November 23, 2023 • 50 mins
It’s astounding that with the exceptional navigational equipment aboard a cruise ship can run aground in the 21st century, and 32 passengers and crew can lose their lives within a thousand feet of land. Such is the power of incompetence and cowardice.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, if you've been sitting around thinking, man, I'd
love to see Josh and Chuck in person. Maybe late
January would be great. Well, then we have wonderful news
for you.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right. We're doing our annual Pacific Northwest and Northern
California tour. We are in Seattle on January twenty fourth
in Seattle. We're counting on you, guys. We stepped it
up to the paramount this year, so please help us
fill that beautiful theater. We are at our home away
from home at Revolution Hall in Portland on the twenty fifth,
and then as always, back at San Francisco's Sketch Fest
(00:31):
on January twenty sixth at the Sydney Goldstein.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
So here comes the info for links and tickets and
all that stuff. Go to linktree slash sysk and that
will take you where you need to go to find
a great seat. Or you can visit our website Stuff
youshould Know dot com that will also take you where
you need to go to find a great seat, and
we will see you in your great seats in January.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just sailing along.
Hopefully we're not going to stop abruptly for this episode
of stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, you know, we were actually developing a robust suite
of maritime disasters.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Well, there's plenty to talk about, for sure, So this
is I mean, we're probably mid suite at best.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I mean, depending on which ones you cover, we could
be no pun intended. Just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Oh that was pretty good though. And it's funny you
bring up the iceberg, which everybody knows is associated with
the Titanic, because I have seen, according to maritime lore
that I found on the internet written by maritime lawyers,
that this shipwreck essentially that we're going to talk about
(01:55):
is a new touchstone for the next like one hundred years,
just like the titan was for one hundred or so
years after it. It was just that much of a cluster.
Luckily not anywhere near as many people died, but it's
as not maybe not as interesting a story, but it's
a pretty gosh star and twotin interesting story if you
ask me.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing that stood
out to me about the wreck of the Costa Concordia.
Is that And you know when you see little documentary
footage and stuff like that of interviews with people, many
of the passengers are remarking like, you know, we just
couldn't believe, like something like this is happening in twenty twelve, right,
(02:40):
like the fact that it's a modern disaster, a llah
the Titanic, like that kind of thing shouldn't be happening
these days.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, And I saw somebody who compared the two described
it as where the Titanic was kind of like an
ironic twist of fate brought on by hubris. Yeah, this
was just brought on by incompetence. That's what it really
boils down to.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Yeah, I mean that's how something like this can happen
in a modern age where everything is there to prevent
something like this from happening, exactly, But you can never
count out human incompetence.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
No, no, And you said modern age, and it was
pretty modern. So on the night of Friday, the thirteenth
January in twenty twelve, not that long ago, just over
a decade, that ship, the Costa Concordia, was sailing around
the Mediterranean, which it normally did. I think. It was
launched in two thousand and five. Yeah, by the Costa
(03:39):
Crouchierre also known as Costa Cruz's line, and at the
time it was the largest ship in the Mediterranean. It
boasted the nicest spa, took up two full decks, and
it was just nice. It looks if you look at
the pictures of what it looked like when it was launched,
it looks like nineteen ninety eight Vegas came along and
(04:02):
threw up in it and just shipped it out to sea.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Yeah, not like the super classy ones these.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Days, right, but this one struck me as I mean
definitely along that same line. I mean, a cruise ship
has a certain look to it no matter what they
try to do.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yeah, there's going to be brass this one.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
This one really like pulled out all the stops, as
our organ playing friends sometimes.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Say, yeah, absolutely, I mean, this was sort of the
pride of Italy. It was their largest cruise ship at
nine hundred and fifty plus feet long and held almost
thirty eight hundred passengers along with just over one thousand
crew members for a total on this day or on
this launch, at least two hundred and twenty nine total people,
(04:48):
captained by Francesco Skatino, who had been He was a veteran,
he had been working just for this cruise company for
eleven years.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah. I think he was fairly new to the Concordia,
but like their ships were similar enough that this was
not I mean, yeah, he was totally able and capable
to captain a ship. You'd think. Yeah, So three hours
after the Concordia set sail for its seven day cruise
around the Mediterranean, which was that's just what it did.
(05:21):
It stopped in the same places. Yeah, three hour tour.
It was passing by an island off of Tuscany called Gilio,
which you can't help but just think of that Ben
Affleck movie.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
That's what I thought of.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
And Captain Skatino did something that in retrospect people are like, wait,
what did you do? But once you start to dig
into it, you're like, apparently that's a thing like cruise
ships sometimes do this. It's called the sail by. He
decided to do a sail by of the island of Giglio,
and Gilio is a seafaring fishing island of like hardy
(06:02):
see people. And then very wealthy people who like to
hang out around hardy see people.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
And any though no fifteen hundred people total right.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Around the whole island, multiple towns. The whole population the
island was fifteen hundred. So Captain Scatino decided to do
a sail by of Gilio. And a sail by is
where you sail like preposterously close to land to do
a couple of things. It thrills the passengers on board,
but it also thrills the people wherever you're passing by.
