Published Date:
31-Jan-2012
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shipping-exchangeAs the operation to salvage the massive cruise liner moves forward, its pace governed by the vagaries of the winter weather, passengers are lining up to claim to compensation. But like several of his shipmates, and despite the trauma of the midnight wreck, Garrone has no plans to leave his job.


"Maybe some people won't want to sail again after living through such a traumatic experience," said Garrone, an engineer who lives in Valencia, Spain.


As divers search for the missing, and salvage crews prepare to recover fuel from the carcass of the Costa Concordia, other crew members interviewed by Reuters also said they had no intention of giving up a life at sea.

"I risked my life to jump into the water and save a drowning man. To know I saved a man makes me feel good about myself. For me it was a positive experience," he said.


It is of course their job, but many of the more than 1,000-strong crew come from places where jobs are in short supply and they have shown no sign of wanting to criticise their employer during a general economic downturn even if they may have entertained some doubts about returning to work at sea.


After the accident, Costa Cruises told the crew it would pay them until the end of their current contract and that their jobs were assured. But some crew members were worried.


"The company said I could decide when I wanted to go back to work, and that I could take all the time I needed," Ciro Iosso, 33, an electrician for more than a decade with Costa, told Reuters. Because of his wife and five-year-old son, Iosso said he had some doubts about going back to sea.


Iosso commandeered a lifeboat that had already been put in the water with other crew members and said he personally evacuated at least 300 off the ship.

"LEFT A SCAR"


"I'm not absolutely sure I'll go back on a ship. The accident left a scar that won't ever go away," Iosso said. "I hope this feeling passes soon and I won't be afraid to go back on a ship, because it's what I do best."


In a shrinking economy, demand for ship's officers slightly outpaced supply in 2010, according to the International Shipping Federation in London, and the cruise industry has been the fastest growing leisure travel market for decades, with a passenger growth rate of 7.4 percent since 1980.


The accident that killed 17 and left 15 missing has so far had a limited impact on cruise bookings, Frederic Martinez, chief executive of the French unit of Royal Caribbean - a Costa Cruises competitor - told Reuters.


In the two weeks since the accident, "we didn't notice a very strong slowdown, or a wave of cancellations, we received very few worried phone calls. We were positively surprised," Martinez said.


But passengers would have booked in advance, and in many cases before the Costa Concordia hit the rocks.


Two weeks after the shipwreck, however, questions are still being raised about how the disaster was handled and whether there are shortcomings in crew training and hiring practices.


A crew member, Gary Lobaton, was the first to file a lawsuit against Costa's parent company Carnival in a U.S. district court. More are expected. Lobaton's lawyers said in his court filing that he was not aware of the "dangerous conditions" of the cruise ship until it was too late to abandon it safely.


Italy's top-ranking Coast Guard official, Marco Brusco, said last week that the ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, lost "a precious hour", which made evacuating the ship more difficult.


Had the order been given earlier, "the lifeboats could have been launched calmly, people could have been reassured," Brusco said in testimony to a committee in the Italian Senate.


Passengers have complained the evacuation was chaotic, with some left waiting in lifeboats for two hours before being able to leave the ship. Several bodies were found by divers in submerged evacuation assembly points, wearing life vests.


"Some crew panicked because they didn't have adequate training," said Ignacio Benigno, 34, a supervisor chef in one of the ship's restaurants. "It was really difficult to prepare the lifeboats in that situation."


Benigno, who is Filipino, was hired by an agency that provides crews to cruise companies like Costa. Both the agency, Magsaysay Maritime Corp, and Benigno said that he had received the proper training.


Unlike Garrone, whose father retired as a Costa mechanic and whose uncle is a retired Costa captain, Benigno started out working in hotels in Manila. Like Garrone, Benigno plans to go back to sea with Costa.


"I promised to go back to Costa," Benigno said. "Many of us are returning to Costa Cruises because we're like one big family."