inside the left side, making it lean over and take on a lot of water in the space of two, three minutes."
Sources report Schettino was at least four miles off course when the vessel struck rocks of the island of Giglio, Tuscany, despite Italy having very well-mapped sea lines, and the cruise ship began listing dramatically almost immediately.
Unsubstantiated reports by The Daily Mail even indicate the captain may have been drinking just before the accident, and was seen partying with some female passengers shortly before the wreck.
Schettino has been arrested by Italian authorities and may be charged with manslaughter for his role in the accident and for abandoning ship so quickly.
According to the Italian navigation code, captains who abandoning sinking ships before their passengers are off can face up to 12 years in prison as punishment.
"The commander left before and was on the dock before everyone was off," Ophelie Gondelle, a French military officer, told The Daily News. "Normally the commander should leave at the end."
'One hundred years later, we still don't do a good job'
The Titanic's sinking may have been caused more by hubris, and the Concordia more by simple incompetency. But according to the International Maritime Organization, part of the United Nations, by far the most dangerous part of a shipwreck is the evacuation of passengers.
And here, as with the Titanic, the Concordia floundered and failed.
"It's amazing that, 100 years later, we're still arguing about how many lifeboats are needed, what kind of training the crew had and what evacuation procedures were," said Bob Jarvis, a maritime law professor.
Jarvis is at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "One hundred years later, we still don't do a good job getting passengers ready for a disaster."
Passengers aboard the Concordia report that the crew didn't give clear directions on how to evacuate. They waited so long to lower the lifeboats that many didn't end up being used because the ship was listing so heavily to the right.
BBC News reports that some passengers only recognized the cue to abandon ship because they'd been on several cruises before.
Seamus and Carol Moore, a couple on the cruise ship, said they had to climb back onto the ship and wait two more hours for rescue after their lifeboat.
A woman named Ananias, an L.A. schoolteacher, said she had to shimmy along a rope down the exposed side of the cruise ship to get to the rescue boat below.
'Now we have something to compare it to'
In 1912, those reading about the Titanic were appalled at the fact that there weren't enough lifeboats for all the passengers on board a voyage across the Atlantic, and were shocked that a ship billed as "unsinkable" would go down on its maiden voyage.
One hundred years later, those watching footage of the Costa Concordia accident are outraged at the captain's apparent incompetency behind the wheel, and marvel that a cruise liner could have run aground while steering though such well-charted waters.
"To see a ship like this in 2012, with all the sophisticated navigation equipment, doing something that it does every week, you don't expect that today," said Jarvis.
"We all think we know about the Titanic because of the 1997 film. Now we have something to compare it to."
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