(06:34):
It's pretty neat, like it's just so close, and the
ship's always lit up, very pretty and all that stuff.
It's just something to see. But if you stop and
think about it, it's incredibly reckless. I mean, to do
this sail by, he had to deviate from his course
so much that he had to turn off like the
tracking software, like just turn it off so that he
could maneuver the ship by hand off course that drastically.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah, and you know what, I'm gonna go ahead and say,
I mean, this is like a fly by that airplanes
might do, and those have resulted in accidents here and there.
I'm just gonna go ahead and throw it out there
that no more sail buys or fly bys. Just keep
all of the dangerous heavy machinery and vehiculars. Vehiculars, sure, sure,
(07:23):
well away from everything.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
You know.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
It's always like, oh, the people love it. This would
be impressive, until there's an accident and it's like, oh
wait a minute, well, people can die doing this, so
let's just stop with this stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, and no more car surfing like they didn't teen
wool for Footloose, none of that stuff either.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah, but the one thing, the game of Chicken and footloose,
just full steam ahead with that. That's a pretty great
thing to do.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Okay, so the sail buy again. This is an enormous ship,
a thousand feet long, basically one hundred and fourteen thousand puns.
This is a ginorm a ship and it's passing by
this tiny little island, and it was doing it for
a couple of reasons. One of the reasons why Giglio
used to get sail bys fairly frequently, apparently they'd done
(08:10):
it just a week before, was that there was a
retired captain from the Costa Cruise Line. I guess he'd
been there for like ever and it'd retire and now
lived on Gilio, so they would do sail bys and
like in part and to salute him.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
That was one swing to the horn.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Basically, there was also a Matredi on board named Antonello Tievely.
He was from Giglio and he had family there. So
apparently the captain was doing this as a favor or
an honor to the matred And then thirdly, the passengers
love that kind of thing too. They're just dazzled by
how close the land is, like you could just reach
(08:49):
out and touch it kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, and this is later in court what Skatino would say,
like these were the three reasons there was And you know,
I don't super remember this for some reason, or I
didn't at least until we got to this point, which
was there was an affair going on between Captain Scatino
(09:11):
and a woman named Dominica. And how do you pronounce
her last name?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
I'd say Simmerton.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Simmartan or something like that ce M O R t
A N. Yes, she was Moldovan who had worked on
the ship the month before, like a short term thing.
Evidently had met Captain Scatino they started this affair. She
was on board, she was twenty six years old and
was on board for this cruise as a passengers, an
unpaid passenger, kind of like, you know, come on as
(09:40):
my guest type of deal, because we're having an affair.
And so prosecutors would say, hey, you wanted to impress
your your girlfriend that you were having an affair with,
so that's why you did it. And this is when
it all kind of clicked. I kind of remembered all
of a sudden that became a big deal in the trial,
and the news was the kind of public outing of
(10:01):
this relationship. And you know, cruise ship crashes because captain's
trying to impress his young girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yes, and she was on the bridge at the time
during this incident. And like I said, they had done
a sail by the week before of Gilio, Captain Scatino
did again to honor Antonello Tevily the Maitre d And
after that last one he had set some some crew
members to the task of figuring out an even closer
(10:30):
sail by route. Yeah, this was the one they were
testing out. So they had sail by Gilio before, but
apparently this is a brand new, even closer route, and
I guess they had gotten that retired Sea captain on
the phone to tell him about the sale by they
were doing, and found out that he wasn't even on
the island. He was back on the mainland at his
(10:51):
winter house. And as they were two reasons right exactly.
And as they're on the phone, Captain Scatino is like, say,
let me ask you a little bit about the rocks
around Julio that we're driving past right now. And I
guess the captain didn't even get any kind of reply
out before the line went dead. And they think that
(11:11):
at that moment the line hadn't actually gone dead, but
that Captain Scatino had hung up because he realized that
they were about to hit a rock on their port side.
Port is left. The easiest way to remember that is
left has four letters and port has four letters, and
they both the t two great ways to remember that
starboard right, you know, port left.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
It's just two things to remember. Though.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
It's not that U so I always have trouble with it.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Do you really?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah? Okay, So they're driving by Julio and they're they're
keeping away from these rocks on their starboard side on
the right side. What they didn't realize is that they're
actually driving through two outcroppings of rocks and the one
on the left side of the port side got them.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, these are called these skull rocks se ol e,
and you know they're all over the place and you
can't necesssarily see them all sticking out of the water.
