Costa Concordia: Captain Schettino is in Custody

by Emily Sutherlin | January 17, 2012 at 12:22 pm

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Captain Francesco Schettino is in jail and being questioned by magistrates over his blatant refusal to take demands of the Coast Guard during the tragic sinking of the Costa Concordia cruise ship.

An phone conversation recorded during the call from help from Captain Schettino to the Coast Guard has been leaked.

Instead of staying aboard to help the crew members and passengers of the Costa Concordia get to safety, Schettino, who shouldn’t even be called ‘Captain’, fled the ship into a lifeboat and called the Coast Guard from there, telling him he was ‘coordinating from the lifeboat’.

The transcription is disheartening and sickening. Not only is he safe in a life boat while hundreds more passengers need help on the ship, he refuses to take orders from the coast guard to get back on the ship and coordinate rescue there.

The coast guard said, “Look, Schettino, perhaps you have saved yourself from the sea but I will make you look very bad. I will make you pay for this. Dammit!"

I think Schettino did a pretty good job of making himself look bad.

He even had the audacity to ask the coast guard how many were dead at the time of the conversation, information the captain should have been relaying to the coast guard.

Schettino only gave the order for the ship to be evacuated at around 10:50 p.m., 70 minutes after the vessel smashed into the rock. In fact, he was still telling the coast guard at 10:08 p.m. that everything was “O.K.” (a highly questionable description of the situation at hand). Apparently, the irritated crew members, much like lost sheep, had to pre-empt the order and begin evacuation before Schettino even gave his order.

A lawyer for Schettino said: "The captain defended his role on the direction of the ship after the collision, which in the captain's opinion saved hundreds if not thousands of lives, the captain specified that he did not abandon ship." Well then, if jumping ship and hopping on a life boat while everyone else is fighting for their lives isn’t “abandoning ship”, I certainly question the ethics of ship captains, and wonder if it was the preemptive action of the junior crew members that saved the lives of the survivors, not the irresponsible captain.

Mr. Schettino is being held in Grosseto and faces up to 15 years in prison.