Cruise regulatory body urged to review Italy tragedy

NEW YORK -- Representatives of the world's cruise industry called Thursday for their international regulatory body to carefully review the investigation into the fatal crash and chaotic abandonment of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia to prevent a tragedy like it from happening again.

"Safety is the cruise industry's No. 1 priority," said Christine Duffy, president of the Cruise Line International Association, or CLIA, the global industry's biggest trade group, at a briefing in London that was broadcast in New York.

"While there is still a great deal not yet known about this incident, all of our members recognize the seriousness of these events and want to ensure that we apply the lessons learned from this tragic event," Duffy said.

The Costa Concordia was carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew when it slammed into well-charted rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio after its captain made an unauthorized diversion Friday from his programmed route. The ship then keeled over on its side.

Eleven people have been confirmed dead in the disaster, the worst in recent times. Twenty-one people remain missing — among them Americans Gerald and Barbara Heil of White Bear Lake, Minn., who were taking a trip they'd long anticipated to celebrate their retirement.

Divers at Giglio resumed a search for them just as Duffy and other industry experts spoke at an annual passenger ship safety conference. The conference was planned before the Costa Concordia disaster.

Questions have swirled about the preparation of the ship's crewmembers, the way passengers were informed of the looming disaster and the behavior of the ship's captain, Francesco Schettino.

The cruise line and Italian prosecutors accuse Schettino of steering the ship off course. He also is accused of abandoning the ship before the evacuation was complete. Schettino is currently under house arrest.

On Thursday, a new audiotape emerged of the first contact between port officials and the Costa Concordia, in which Schettino is heard insisting that his cruise ship had only a blackout a full 30 minutes after it had rammed into a reef.

The recording between Schettino and Livorno port officials began at 10:12 p.m. Italian time on Friday, a good 30 minutes after the ship violently hit a reef and panicked passengers had fled the dining room to get their life jackets.

In it, Schettino is heard assuring the officer that he was checking out the reasons for the blackout. But he doesn't volunteer that the ship had hit a reef.

The port officer tells Schettino that his agency had heard from a relative of one of ship's sailors that "during dinner everything fell on their heads." Passengers in the dining area reported plates and glasses slamming down onto diners. "We are verifying the conditions on board," Schettino replies.

Asked if passengers had been told to put on life jackets, he responds: "Correct."

The industry representatives refused to comment specifically on Schettino or details of the Costa Concordia disaster. Instead, they sought to provide information on the general procedures and safety standards that govern the industry in a bid to ease travelers' concerns.

A ship captain, they said, is mandated to follow the voyage plan. But if he deviates from it, the "appropriateness" of that change is supposed to be discussed with the captain's entire team, said William Wright, a captain who has worked for Royal Caribbean International and was most recently captain of the Oasis of the Seas, one of the world's biggest cruise ships.

Although Schettino left the ship before all passengers and crew were off and was told by Italian Coast Guard to return to the vessel, there is no requirement that a captain go down with his ship.

"There's no basis in international law for the notion that the captain goes down with the ship or is even the last to leave his ship," said Sir Alan Massey, chief executive of the United Kingdom's Maritime and Coastguard Agency, though companies may have their own individual policies. "There's more myth than reality applied to that notion."

Wright said that when passengers are required to receive emergency instructions and undergo safety drills likely will "undergo some scrutiny in the weeks and months to come."

Some passengers who boarded the Costa Concordia at different ports have said that they were not given instructions on what to do in an emergency at the start of their voyage.

Wright said that "it's clear in the vast, vast majority of departures that the passenger safety drill, the muster, occurs prior to the ship letting go lines and leaving the dock."

There are some instances when the drill may occur the following day, but that would not be in violation of international regulations.

As for the way crewmembers are prepared, industry representatives said that there are regular emergency training drills, and every crew member is given specific instructions on what they are supposed to do during a crisis and specifically trained and certified for that task.

"Obviously a bartender who is taking muster at a muster station would not have the expertise necessarily to be able to lower a lifeboat or operate a lifeboat but the persons are trained with the function that they are assigned," said J. Michael Crye, executive vice president of CLIA, who spoke to reporters in New York following the London briefing.

Crewmembers are also supposed to be able to speak the languages spoken by the passengers on board. Some on the Costa Concordia complained that they were not adequately informed, or spoken to in their native languages, as the disaster unfolded.

Crye said that despite last week's accident, the cruise industry has a strong safety record. Between 2005 and 2011, the cruise industry carried roughly 100 million passengers, and there were approximately 16 deaths attributed to marine accidents, he says.

Costa Concordia crew members, who have been returning home are starting to speak out about the chaotic evacuation. They say that Schettino sounded the alarm too late and didn't give orders or instructions about how to evacuate passengers. Eventually, crew members started lowering lifeboats on their own.

"They asked us to make announcements to say that it was electrical problems and that our technicians were working on it and to not panic," French steward Thibault Francois told France-2 television Thursday. "I told myself this doesn't sound good."

He said the captain took too long to react and that eventually his boss told him to start escorting passengers to lifeboats. "No, there were no orders from the management," he said.