And you know, the last moment, basically he orders a
course correction, Skatino does. The helmsman at the time was
an Indonesian man named Jacob rus leie Binn and went
(12:16):
the wrong way because there was a language issue. Put
a pin in that because that'll come back up later
in court. And the stern collided at nine forty five
and the timeline's pretty important here, So nine forty five
PM is when they first make contact and tear a
one hundred and seventy four foot gash in the port
side of that ship. Later on, as we'll see in court,
(12:41):
there were experts that basically said, hey, listen, there was
no course correction at that point that would have mattered.
They were just too close. So it wasn't the fact
that this guy went the wrong way. It's not like
all Jacob Bin's fault, So that would come out later.
But immediately one hundred and seventy four foot tear in
the side of the show is an immediate disaster as
(13:02):
far as how much water this thing is taking on
very very fast.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Yeah, and I mean, just to put it in sports terms,
that's like half the length of a soccer pitch or
an American football field. Like, that's a really long tear,
and it was really deep, and it ran so hard
into the rocks. Chuck an eighty ton boulder became embedded
in that tear in the ship and was there forever permanently.
(13:28):
Apparently they later on removed it and are using it
as part of a memorial. But it was this huge
bowlers a huge, huge tear, and it also was in
a terrible place. It hit some water tight compartments tore
clean into them. So now these water tight compartments are
starting to take on water, not good for any ship.
But one of those compartments was also the engine room,
(13:49):
and in very short order, the engine room started to
flood and they lost power very very quickly. It was
very clear right at the outset that they had a
huge problem going on.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah, and when you say lost power, like they lost electricity,
but they also lost you know, engine power. The engine
was off, the rudder wasn't operable. All the lights went out,
so now they're in the dark. They can't do anything
engine wise to try and you know, pry themself off
or anything like that. Skatino did it seem like I
(14:23):
do a fairly decent job steering it, I guess, gliding
it in, just steering it on inertia or whatever, toward
the port side to at least get a little closer,
which they say might have helped save some lives, but
it caused the ship to tip even more. And that
was a big, big factor in how many people ended
(14:44):
up dying, was the fact that this boat started it
turned on its side, basically not completely on its side.
What was the degree in the end seventy degrees, yeah,
I mean that's pretty close to ninety.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, I mean zero degree upright, ninety degrees is completely
on its side. This ended up listening to seventy degrees.
So yeah, for all intents and purposes, if you were
on that ship, it was basically on its side, right, Yeah.
And the idea that Skatino managed to navigate the ship
so the ship was still it was still moving, they
just didn't have any power. It was moving under momentum
(15:20):
when the power went out, and it was the scary
thing was chuck. It was starting to head out to
sea with one hundred and seventy four foot gash in
the side, taking on water, and it had it kept
going out to sea, it would have sunk and possibly
a lot more people died.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
The bone of contention is whether Skatino did anything or not.
Some maritime experts later on said he didn't do a thing.
That rudder got stuck in the perfect position and managed
to do it. Yes, it did one hundred and eighty
degree turn thanks to the wind and the rudder and
miraculously turned around and came back to land rather than
(15:57):
deep water where it kind of wedged it self against
the rocks. He probably didn't have anything to do with it,
although he tried to claim that because they're like that
probably saved lives.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Well, I will say this, if Skatino said it was
me that did it, then I'm immediately inclined to not
believe it.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
That is a good rule of thumb with this guy.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah, shall we take a break? Yeah we should, all right,
that's a good setup. This cruise ship is taking on water,
it's listing with everyone on board, and we're gonna come
back and tell you what happened right after this.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Stuff you should know, Josh, and shock stuff you should know,
(16:54):
all right.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
So remember I said to pay attention to the timeline.
This thing again hits those rocks ninetive pm. What I
would do if I was a captain and I know
nothing about captaining a cruise ship or anything larger than
upontoon boat, you don't, no, I would have immediately called
for help. But that didn't happen. Skatino did not call
(17:17):
for help immediately. I think he knew that he had
really screwed up. Yeah, and I'm not sure if he
immediately knew just how bad things were. I would say
that the listing of the boat would have been a
real key indicator that it's much worse than like anyone
could have imagined.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
He also got word almost immediately that the engine room
was flooding.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah, so he knew how bad it was pretty quickly.
The reason that the authorities on land, you know, and
even knew this was happening is because you know, they're
right there off the shore. So people on the ship
are calling to shore, and people on land like see
this happening, and they're like, hey, this cruise ship is
They're only fifteen hundred people, but it was it was
(17:57):
a big thing, and I imagine it made tons of noise.
They talk talked about the sound of the scraping, like
how loud it was and how like scary sounding it was.
