The inadvertent sinking of the Italian cruise ship by running aground on jagged rocks off the coast of Italy reminds us again how fragile and unpredictable life is. Apparently, the captain of the mega-liner was doing a bit of "show boating," by cruising the behemoth unnaturally near the coastline and blowing its horns to amuse the passengers and attract attention to the ship. Sort of like the Tom Cruise "fly by" over the flight tower in "Top Gun."
But, hey, that was a movie, for goodness sake; this is real life with precious cargo onboard. Just a few meters away were safe deep waters versus the treacherous rocky shallows the captain decided to navigate unsuccessfully. The cruise-line owners are apparently not sparring the captain either; instead, they're perplexed at how little caution their captain exercised and claim human error as the cause of the disaster.
Unlike the Titanic, when the crew had hours to get off the doomed shipped after it hit the iceberg, the passengers of Costa Concordia had less than an hour to make way to safety. Still, the similarities between the two tragedies are stunning. Both were in extremely cold water and hit an avoidable large object, each tearing long gashes in the hull below the waterline. Both ships were thought very safe, "unsinkable" and "too large to fail" ocean liners. How unlikely did the tourists on those ships think such a catastrophe could occur?
