Cruise ship owner offers passengers $14,000 for wreck

[Nash B.]

The money doesn't get pulled out of a magic hat. We all pay for it one way or the other.

How do we all pay for it one way or the other?

[mstng86]

How do we all pay for it one way or the other?

You didn't hear about the Carnival government bailout?

[Nash B.]

But he said the money doesn't come out of a magic hat.

[Machx2]

It would depend on what happened to me as to whether that dollar amount is sufficient. If I was on the deck when the shit hit the fan and just stepped onto a boat or swam a few yards to dry land then $14K sounds reasonable.

If I was in the asshole of that ship and had to climb and crawl my way out, wondering if I was going to die or not then no fucking way I'd take $14K.

X2. If I had to fight my way to the exit, swimming, throwing kids and women out of my way just to get out, I would want more money.

[talisman]

Wow, a bunch of sue happy people in here and you wonder why America is the way it is.

The money doesn't get pulled out of a magic hat. We all pay for it one way or the other.

14,000 is reasonable compensation. What some people on this site think they would deserve is ludicrous.

Never let go, Jack.

[Shorty]

x2. If i had to fight my way to the exit, swimming, throwing kids and women out of my way just to get out, i would want more money.

lmao

[Alex]

14,000 is reasonable compensation. What some people on this site think they would deserve is ludicrous.

You is stupied

[talisman]

lmao

[Forever_frost]

14,000 is reasonable compensation. What some people on this site think they would deserve is ludicrous.

Right. Now we know what your life is worth, thanks for that. However, watching your loved one drown to death, having to walk on the walls of a capsized ship to find an exit, pushing aside bodies of those already drown, going through flooded areas and having to swim underwater to get where you're going is certainly worth quite a bit more to me. And the PTSD from it? Oh hell yeah.

Tell you what, try PTSD for a week. Let me know if a lifetime of that is worth 14k, well less once you factor in the cost of your luggage, your ticket, your ticket home, and the loss of all your personal belongings you brought with you on the trip.

[IHaveAMustang]

I'm somewhat surprised that no one has mentioned the "family" compounding on this ~ $14K offer.

My wife and I would travel light. Neither one of us take our rings off at all, so that would have cut down on our replacement costs. No iPhone cheap laptop...fine. We would have received $14,000 each ($28,000) minus some costs. That's a decent settlement...if we hopped in a lifeboat and floated away.

Imagine a family of 4 who was "traumatized" (I assume children do count?). Thats $56,000.

I do echo the "if I had to blow out the rear propeller with a compressed air tank and escape from the belly of the ship to save myself and a ragtag crew of survivors" idea, I would want more. Otherwise, bank.

[jefehbk]

if people take the 14k...is that taxable by the govt? I assume it is since those leeches want half of everything.

[talisman]

What a clusterfuck.


GIGLIO, Italy (AP) — More time and money will be needed to remove the Costa Concordia cruise ship from the rocks off Tuscany where it capsized last year, in part to ensure the toxic materials still trapped inside don't leak into the marine sanctuary when it is righted, officials said Saturday.

As shipwreck survivors and relatives of the 32 killed began arriving on the island of Giglio to mark Sunday's anniversary of the grounding, environmental and salvage experts gave an update on the unprecedented removal project under way.

They stressed the massive size of the ship — 112,000 tons — its precarious perch on the rocks off Giglio's port and the environmental concerns at play in explaining the delays and problems in rolling the ship off its side and towing it intact from its resting place.

The pristine waters surrounding Giglio are part of a protected marine sanctuary for dolphins, porpoises and whales, and are a favorite for scuba divers. Already, tourism was off 28 percent last year, thanks in part to the eyesore in Giglio's port.

Franco Gabrielli, the head of Italy's civil protection agency, told reporters that officials are now looking at September as the probable date to remove the ship, taking into account conservative estimates for poor weather and rough seas. Originally, officials had said they hoped to tow it from Giglio's waters by early 2013.

