will cost the company up to $95 million in profit for 2012

I suppose insurance covers the ship and liability for passengers' injuries, but I bet there's a big premium increase in the company's future.

Does admiralty law allow passengers to win punitive damages in cases like this?

thistime: FormlessOne: Between causing the wreck, leaving passengers to die while fleeing the ship, and lying about fleeing in front of eyewitnesses who saw him flee, and tanking the stock of the company for which he worked, Francesco Schettino needs to fellate the business end of a shotgun. There's no hope for him - he'll never work again, he's looking at a significant amount of prison time, and the civil suits with his name in them will never end. Best to just step out now and avoid the torches & pitchforks.


I love the way it's all on the captain and poor old carnival has NOTHING to do with it.. Are you really that dumb? Have you ever heard the word 'scapegoat'? The coordinated effort to slam the captain is more coordinated than the damn rescue. What does that tell you? yeah the captain was 100% involved in ALL aspects of the evacuation and those thousand crew members that didnt do jack were all being jedi mind controlled by the captain.

Whats more sad what the captain AND Carnival did? or the fact that dumbasses like you really believe it was all on ONE person??

Come on even the stockholders arent that stupid.. how long you been shilling for Carnival?

notsureifserious.jpg

Sh, c'mon. The majority of pleasure cruise mishaps over the years seem to have Carnival in the headline.

JohnAnnArbor

The QE2 ran aground in well-traveled waters in 1992 despite having the latest charts. A 1939 survey had missed the high point of a shoal. It's on the charts now. Some call it "Queen's bottom."

ha-ha-guy: NEDM: ha-ha-guy:
I'll also bet you a significant sum of money that Carnival has a GPS unit on each of their multi million dollar vessels and can track them. Carnival was talking about how the captain overrode alarms when he moved off course. If Carnival doesn't have some computer in their operations center start beeping angrily when all this happens, then they are morons.

The alarms they were talking about were local (read:shipboard) ECDIS alarms for when the ship goes off course. Depending on how much tolerance the crew sets that, it can go off at half a mile or 5 miles off course. It's just something to get your attention. It doesn't convey anything other than "Hey! We're drifting off the course you set me on! Come take a look to see what is causing this and take action to correct it!".

One would assume that somewhere in Carnival's operation center a company starts beeping at say the 0.5 nm mark (or insert a number of choice). You would then assume that the cruise ship gets a call from the ops center and is asked "So why are you off course?". As Carnival mentioned the courses are preprogrammed so everyone knew where the ship was supposed to be.

If the cruise ship gives a good reason like "carrier battle group in my way" or "giant oil spill, turning around and getting the hell out of here" then one assumes all is well. Should the cruise ship fail to give a good reason I'd assume there is some kind of corporate policy where someone can get on the phone and scream at the captain to get his ass back on course.

Semi trucks have this technology (look for the little white saucer behind the cab/ air foil). Lots of intracity delivery vehicles have it as well. Commercial grade GPS is accurate within a couple of feet normally.

So Carnival does need to answer the questions:

"Were you tracking a cruise ship with 3,200 souls onboard?"
"If not, why?"
"If yes, why did you not notice it was 2.5 nm off course and check about this?".

Carnival has to be tracking the ...

Are you just making this all up, or do you actually know anything about cruise ships?

And hypothetically, if some central Carnival ops center saw the ship off course, what exactly would they have done? The captain knew he was off course, he was there on purpose.

Oops, my bad. Is drinking and boating really that bad?

Rapmaster2000: Lawyers will want to know.

1. Why were these flybys tolerated by Carnival?
2. Why was the crew seemingly poorly trained with lowering the lifeboats?
3. Why did a group of Russian passengers miss the safety briefing?

It implies that there are problems with its operations that Carnival should be aware of. They will be sued and lose. The market is pricing the lawsuits and the loss of assets and future revenue into the stock price. They know.

