📁How did the ships react to the clusterfuck that was the Costa Concordia disaster? I'm willing to bet that a certain Captain Schettino is likely to end up on the ocean floor, or at least something else that's dark-yet funny in a baroque way.
Overall, reactions started out sympathetic, but rather quickly turned angry.
The accident itself was kinda-sorta Concordia's fault - she was The Ship, and if she'd been on the ball, this accident wouldn't have happened. Every ship has had a bad captain at some point, and it's their responsibility to keep the idiots in check. If the accident had ended there, it's likely that most ships would have quietly made fun of Concordia for her lapse of judgement while publicly saying that it was an "unfortunate accident".
(BTW, Concordia got raised in 2015. She's slowly being rebuilt by her insurance company. Pre-COVID, her repairs were expected to be done in 2022.)
That being said, Schettino's conduct following the crash was absolutely unacceptable. It is both accepted and expected that the captain of a ship will either be the last one off or one of the last ones off. (Going down with the ship has fallen out of fashion - someone needs to be interviewed by the authorities afterwards) The fact that Schettino jumped ship and left his passengers to die is considered extremely distasteful by humans, but is a cardinal sin amongst ships. As it stood, it was likely that he'd never be able to captain anything bigger than a Rowboat ever again, but when he started getting support from the Captain of the MTS Oceanos, the. Gloves. Came. Off.
To briefly speak on the topic of Oceanos, he was an old Greek liner who found a second life working cheap cruises. He sank off the coast of South Africa after years of deferred maintenance caught up to him. His captain and almost all the crew very quietly abandoned ship, leaving the passengers to die in the heaving 30ft seas. It was up to the ship's entertainment staff to actually perform an evacuation, while Oceanos himself kept broadcasting an SOS until help was summoned. Somehow, the only fatality of the sinking was Oceanos himself, but his captain's betrayal was not forgotten by the international ocean-going community.
So, as Schettino was getting raked over the coals, Oceanos' Captain Avranas opened his big mouth and started supporting Schettino's actions.
To put this in context, imagine if the Charleston Church shooter started getting support from the guy who shot up Sandy Hook - it was NOT a good look, and the international maritime community went from 0️⃣-💯 real quick.
Schettino had been smart enough to keep well away from the oceans since the accident, but Avranas had no such self-preservation instincts, and convinced Schettino to travel out to his home in Greece so they could present a unified front for the media.
Avranas' home was on a small Greek Island. It required two ferry changes to get to it.
Supposedly, the two of them boarded a ferry to get there.
They've never been seen since!