So the long and short of it is, Search and
Rescue called them at ten pm, fifteen minutes later, and
Skatino kind of downplayed it a little bit.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Yeah, at first he was probably like, letter ring, just
letter ring, They'll go right.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
However, because this is modern times, and one of the
great things about something like this happening in modern times
is you have recordings of phone calls and stuff that
you can go to. You can't just you know. It's
not like the Titanic days when you could lie about
something and maybe get away with it, you know. So
they recorded this call between crisis coordinator Roberto Ferroerini from
(18:43):
Coasta Cruises and Scatino where he finally admits I've made
a mess and practically the whole ship is flooding. Yet
still at ten ten, this is almost thirty minutes later,
the Coastguard is calling again and they find learned that
it's taking on water almost a half hour later.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Yeah, because the guy he admitted it to, like you
said it was, he worked for Costa Cruises. He's like
the guy you call when when everything has just hit
the fan, and so he he didn't like the first call.
They were like, no, just tell him it's a blackout,
and that's what they told the coast guard. It wasn't
for till that second call where they're like, yeah, we're
taking it on water, why don't you send us a tugboat?
(19:23):
One tugboat, that's all they requested. Luckily, people on shore
had gotten word that there was something weird going on
and they started to move down. So yeah, basically they
started to move down toward the wreck and it became
immediately clear that there was a huge problem. The ship
was starting to tilt. It was way closer to land
(19:44):
than it should be. Apparently it came to rest one
thousand feet from land. That's how close it was.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
It looked even closer it does. You see the wreck
footage for.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Sure, like it's really really close to land, and that
there were plenty of people on board. So they started
rushing to the accident scene in boats and eventually by
helicopters and calling in the people they needed. And again
the ship is not asking for this stuff. Other people
are being like, you guys need this stuff, We're coming,
(20:14):
because Skatino was trying to downplay it to save his
reputation and the crisis coordinator was trying to save the
company's reputation.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Yeah, So rescue boats finally arrive at ten forty. This
is almost is fifty five minutes later, almost an hour
after this thing hits these rocks, you finally get rescue boats,
and Skatino finally gives the order to abandoned ship. Some
people had already taken upon themselves to get the lifeboats
going because you know, the writing was on the wall.
(20:45):
And then something happened that is really hard to believe
that A he did it and b he thought he
could get away with it. Yeah, but at eleven twenty
Skatino abandoned ship. That captain of the ship, the captain
is the oath. Well, I don't know if they take
an oath, but they probably do. Let's just say it's
(21:06):
at least figurative. The captain is supposed to go down
with the ship and be like the last person off
you know, they're in charge. They're the ones that are
supposed to make sure everything is as least chaotic as
it can be. And Skatino's skidaddles at eleven twenty and
in court later he basically got laughed at. Said that
(21:29):
he had fallen off the ship and landed in a lifeboat.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Yeah, and they're like, well, why didn't you get back off?
He's like, I don't know, I didn't want to.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, I'm in there.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yeah. They remark that when he made it to land
that he wasn't even wet, but just to get across.
Like how badly he abandoned the ship. He said, abandoned
ship at eleven and was off within twenty minutes himself.
The local authorities didn't mark the evacuation as until about
(22:01):
five am. Yeah, that's how he abandoned. Almost everybody on
that ship just left. And what's crazy is his crew,
like the higher up crew left with them. They didn't
leave anyone in charge. There was a total power vacuum.
And there was a really big problem too that they
had so at the time, under maritime law, if you
(22:23):
had a cruise ship within twenty four hours of departing,
you had to run through your emergency evacuation drill with
the passengers and the crew. Have you ever been on
a cruise ship.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
I've been on one cruise and it's a total buzzkill.
But the very first thing you do is they gather
everyone in this huge room and go over all that stuff. Yes,
it's a pass mustard.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
It's the last thing you want to do when you
first get on a cruise ship. But before I guess
they kind of acknowledged that and said just sometime within
the first twenty four hours after the Costa Concordia, They're like,
you have to do that before you even set sail now, but.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
They'll have you have your first rum punch.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
They hadn't even done that yet. So not only did
the passengers not know what was going on, not only
was there literally no one in charge, but much of
the crew was reported to have basically been throwing elbows
to get on lifeboats themselves. Ones that word stepping up
and trying to lower lifeboats clearly didn't know how to
(23:21):
do it. Apparently, there was a retired sailor who was
on board as a passenger who basically shoved one of
the crew members out of the way to lower the
lifeboat himself because the crew member was so incompetent at it.
So from top to bottom, from captain to passenger, no
one essentially knew what to do. They just knew that
the ship was tilting at some really scary angles and
(23:45):
water was starting to come up. And all of a sudden,
what used to be the walls were now the floor.