In addition, Gabriele and Costa officials said the cost might now reach €400 million ($530 million), up from the €300 million ($400 million) originally estimated.

The Concordia slammed into a reef off Giglio on Jan. 13, 2012, after the captain took it off course in a stunt to bring it closer to the island. As it took on water through the 70-meter (230-foot) gash in its hull, the Concordia rolled onto its side and came to rest on the rocks off Giglio's port. Thirty-two people were killed.

The captain, Francesco Schettino, remains under house arrest, accused of multiple manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and leaving the ship before all passengers were evacuated. He hasn't been charged. Schettino maintains he saved lives by bringing the ship closer to shore and claims the reef wasn't on his nautical charts.

Relatives of the dead and survivors began flocking to Giglio on Saturday ahead of Sunday's daylong commemoration to honor the 32 victims, those who rescued them and the residents of Giglio who opened their doors to the 4,200 passengers and crew who survived.

"Just seeing this boat has a powerful effect on me," said Albert Karianis, a 60-year-old cleaner from Marseille, France, who survived the shipwreck and returned Saturday to the island for the first time.

"I think about it every day, and I have nightmares," he said.

Hilaire Blemand, the father of victim Michael Blemand, said he came back to honor his son and take part in the commemoration Mass for the victims.
"You always have a feeling of apprehension when you return to where it all started, and when you see that the ship is still there, it is still just as painful," he said.

Also arriving on Giglio on Saturday was Capt. Gregorio De Falco of the Italian coast guard in Livorno, who became something of a hero to survivors after his recorded conversations with Schettino during the evacuation were made public. In the conversations, De Falco excoriates Schettino for having abandoned the ship before all passengers were off and orders him to return, shouting the now-infamous order "Go on board (expletive)!"

De Falco told RAI state television he wanted to go to Giglio to "embrace the victims, and the relatives of the victims." De Falco, who has shied from all media attention since the disaster, said he did so because he didn't want the "notoriety."

"I don't want notoriety for this tragedy. I have always avoided it."

While groups of survivors were arriving on the island — some on specially organized ferries — others received a letter from Costa urging them to stay away, saying there wasn't room for them and that the commemoration was for families of those who died. Those who received the letter speculated that Costa simply didn't want disgruntled passengers speaking to the media.
Nevertheless, some such passengers were on hand.

Violet Morra, a 65-year-old from Marseille, said she had rejected Costa's initial settlement offer of €11,000 euros per passenger, offered in the immediate aftermath of the grounding. Many survivors rejected the offer and are pursuing legal action against the company and its Miami-based parent company Carnival Corp., the world's largest cruise line.

Passengers recounted a harrowing and chaotic evacuation, with crew members giving contradictory instructions and the captain delaying the evacuation order for a full hour after impact. By the time he gave the order, the ship was at such a tilt that many lifeboats couldn't be lowered.
"It meant that our lives were only worth €11,000, just €11,000 euro for our lives," Morra said. "We are still facing psychological problems, and so we have rejected it."

Costa attorney Marco De Luca said the compensation procedures are going ahead "at a satisfactory pace." He said almost two-thirds of the passengers took Costa's compensation offer.

Costa is fighting legal efforts, particularly those in the United States, where damage awards are likely to be higher than in Italy. Costa is challenging the jurisdiction of U.S. courts to hear the cases, arguing among other things that in buying their cruise tickets, passengers entered into a contract with Costa that selects the courts of Genoa, Italy, as the exclusive forum for any claims against the company.

The plan to roll the Costa off its side and remove it from its resting place involves constructing an underwater platform and attaching empty cisterns on the exposed side of the ship. The cisterns will be filled with water, and cranes attached to the platform will be used to rotate the ship and pull it upright. Once upright, the ship will have cisterns attached to the other side. All the cisterns will be emptied of water and filled with air to help float the ship and free it from the seabed. Once it's properly afloat, it can then be towed to a nearby seaport for demolition.

