These last few days I have been watching the Costa Concordia ship lying submerged in the Mediterranean Sea near Giglio Island with great interest. It has not completely sunk, and for that we should be grateful.
I'm not exonerating the captain from steering the ship onto rocks and leaving it as soon as possible to save his own life, thus creating a shocking vacuum of power when it was most needed.
Perhaps the fact that the ship landed where it did, and was almost completely evacuated in two hours, is little short of miraculous. If the ship had been in open water, it might very well have sunk quickly, bringing catastrophic loss of life. As it is now, Carnival Cruises and Costa Lines will have to carry most of the financial burden.
How quickly people forget these disasters. I went on a cruise, four of us in my family, around the Greek islands in March 2007, on the Louis Cruises Sea Diamond. One week after we disembarked, the very next cruise, the Sea Diamond, carrying about 1,537 passengers, hit rocks off the island of Santorini in the afternoon. We saw photos of crew members we had spoken to only days before. She sank overnight, fortunately after passengers were evacuated through rough waves, and only two passengers died.
Here is a good photo of the Sea Diamond:
Sea Diamond
Here is a photo of the Sea Diamond before she sank:
Sea Diamond, April 5, 2007
The point is, these incidents are disturbing, and yet neither involved loss of life, only loss of enormous, important ships. We could have been on it, but we weren't. For that we count our blessings.
Here were three of us posing. We had a fabulous trip.
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