What used to be the other walls now the ceiling,
and what used to be the floor and the ceiling
are now walls. That's how much the ship tilted. I
can keep going. I could tell you, like the carpeting
went from the floor to the wall.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
If you keep going, this ship's going to be upright again.
So they need they needed you there just to explain.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
That that brass the railing you used as a handrail,
you could dangle from it. It's at the ceiling exactly.
So yeah, and the other the other really scary thing
about it, aside from that that you're lucky if you're
in a deck that's just like that. There's also corridors
that go from one side of the ship to the other.
Those are no vertical shafts. I saw it put. There's
a really great shaft. Yeah, essentially that you could fall
(24:33):
into and all of a sudden, you're falling to the
other side of the ship. It was like the beside
an Adventure halfway.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
It's like whatever TV show you were watching, all of
a sudden was almost upside down.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
You would have to dangle from the floor which is
now the ceiling to watch the TV appropriately.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
That's right. So after midnight, the Coastguard captain there, Gregorio
de Falco, called Skatino and again these are recorded phone calls,
which is great. And at that point Skatino is in
that lifeboat and there was a very dramatic conversation that
(25:14):
they had which was played later on, where DeFalco says,
you got to return to that vessel. Pal you're the
captain and you oversee this evacuation. It's chaos and you
should be up there in charge. And he became sort
of a local folk hero in Italy. And there was
a line that he had which Olivia helped us with
(25:35):
this so she puts it kind of nicely. PG translation
is get back on the board, damn it. And this
was printed on T shirts and it was sold in Italy.
It became a very big part of the trial Skatino
didn't do it. He was like, nope, not going back on.
By twelve forty, so this is almost three hours later,
(25:57):
there were twenty five patrol boats, fourteen merchant vessels, and
those helicopters on the scene, and I think by you know,
by this time, the ship was listed so severely that
they'd lost like all of the port side lifeboats. They
couldn't even launch those, So you're dealing now with half
the lifeboats as well.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Yeah, the floors now walls. But the reason why you
couldn't do the lifeboats took is because on the port side,
rather than being the side of the ship that was
now skyward, that was like the top of the ship.
How are you going to lower a lifeboat like that?
You can't do it. Luckily, they got apparently twenty three
of the twenty six lifeboats launched before it just became
(26:37):
impossible to launch the last three.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
But it should be enough for all the people, right, it.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Should have been, and I think it was. But the
whole thing was done so disorderly. People were shuffled from
one place to another. Yeah, and thirty two people ended
up dying, and most of them, I should say most
of the drowning deaths apparently occurred around the set moment,
and that is so the ship was listed at twenty degrees.
(27:03):
You can work with that, but your dishes are sliding
off of your tables and stuff like that. Nothing you
want to really deal with, but you can manage. And
it started to made it to about fifty degrees. Now
it's a real problem, I think about them. They couldn't
launch any of the boats. But then from fifty degrees
it started to list to seventy degrees, that where it's
almost completely on its side, and that happened quickly enough
(27:27):
that people who had been on the starboard side and
said nope, lifeboats full, go to the port side were
actually caught in between the two inside interior rooms. And
now all of a sudden, water's coming up from the
walls and the floor, and you're trapped inside a room
that you can't swim out of. And I guess I
think like eleven or sixteen people died that way, just
(27:48):
getting caught when the ship listed and the water started
to come up, and it happened almost all at once,
So you can make a really good case that had
they not delayed this rescue, had they initially called for
help immediately. They probably would have gotten everybody off of
that ship before it listed to seventy degrees, and all
those people who drowned in the in the center of
(28:09):
the ship almost certainly would have lived.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Yeah. Absolutely. You know, we talked about all of the
upper tier crew getting off on the lifeboats with a
captain that left, and Olivia helped us with this, and
she found some pretty great examples of heroes of this
situation that left, and some of them actually did rescue
(28:34):
people that left. Musicians and waiters and bartenders to help.
These are not crew members that are trained, you know,
to run the cruise ship. These are people serving you
food and drinks or playing the drums. That was a drummer,
Giuseppe Girolamo. He is thirty years old. He had a
(28:55):
spot on that last lifeboat, but he gave it up
for a family with two kids. He perished. A bartender
named Erica Fani Soria Molina gave up her life jacket
to an elderly man and perished. You know, once this
thing is moving around, and like the currents around something
like this, you know before it's stationary, are are vast
(29:18):
and I imagine once it isn't even is stationary, just
all the transfer of air and a vacuum of water
being sucked in, like it's very perilous water that you're
getting into. So a lot of these people died by
you know, jumping in the water to try to swim
to shore, but they were just kind of sucked under
(29:38):
and kept there.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yeah, and they may have made it had they kept
their life jackets, but for one reason or another, they
gave their life jackets a way to save other people.
