The EU, ‘mega-ships’ and a paper trail of warnings that still remains
LAST MONTH’S capsizing of an Italian cruise ship caught the European Commission out in a highly embarrassing system failure, as I reported two weeks ago. The evidence for this was a series of studies published over the past eight years by Prof Dracos Vassalos – arguably Europe’s leading expert on ship safety, who has carried out research funded by the Commission for 17 years – warning of precisely the disaster which befell the Costa Concordia. It was perhaps unsurprising that Prof Vassalos last week sprang to the Commission’s defence on our letters page.
What Prof Vassalos’s letter did not mention was the very point highlighted in my article: that a central theme of papers he has published with increasing urgency since 2004 has been the vulnerability of huge modern cruise ships to capsizing if their hulls are breached. The problem that he and his colleagues identified was that, although these “mega-ships” are normally stable, they have a crucial design flaw. Even a small amount of water breaking in after a collision may be forced across the ship, rendering it liable to capsize, exactly as happened to the Costa Concordia,
In 2006, when the Commission was preparing a major new directive on ship safety, Prof Vassalos and his team published a paper on the “post-damage stability” problem, entitled “Survival Criteria for Large Passenger Ships”. This was part of an EU project known as Safenvship (the details of which seem to have disappeared from the Commission website). In another paper, in 2007, they warned that “the regulatory system is stretched to breaking point”.
In 2009, however, when the EU issued its directive, it totally failed to address the problem. This prompted Vassalos and his team to publish yet another paper, entitled “Ringing the Alarm Bells”, claiming that the new rules did nothing to remedy what they described as the “serious problem” they had identified with “damaged ship stability”. Their experimental studies had shown that “of 33 cases considered, 16 were found to lead to the vessel capsizing within two hours, sometimes very rapidly”.
In other words, it was all very well for the professor to praise the Commission last week for its “outstanding contribution to ship safety”, but as he knows better than anyone, the Concordia disaster was brought about by the very problem he has long been warning about – and so far in vain. The evidence for this is contained in that trail of papers by Prof Vassalos which can still be read on the internet – if not on the Commission’s own website.