The
Sea Diamond's hull was torn so badly above and below the waterline
in its collision with a volcanic reef just outside Santorini's
harbor that it was impossible to close compartments and contain
rushing seawater, the company's chief executive told Travel Weekly
late last week.
The disaster, which
apparently cost the lives of two French nationals and continued to
spread oil into the azure sea of the Aegean off the Greek island's
coast, kept Louis Hellenic Cruise executives scrambling to address
the accident throughout last week.
"We have not slept,
Easter passed almost unnoticed, we have been on a constant vigil,"
CEO George Stathopoulos said in an interview from
Athens.
Church bells tolled
in the background as he spoke.
"We are devastated,"
he said. "The Sea Diamond was one of our best ships. Our main
concern, since the beginning until now, was to evacuate all the
passengers safely. The second concern is now to locate the two
missing passengers and, of course, the pollution and the eventual
environmental consequences."
Louis Hellenic
canceled one cruise, the one scheduled for the Sea Diamond that was
to have left on April 6, the day the ship sunk. The Thomson Spirit
was immediately commissioned to take over other scheduled cruises
last week.
Stathopoulos said the
company had blitzed tour operators and other business partners with
e-mail and phone calls from sales representatives and executives in
both the U.S. and Greece to make sure that they were aware that
operations were continuing with as little interruption as
possible.
Stathopoulos said a
permanent replacement for the Sea Diamond would be announced
"within several days."
Greek authorities
have brought preliminary charges of negligence and violation of
maritime regulations against the ship's captain, several members of
the bridge crew and the chief of housekeeping, pending further
investigation. Those charges are prefaced on an inquiry into how
the accident happened, how ship officers responded and how the
evacuation itself was conducted.
The captain of the
ship, according to Associated Press and other news agencies, told
prosecutors that unusually strong sea currents pushed the ship into
the reef and that efforts to turn it before it struck were
unsuccessful.
Walter Nadolny, a
maritime expert and professor with the State University of New York
Maritime College, said he had a number of unanswered questions
about the accident. "I find sinking 16 hours or so after the fact a
little suspicious," he said. "This is all conjecture, of course,
but without seeing any pictures, you hit a rock, have a gash and
you try to back off. But with a gash in the bow, why did the ship
sink stern-first?
"You also find
yourself asking, when the ship was within minutes of the dock, why
did they not try to dock it? Greece is not a third-world country.
Why not call for a salvage tow to shore?"
He also said that the
arrest of the ship's housekeeper, which prompted questions in some
media accounts, probably indicated that authorities had concerns
about how the evacuation had been conducted.
"The housekeeper is
generally the hotel manager, and they are pretty far up on the food
chain in management," he said. "At Carnival or NCL, the ship's
hotel manager would be in charge of a smooth evacuation, and I'm
sure that the same would be the case with Louis Cruises. That is so
the control officers can concentrate on the emergency."
Ship hotel staff,
waiters and other service workers are specifically trained in
evacuation procedures and report to the bridge by radio in an
emergency.
Nadolny said he
planned to follow developments in the case as it unfolded and use
the information for course study with students, in part because the
sinking of a cruise ship is so rare. "Groundings are fairly
common," he said. "But for a cruise ship to sink is very
uncommon."
He said
compartmentalization on cruise ships generally makes them far less
susceptible to sinking and capsizing because counter-flooding of
compartments could be used to stabilize a damaged ship.
Stathopoulos said
that in this case, however, compartmentalization was compromised by
the way the accident occurred.
"The ship was a very
strong and modern vessel," he said. "It had 14 compartments and was
built to withstand the impact [of grounding]. But in this case,
more than two compartments flooded."
He said the
circumstances of the damage were "over and above the level of the
compartments. We were very unlucky in that. Very
unlucky."
Stathopoulos said the
company was cooperating fully with authorities.
Nadolny said that
while investigations would determine what happened, he was also
curious about why it took three hours for the Sea Diamond to be
evacuated. Maritime safety guidelines, he said, generally call for
a ship to be evacuated within one hour.
Other than the
missing passengers, no serious injuries were reported during the
evacuation. However, many passengers arriving at a nearby dock on
Santorini told reporters that they had been very frightened when
faced with difficult descents to boats, even though the weather had
been good and the seas calm.
The search for the
two missing passengers, still unsuccessful late last week, was
inhibited mainly because the ship came to rest more than 300 feet
below the surface and remained unstable. "The ship is continuing to
slide," Stathopoulos said. "It is unsafe for divers to get near to
it."
The depth of the ship
and its instability also made it difficult to stem the spilling of
an estimated 100 tons of fuel oil.
Stathopoulos said
that immediately after the sinking, the company had contracted with
an environmental mitigation company in Athens, which took over
efforts to mitigate the oil spill.
Stathopoulos said he
did not know if the ship could ever be raised.
While the loss of two
lives and assistance to the family of the missing passengers topped
the company's immediate priorities, Louis Hellenic also had to deal
with media reports of panic and inadequate safety preparations on
the ships. Nicholas Filippidis, director of product development for
the company in North America, and Stathopoulos said reports of
insufficient life jackets and a failure to deploy lifeboats were
erroneous.
"There was no need
for lifeboats," Stathopoulos said. "At the time of the evacuation,
the ship was not sinking. There were also [tender] boats that had
been waiting for the ship in the harbor, and the lifeboats were
simply used as lifts to take groups of passengers down to those
boats."
He praised quick
response by the Greek coast guard, private vessels and local
authorities. "Helicopters were in the air, warships arrived, coast
guard ships and others came to our assistance," he said. "It was
handled very well."
Greek maritime
officials said immediately after the grounding that the evacuation
had been conducted without incident.
Stathopoulos said the
ship's 391-member crew moved quickly and courageously to help the
1,156 passengers. He dismissed reports of panic, denying early
reports that the evacuation had been hurried or frantic. He said
the ship's captain notified the coast guard immediately and "called
the company about one minute later."
But Nadolny said he
remained curious as to why authorities onshore said they had
difficulty reaching the ship for some 30 minutes after port
officials on Santorini saw it listing about 12 degrees to
starboard.
The ship had been
inspected as recently as last month by DNV, a Norway-based
industrial certification services company. According to a notice
posted on DNV's Web site, the ship, built in 1986 and refurbished
in 1999, had been under continuous classification by the rating
service since its construction. In an inspection less than a month
ago, it was issued a class certification, a safety management
certification and a ship security certification, DNV
said.
Louis Hellenic
Cruises, which serves many U.S. tour operators and draws much of
its business from U.S. travelers, has been in discussions with the
Cruise Lines International Association about membership and
subsequent safety certifications since 2005, said Christine Fischer
of CLIA. Filippidis said the company had a pending application with
CLIA at the time of the accident.
Stathopoulos noted
that all of the 1,154 passengers who were evacuated had been taken
by ship to Athens in the two days after the accident, accommodated
at good hotels and given cash for incidentals.
He said the company
was fully insured, not only for the loss of the ship and liability,
but also for environmental consequences, which is expected to
mitigate financial losses from the accident. Analysts last week
agreed with that assertion.
To
contact reporter Dan Luzadder, send e-mail to [email protected].