So yeah, that was extraordinarily sad, and there was a
lot of valiant efforts, including from people who survive too.
One of the heroes of the story was the deputy
(29:59):
mayor of Gilio Porto, I think the main pack on it.
He Yeah, he was the one who basically filled that
power vacuum. He went and was working side by side
with the i think the chief navigator, a guy named Simoneknesse,
who was the one who was ordered to lie to
the coastguard when they first called. Those two worked to
(30:19):
get like a couple hundred people off of the ship
that were stuck on it when it listed to seventy degrees,
and they were doing things like they found an aluminum ladder, chuck,
and you basically had to climbate to get to the
railing of one of the decks because again it's at
seventy degrees and don't get me started about what's wall
(30:40):
and what's the floor. But they were basically using this
ladder in the exact opposite direction that you normally would
and when you would get up to the top of layer,
you had to climb over the deck railing and now
you're on the port side hull of the ship and
you had to scoot down tens and tens of feet
using a rope ladder and then jumped the last three
(31:01):
to five feet onto a waiting rescue boat. And like
one hundred and ten people managed to survive by using
this exit that Canesse and the deputy mayor managed to organize.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Yeah, I mean to drive it home. This deputy mayor,
who was you know, probably just easing in for a
late dinner on his cozy island. As Skatino is bailing
off this ship. This guy is getting aboard the ship.
He was the first one from that island to get
out there and say I'm getting on board that ship
(31:37):
to help people. As the captain has bailed in a lifeboat.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah, it's a really unbelievable point out for sure. They
may have even passed one another.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, so you said one hundred and fifty, I'm sorry.
Thirty two people died, one hundred and fifty people were injured,
sixty five very seriously injured. We're talking partial paralysis. There
was one case of blindness, amputations, obviously a lot of
people that suffered from PTSD. Afterward, it took to six
(32:08):
am the next morning for everybody everyone to be evacuated
that was still alive. As we'll see, there were very
sadly some bodies that they would find in the months
as far as like recovery of the dead goes during
the operation to save this or not save the ship,
(32:29):
but to save the environment from this ship.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Basically, Yeah, that was a huge thing. So they went
from rescuing people to recovering remains to preventing a maritime
environmental catastrophe of unparalleled proportions from happening. Because this ship
had twenty six hundred I think tons of fuel and
(32:53):
oil and hydraulic lubricants and all sorts of stuff that
would just give back in the water. Yeah, on board,
and it was just waiting. All that ship had to
do was start to crack up, and it was laying
against some rocks at a seventy degree angle. No one
knew how much pressure it was having exerted in the middle.
Was it going to break in half at the rock,
(33:14):
like the rock's going to be a full crumb. They
had no idea. They just knew that they needed to
get that oil out of that ship as fast as possible.
So that was also one of the one things they
were doing while they were simultaneously searching for remains.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, so not only the fuel. And we should point
out that this is Gilio's inside the Pelagos Sanctuary, the
largest marine wildlife park in the Mediterranean, just an amazing place.
And you've got this oil, and then you have everything
on the ship, all kinds of plastics, all kinds of chemicals,
(33:49):
all kinds of nasty stuff, all kinds of food. Apparently
the food spoilage like they were right in the middle
of dinner service. So not only all the food that
they were serving for dinner, which you know, for a
cruise ship, if you've ever been to a dinner service,
it's just more food than you can ever imagine. Basically,
but all the food, you know, the freezers are bursting,
all the food that's on the ship. It's at the
(34:10):
very beginning of this crew, so it's fully stocked. And
so that was an environmental disaster attracting all kinds of
sea life making. You know, the runoff effect of that
is you have people who make their living fishing on
this tiny island, like many many people do that, and
all of a sudden their industry is wrecked for a
while because this ship, you know, to make a long
(34:31):
story short, ended up laying there for about two and
a half years. Yeah, and it was a environmental disaster.
And that Nova documentary sent me Nova did it. It's
fifty three minutes long and it's what was it called
Sunken Sunken Ship Rescue. It is if you have a
PBS subscription, it is worth your time to watch the
(34:54):
documentary on the salvage operation on this thing, because it
is unbelievable what humans can think of the ingenuity of
humans to take an unprecedented situation like this and figure
out how to safely get that boat out of there
was just I'd never seen anything like it.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Well, let's talk about a couple more things before the salvage.
We'll take a break and then come back and talk
some salvage. How about that, let's do it. So in
addition to the food that they're having to float past
the divers who are looking for remains, and apparently also
they found three people alive who were trapped after the
(35:32):
evacuation was complete. One was the ship's purser who had
fallen into a restaurant because it was sideways and he
was trapped there for thirty six hours. And then another
was a Korean couple who were on their honeymoon who
got trapped in their cabin. So there was like, wow,
we found some live people. It really made them redouble
their diving efforts. And it was really dangerous diving through
(35:56):
this stuff. Like there's bed sheets that you could get
wrapped up in as a dive. There were knives floating
around coming towards you, just tons of debris, chandeliers like
hanging over you that could just drop at any minute.
