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COMMENTARY
January 18, 2012
Ship shapes
Anyone who travels takes his life in his hands, and this includes those who travel unadventurously in circles, aboard cruise ships, or to holiday camps.A certain number must reasonably expect to end trapped in a sunken hull; falling from the skies in an airplane; lethally food-poisoned; fatally heat-struck; eaten by a shark; trodden by an erstwhile tame elephant; kidnapped and murdered by local brigands. Whatever. It does not follow that the tour operators were remiss, although it might do. Nor that they gave insufficient warning of the perils to which human flesh is heir. Any kind of departure from routine involves risks; and routine is itself a great killer. The cult of perfect safety is the ultimate cause of innumerable horrific accidents and deaths, because the technicians are so focused upon procedures and regulations, that they become blind to actual threats. (I once met a black-humoured insurance executive who collected examples of this as a hobby.) The disaster by Tuscany, where the cruise ship Costa Concordia struck a rock, or perhaps only the sandbar, provides a grim, yet also ridiculous, memento mori. In this age of excess income, when so many have taken cruise ship holidays, the story has a huge grab factor. Hence wall-to-wall media for an incident in which the casualties are fewer than from the usual morning bombings in Pakistan or Iraq, or the average cattle raid in Southern Sudan - where "people like us" are unlikely to be among the victims. At the time of writing, the first impression of farce has been repeatedly confirmed. Bodies are still being recovered below decks, and trapped survivors are still being sought, four days after the accident. The Italian police have a captain in custody who seems to have been among the first to abandon ship, along with many of his crew, leaving passengers to fend for themselves. Many of those saved themselves by swimming ashore. As we approach the centenary of the Titanic disaster, we might observe that the laws of physics remain in force. I was struck, almost risibly, by a BBC sidebar headline, which asked, "How did this happen to a modern ship?" The answer would be: "Easily." The builders of these immense floating pleasure palaces declare they are safe because they are loaded with technical gizmos, helping us forget that their extraordinary size is the weakness. The weight of the thing is sufficient to rip any hull apart, when it hits anything immovable; and the oceans are full of things like that. The bigger the ship, the more delicately she must be handled, thanks to the destructive power of this weight; yet the less manoeuvrable she becomes. Cruise ships are anyway not built as solidly as, say, the Titanic. When airliners took over the North Atlantic run, the fast tough passenger ships designed for its heavy seas went to the scrapyards, ultimately to be reincarnated as these holiday vessels. Cruise ships are built structurally lighter, for moderate speed and moderate seas; then loaded to ever larger economies of scale. They are resort hotels, posing as ships. As a correspondent with some knowledge of shipbuilding explains, "They are eggshells without proper keels, and they have lots of little propulsion pods below that would each leave quite a hole if rubbed off." Luck alone may explain why none has yet gone down, a little farther from shore, with losses on the scale of 9/11. In writing about the sinking of the Titanic, a hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad called similar attention to the fatuity of builders' claims. They said she was unsinkable, while wantonly overlooking the size issue. One of the associated perils is human. The captain of a ship must carry crew, passengers, and cargo "in the hollow of his hand," but above a certain size this becomes impossible. The Titanic herself was too large to be integrally sailed, let alone evacuated; modern management practices were already in place, in which responsibility is diffused, and authority mediocritized. And yet she was tiny, compared with a modern cruise ship; and her crew far better trained. Conrad compares the Titanic's fate with that of the packet steamer Douro, which had sunk within 15 minutes of being broadsided in deep water, a generation before. She was one-tenth the size of the Titanic, yet the proportion of crew to passengers was much the same. In the available time, it was possible to save all the passengers but one (who clung in a death-grip to a railing). All crew required to pilot the lifeboats safely embarked, and all the rest went down. No one had paused to reflect upon his duties. That was an age, as Conrad noted, before the "ineffable hotel exquisite" had come to demand spacious and luxurious accommodations, and when a ship was still a ship. And long, long before those accommodations were themselves adapted to the chintzy requirements of mass leisure. But death, like physics, remains just the same. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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