Actually, it sounds like EVERYBODY missed the briefings. Story on Yahoo says a newlywed couple attended one, but it was a sales pitch for excursions, other people getting on at other ports didn't even get the sales pitch which at least lets you know where the lifeboats are...

http://gma.yahoo.com/passengers-tied-sheets-together-escape-sinking-c r uise-ship-155040753--abc-news.html (new window)

We took an Alaskan cruise in '07. Within an hour of leaving dock(Long enough to finish seeing Vancouver from the boat, and to watch the actual disembarkation, which I thought was cool), we were at lifeboat training. Excursions weren't mentioned here. Employees were introduced, and a little bit of background was given for the ones we'd be in contact with for the week, but the rest was pure business. We were told which lifeboat was ours, we were told about the locations all over the ship for life vests in case there weren't any by our boat. We were shown how to line up, our crew knew what they were doing, they could answer any(reasonable) question we had, and we learned how to put on the life vests, and how the emergency beacon worked.

Of course, maybe that's the difference between Royal Caribbean and Carnival? One follows safety regs, and the other cuts corners?

joness0154: The captain was the one who sailed the ship right onto the rocks to begin with.

Shhhhhh, you're ruining the 'You must be a corporate shill.' argument... :-) Don't present facts, they only anger ranters and make them Hulk out.

I read some more and I understand why the cruise line is throwing the captain to the sharks. According to Wikipedia the liability of the cruise line may be negligible if U.S. law applies. Claims are limited to the value of the ship at the end of the voyage, which is small if the ship sank. The exception is if the owners were complicit in the wrongful act. So the owners need to convince the world that they had no knowledge of what the captain intended to do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_of_Liability_Act

I don't know if other countries with jurisdiction over claims have similar laws.

ha-ha-guy: One would assume that somewhere in Carnival's operation center a company starts beeping at say the 0.5 nm mark (or insert a number of choice). You would then assume that the cruise ship gets a call from the ops center and is asked "So why are you off course?". As Carnival mentioned the courses are preprogrammed so everyone knew where the ship was supposed to be.

I read that as 0.5 nanometers and thought.... man, you're really strict.

Swoop1809: Would you recommend an Alaskan Cruise? It's always something I though would be cool to do. I find the Carribean overrated.

I loved it... There weren't a bunch of old crusties on there at all... There weren't as many families, but plenty of 20-30 year olds. The cruise itself was awesome. Most of the ports weren't really worth getting off at, but Skagway and Icy Strait Point were exceptions. ISP seemed like a tourist rap from the guidebook we read, but it was an absolutely beautiful island with a lot of just walking around to do. I finally got to get my kids the crab they had been begging me for at an affordable price, they have a 1 mile long zip line that is apparently the longest in the world and makes the coolest sound. My younger stepson was too small to go on it, so we didn't ride it. I spent 2 hours on the beach teaching them to skip stones...

Ketchican was pretty cool, too, but the rest of the places came across as tourist traps. In Skagway, we took our only excursion, just a guided van ride to go to the Canadian border, check out the mountains, visit the old graveyard, hear legends of some of the colorful folk buried there, etc.

I'll take an Alaskan cruise again, for sure, even if I stay on the boat the whole time, the scenery is worth it. Getting to pull up in front of a glacier is unlike anything you've ever seen, and the weather was great... We had no rain all week, which is apparently unheard of, but I was from Az at the time(And it was summer), so rain was a rarity for me anyway.

There are 2 different types of cruises though, Inside Passage, and another I can't remember the name of. One goes a ways up, turns around and comes back. The other goes farther and has a little more to see, and no duplicate ports, that's the one we went on, and I recommend it.

We also got lucky that our captain not only was a friendly guy, but he had a sense of humor, morning announcements and other announcements were these rambling discussions about God knows what, but they were hilarious. He also got half of the passengers to run to the port side because there was supposedly both a moose and an eagle on shore. In reality a couple of crew members were dressed in an eagle and moose costume, and were screwing around, it was funny as Hell. The guy made me want to specifically take a cruise on his ship again.