It was a bad jam as far as diving goes.
And there's some really amazing footage of divers swimming through
(36:19):
the wreckage that the Italian police posted that you can
go see. I would strongly recommend going to check that out.
But as they're doing all this, they finally I think
cleared everybody but two people. There were two bodies that
they just were like, we can't find them right now,
we need to get this salvage operation underway, and they
(36:41):
started to do that.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
All right, you want to take the break now, Yeah,
I feel like, yeah, yeah, we'll be right back. Everybody.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
Stuff you should know, show stuff should know, so chuck in.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
I think September twenty thirteen, almost Jesus is January twenty twelve,
so more than a year, almost two years after the wreck.
The boat's just been laying there on its side in
the water. Five hundred people came together to get this
thing upright again. And that was like just a crazy
(37:38):
idea because other people are like, no, we're gonna have
to just like demolish this thing in the water with explosives.
There's nothing we can do. And some people are like, no,
we can float it again, and they did. They managed
to figure out a way. I'm using a technique called
turnbuckling that got the ship back upright.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Parbuckling.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Parbuckling. It's like turned by but for giant ships.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yeah, I mean, I think initially, I mean, the reason
it took almost two years is they were coming up
with a plan to do this, so, like when they
hit the ground running in September twenty thirteen. Initially they
were going to try and cut it into pieces, which
is a method that's been used before. But they were like,
there's no way we can do that without causing more
environmental mess. And that's the kind of thing when something
(38:26):
like this happens these days, the environment is takes precedent
and you have to do it in such a way that,
like you said, you don't blow it up and you
don't cut it into pieces and wreck the local environment.
So they had to figure it out and they I mean,
I suggest watching that documentary, it's amazing. They ended up
building these huge platforms underwater that the boat would sit
(38:48):
on once they rolled it back upright. But the whole
rolling it upright process was fraught with peril of the
boat breaking apart. No one knew what exerting that kind
of pressure to kind of pull this thing back over
these huge steel cables would take. So it was it's amazing.
There were a lot of very tense moments, but they
did manage to get this thing upright and floating and
(39:12):
towed it away with tugboats.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Yeah, it was an engineering marvel. Apparently, they had lasers
and microphones and everything on all over the ship to
make sure it wasn't settling or moving at any point.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Still, it had become part of the rock over that
time too, which was a very tense moment in the
Nova Special because when it was go time, that's when
they realized it was like it is now attached to
the seabed in places, and they were like, we don't
know what's going to happen, and it dislodged and it
actually worked out, but it was very very tenuous there
(39:42):
for a little while.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
So they got it upright and after that apparently it
opened up parts of the ship to exploration that hadn't
been available before it was just too dangerous. And they
found the remains of the second to last missing victim,
Maria Grasia trick car Trick Riichi. She was celebrating her
fiftieth birthday with a friend and her daughter when she died.
(40:07):
She and her friend died, her daughter survived, and there
was just one last person to be found after that,
and they didn't find him. His name was Russell Rebello.
He was another hero who gave away his life jacket
to save someone else.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
And he's a I think right.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
He was a waiter and he was organizing people to
get out of there. He's helping people get off of
the ship and died as a result. And once they
floated the ship and towed it back to Genoa for recycling,
they were just turning it into scrap, one hundred and
forty four thousand tons of scrap. The people doing that
(40:44):
project found the remains of Russell Rebello in a cabin
behind some furniture on the eighth deck. He had just
been trapped there the whole time that the boat was underwater,
and they found him after it was in the ship
jarden dry dock.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Yeah. Obviously, the legal fallout from this was pretty broad.
Skatino was dubbed Captain Coward by the media in Italy.
And on January fifteenth, actually two days after the prosecutor
came forward confirming the events as we have detailed. Two
(41:22):
days after that they placed Skatino under house arrest. Obviously,
that audio with DeFalco was released very damning evidence. And
then July twenty thirteen, that crisis coordinator Ferrorini, who was
on the phone with Skatino. Four members of the crew
pled guilty. They took a plea bargain basically where they
(41:44):
pled guilty to manslaughter got sentences from one and a
half years to close to three years, including Jacob rus
Lee Benn, who was the helmsman who steered the wrong way.