Salvage crews successfully removed some 2,100 tons of fuel last year from the ship's tanks without any major spill. But Maria Sargentini, president of the environmental oversight group for the Concordia, said sewage, remaining fuel and tons of rotten food remain inside.

"Sure, there are still some risks," she said Saturday. "Especially during the rollover and floating operations, there could be some leaking.

[talisman]

Looks like they're finally going to try and raise it Monday.


After rescuing a burning ship from pirate-infested waters off Yemen and a sinking oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, South African salvage master Nick Sloane faces his biggest test off an idyllic Mediterranean island.

The 52-year-old says the attempt to raise the Costa Concordia cruise ship from its watery grave, due to begin on Monday, is his "most challenging" yet in a career that has taken him to six continents and two warzones.

The Zambia-born Sloane was flown to the Italian island of Giglio last year from New Zealand, where he was working on a spill from the MV Rena oil tanker, for the biggest ever salvage operation of a passenger ship.

He has led an international operation with 500 salvage workers including divers, welders and engineers operating 24 hours a day around the rusting 290-metre (951-foot) hulk, which is bigger than the Titanic.

When the lifting of the 114,500-tonne ship gets under way, Sloane will be the one giving the commands from a control room on the shore and monitoring the unprecedented operation through eight monitors.

The ruddy salvage master hit a low point last year when storms hampered the operation and there were serious difficulties drilling into the granite seabed to install a metal platform to hold the ship stable.

"There was a lot of questioning. 'Are you sure it's going to work?' 'This is crazy!'" he remembers.

Work has sped up since then and Sloane has said he is confident of success, while remaining realistic

The most serious risk is buckling in the hull as the luxury liner is dragged upright, which Sloane has compared to a "banana" effect -- the extent of which will only become clear as the operation is underway.

"There's a lot of unknown factors about the ship. We've made a lot of assumptions," he admits.

Sloane has warned that the hull is slowly compressing in on itself and that now is the last chance to lift the Costa Concordia before it collapses too much.

"You can't afford to wait. Time is your worst enemy," he says, warning about the large swells expected once winds known as the sirocco hit the island in autumn.

Sloane, who had initially hoped to right the ship in time to float it in time for US Independence Day on July 4 with a big fireworks display, said he had a celebratory cigar at the ready.

"I'm going to stand on deck and smoke this as she's finally towed away," he told AFP during one recent visit, pulling the cigar out of his pocket at a port-side bar.

Sloane is no stranger to spectacular accidents at sea.

He began his career in 1980 working on the tugs of Safmarine, a South African salvage company.

His first major job was the salvage of the Castillo de Bellver, a burning Spanish tanker filled with 252,000 tonnes of crude stranded off the coast of South Africa.

He worked his way up the ranks in the industry and was promoted to the position of salvage master in 1991.

He was part of a team that went in with the US Navy's salvage division to repair damaged pipelines and oil infrastructure in Afghanistan and Iraq immediately after the US-led invasions and has worked in Russia to build a giant oil pipeline for Kazakh crude.

He has dealt with accidents that caused some of the worst oil spills in the world in recent years.

In 2011, he was involved in a risky operation when he helped secure the Brillante Virtuoso tanker, which was attacked by pirates off Yemen and set on fire.

Sloane is a consummate raconteur and is fond of showing off pictures on his mobile phone immortalising moments of bravado in far-flung parts of the world.

The Costa Concordia project appears mild in comparison but there has been pressure from environmentalists over the potential for toxic spillage as the ship is being raised in what is a pristine marine sanctuary.

While there are no golf courses to keep up his favourite hobby, there is at least some solace for the work hard, play hard South African: the location is Tuscany, homeland of his favourite Chianti wine.

[Forever_frost]

Any news on what the final payout was to the families or was it stuck at 14k?

[jason07]

I really hope discovery channel or some other network, produces a documentary on this. I think it's just fascinating the engineering involved with all this.