On the night of 13 January 2012, the cruise ship Costa Concordia struck a rock outcrop off the Italian island of Isola del Giglio, gashed her port hull below the waterline, lost propulsion, and capsized in shallow water close to shore; 32 people died. Twenty-seven were passengers and five were crew; a Spanish salvage diver later became the disaster’s 33rd victim during the wreck-removal operation. The vessel was on the first night of a seven-day Mediterranean cruise out of Civitavecchia, carrying 4,229 people — about 3,206 passengers and just over 1,000 crew. She was, at roughly 114,000 gross tons and some 290 metres long, one of the largest passenger ships ever lost.
The proximate event was a navigational decision by her master. Captain Francesco Schettino had ordered an unauthorised close “sail-past” — an inchino, or bow — of Giglio, bringing the ship in toward the island as a salute. At about 21:45 the hull made contact with Le Scole, a charted rock formation a few hundred metres off the coast. The impact tore an opening that the official investigation measured at roughly 53 metres along the port side, flooding several contiguous watertight compartments containing the propulsion and steering machinery. The ship lost power within minutes and began to list, eventually drifting back toward the island and grounding on her starboard side.
The disaster was investigated by Italy’s Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport (MIT) through its Marine Casualties Investigative Body, which published a safety technical report in May 2013. Its conclusion was direct: “the human element is the root cause in the Costa Concordia casualty” — both in the unconventional manoeuvre that brought the ship onto the rocks and in the chaotic, delayed emergency management that followed. The report found the vessel was sailing too close to shore, at night, in a poorly lit area, at an unsafe speed of about 15.5 knots, using an inappropriate chart, and that the master disregarded his bridge team.
The legal reckoning fell mainly on the master. In 2015 a court in Grosseto convicted Schettino of multiple counts of manslaughter, of causing the shipwreck, and of abandoning the vessel while passengers were still aboard, sentencing him to sixteen years. Appeals courts upheld the conviction, and Italy’s Court of Cassation made it final in 2017. Five Costa Crociere employees, tried separately, accepted plea bargains and received sentences of months to a few years.
At about 22:12 on 26 September 2000, the Greek passenger ferry MS Express Samina drove onto the Portes islets — a charted reef roughly two nautical miles off the harbour of Parikia, on the island of Paros in the Aegean — at around 18 knots, tore open her hull, and sank within about an hour. Eighty-one people died out of 533 aboard; the toll is sometimes given as 80 or 82, the variation turning largely on whether the harbourmaster who suffered a fatal heart attack during the rescue is counted. The ferry struck a hazard that was marked on every chart of the approach, in worsening but navigable weather, for one elementary reason: there was no one effectively conning the ship.
The Express Samina was an ageing RO-RO ferry — built in 1966, some 34 years old — operated by Minoan Flying Dolphins, which by 2000 dominated Greek coastal shipping. On the night of the sinking she was running under autopilot with no proper bridge watch; crew members, including the first officer, were away from their posts, with witnesses describing officers watching a televised football match as the ship ran on toward Paros. With the autopilot holding a course and no one correcting it, the ferry stood on past the point where she should have altered for the harbour and struck the Portes rocks. The damage was made far worse, and the sinking far faster, because watertight doors that safety rules required to be shut were left open — by most accounts nine of the eleven — so the inrush spread unchecked through the hull.
There was no standing Greek transport-safety board to issue a “probable cause” in 2000; the official reckoning came through the Greek state’s administrative and judicial investigation, conducted under the Merchant Marine Ministry and the courts. The finding was crew negligence. Several crew members were prosecuted and convicted: the first officer, Anastasios (Tassos) Psychoyios, received 19 years, the master, Vassilis Giannakis, 16 years, and others received lesser terms for offences including abandoning the ship without the captain’s order. The company’s managing figure, Pandelis Sfinias, charged in connection with the disaster, died by suicide two months after the sinking.
The Express Samina remains a landmark in European ferry safety because of how avoidable it was — a modern ferry, on a routine domestic run, lost on a charted rock because the bridge was unmanned and the watertight doors were open. It accelerated reforms in Greek shipping: the mandatory fitting of voyage data recorders, the maritime equivalent of an aircraft’s black box, and a reduction of the maximum permitted age of passenger ferries.