On Jan 16, 9:36*pm, Charles wrote:
In article , Tom K

wrote:
To me, that damage doesn't look major.

Given the SOLAS requirement, that ship shouldn't have sank.

The damage is major. I don't see how you can look at the pictures
available and see otherwise.

As per news reports, the hole in the hull on the port side is 48.8m
(160ft) wide, whereas the ship is 290m (950ft), which works out to
roughly 1/6th the ship's length. Major, sure, but fatal?


As far as SOLAS...no ship is unsinkable. You can't write a regulation
that will prevent a ship from sinking. What they are requiring is that
the ship stay afloat long enough to evacuate the passengers and crew.

Which appears that in this case also failed - - the ship was grounded,
which resulted in it not completely sinking, thereby buying time &
opportunity for passengers to self-rescue by swimming ashore. Had
this been in deepwater, the death count would have clearly been far
far higher.

Similarly, other obvious failures were in the crew's poor response to
the emergency, as well as downright bad dissemination of information.
There might also be some questioning of having the planned emergency
drill scheduled for the next day instead of promptly ("same day"),
before passengers have had their first overnight. I've not been on
that many cruises, but IIRC, 100% of them so far have had their
lifeboat drill on the day-of-boarding.

Finally, this is probably more of a warship thing, but perhaps this
incident will cause some reconsideration: this ship's design
apparently either didn't have -- or the crew didn't know how to employ
-- controlled counterflooding of compartments to keep the ship's list
from becoming excessive and going over.

All of these factors can be addressed ... but it costs money. Time
will tell us what the industry's priorities really are.



-hh