Abstract
Despite the increase in regulation and codes, there is a relatively small body of scientific literature on maritime disasters management, especially in terms of human factors that affect the success of the evacuation and safety procedures. This paper provides an analysis of passengers’ behaviour during the Costa Concordia disaster of 2012, in which 32 people died. We use 49 passengers’ witness statement made available by the court of Grosseto to understand how the evacuation occurred. We examine whether the main factor in reducing the effectiveness of the evacuation procedure was the lack of effective management or the behaviours among evacuees, or a combination of the two.Results of the analysis suggest that passengers reacted with solidarity, helped each other and that such spontaneous and pro-social behaviour possibly contributed to reduce the number of casualties. By contrast, competitive behaviours happened only in relation to specific environmental constraints and were limited to the proximity of safety boats.The deficiencies in command in the Costa Concordia evacuation highlights the need to increase the skills of personnel called to manage an emergency at sea and the need to create ad hoc training programs that consider also unexpected scenarios.Understanding how people (both staff and public) deal with an emergency and the factors that affect their decision is pivotal to help planners to review their strategy, anticipate similar events, and consider all the factors in future plans and regulations. While human error is always a big factor in maritime disaster, its impact can be considered and mitigated with specific procedures and adaptable plans.
Highlights
Since 1980, the cruise ship industry has been one of the fastest growing sectors in the travel sector (Barron and Greenwood, 2006; Brida and Aguirre, 2008) and recent years have been characterised by a sig nificant increase in large-scale cruise ships and passenger ships in terms of numbers and popularity (Kvamme, 2017)
This research is based on secondary data collection and provides critical analysis of documents related to the Costa Concordia disaster proceedings that have been released only recently
The number of maritime accidents and disasters is growing and, despite the increasing body of regulation and codes, there is a only a small body of scientific literature on maritime disasters, discussing emergency management and factors that affect the success of the evacuation and safety procedures; in particular, specific human factors, in terms of human error in management and emergent behaviours, are still not deeply investigated and considered in the cre ation of guidelines and rules to improve the management of future disasters
Summary
Since 1980, the cruise ship industry has been one of the fastest growing sectors in the travel sector (Barron and Greenwood, 2006; Brida and Aguirre, 2008) and recent years have been characterised by a sig nificant increase in large-scale cruise ships and passenger ships in terms of numbers and popularity (Kvamme, 2017). Some of them have been characterised by the desertion of the ship by the captain before the end of the evacuation process; in 2014 the captain of the Sewol left the ship without issuing an evacuation order, hindering the formal start of the evacuation (Kee et al, 2017) Most of these events were characterised by the captain’s inability to manage the emergency and by ineffective decisions; for example, during the emergency of the Oceanos the cruise director reported that many of the officers left the ship before the emergency was over, leaving the passengers without any information about what to do (Allen, 1994). 115/2015 (Court of Grosseto, 2015), the abandonment of the ship resulted in a lack of management and in organizational improvisation (Court of Grosseto, 2015) What this and the other two emergencies have in common is that passengers did not receive help or information and were left alone, possibly causing injuries and fatalities (Talley et al, 2008; Lu and Yang, 2011)
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