And Skatino says, oh, this plea deal sounds like a
pretty good thing. I'd like to get in on that,
and they're like, oh no, no, there's no plea deal
(42:06):
for you. You're going to go to full trial on
a manslaughter charge causing the wreck and abandoning ship. And
they opened it up into a one thousand seat court
theater basically in Tuscany so people could go and watch
this play out in person.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
It was a huge, huge international spectacle. The trial almost.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Two years, basically nineteen months.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Like it's it's pretty rare that somebody who's like roundly
vilified isn't in some way like being unfairly villified. But
Skatino is one of those rare people where he totally
deserved every bit of scorn and disdain that that was
heaped upon him. And it was still heaped upon him.
(42:51):
He was a national embarrassment for Italy but just a
just an international snake as far as everybody else was concerned.
And from what I can tell, I'm like, surely there's
something this guy did that was like, oh, actually he
did this. Nope, it does not exist, which is you
just don't run into that very often.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah, he was sentenced to sixteen years. He appealed, that
appeal was uphild in May twenty seventeen, and he is
currently serving that sentence. There are people, and I'm glad
Livia pointed this out. I don't think anyone, like you said,
is defending Skatino. But there was more scorn heaped upon
Coasta Cruises as a whole because they pointed out things like,
(43:33):
you know, I said, put a pin in the fact
that there was a language barrier between the helmsmen about
which way to steer. Like they're like, that shouldn't happen.
There shouldn't be a language barrier between who's steering the
ship and the captain of the ship. You got to
work that out. There were safety and evacuation procedures that
were basically either not known or ignored, right, And that's
(43:56):
you know, that falls on the company to some degree
for sure. And then there were technical things. There were
some I believe watertight doors that were left open. It
was they were either malfunctioning or the crew just didn't
shut them because it reduced like the amount of work
to like unseal those doors, and you know, made their
workflow easier. So you know, there were a few things
(44:17):
that popped up. The fact that they the company even
said like sail buys are fine, like we do it.
It's something that we all do and it's fine. Like
all these things popped up to put coast to cruises
and hold their feet to the fire. So they ended
up offering a payout of eleven thousand euros to anyone
who was on board, plus obviously reimbursing them for the
(44:40):
trip and any costs related to traveling for the trip,
as long as you give up the right to sue.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Yeah, and they settled with Italy itself for a one
million euro fine, which kept them out of criminal lawsuits
or criminal charges as a company. They just basically shoved
skete know forward and said here, everybody have at and
again rightfully so, but the company didn't take the kind
(45:07):
of responsibility that it should have, like you were describing,
and they got off easy, I mean a couple million
and settlements. I mean they really skin flinted the people
who were affected by this. But that's not to say
they got off scott free as far as finances go. Yeah,
the salvage operation itself cost one point two billion dollars.
(45:30):
That's yeah, WWI is the amount of costs to build
the ship in the first place.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Plus they lost the half a billion dollar ship, right,
so they lost You're close to two billion dollars exactly.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
So, so Skatino's little sale by costs that company two
billion dollars. It cost the world thirty two lives and
some serious injuries as a result, and of course the
area around Julio Island is not probably never going to
be the same again, or it won't be for a
really long time. But there was an interesting little post
(46:00):
because somebody else lost out on this deal too. You
may or may not feel bad for them, but the
Calabrian mafia a few years ago came out that the
Italian police were recording their conversations and found out that
the Calabrian mafia had had a bunch of cocaine aboard
the Costa Concordia, and it's not clear if it was
(46:24):
still there or if somebody swam aboard and got it,
or what the deal was. But it was never like
the salvage crew was never like we found the cocaine.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah. Pretty interesting. Yeah, and we should also mention too,
during that the salvage operation, remarkably only one person died,
considering how dangerous the work was that they were doing these
industrial divers. Yeah, and one of them, there was a
Spanish diver who died February first, twenty fourteen, trying to
(46:57):
salvage the thing and help the environment out.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Pretty nuts.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
There was one other quote that DeFalco had that wasn't
quite as touted in the media, but I thought it
was pretty ba.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
You ready, that's a spicy meatball, DeFalco.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
Said to Scatino on that famous phone call. Perhaps you
saved yourself from the sea, but I'll make you pay.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Oh yeah, it's a good one.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
He got them too. Wow. So that's it for the
Costa Concordia. And if you heard all this and you're
like this is really interesting stuff, there's a lot of
stuff out there for you to go check out.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Totally. That Nova Doc is well worth fifty minutes.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, I mean that alone is worth it. What was it?
It's a sunken ship rescue. It's a terrible title. It's
really hard to get in there. Also, there's a really
great Vanity Fair article called Another Night to Remember. I
don't remember who wrote it, but like they described the
people involved as like ruggedly handsome, receding hairline, just Vanity Fair.
(47:57):
Kind of little interesting details to you, but it's really
coherent and well written and really in depth.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
Yeah, for sure, it's Vanity Fair Baby. That's right, that's
what they do.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yep. And since Chuck said it's Vanity Fair Baby, that
means it's time for a listener mail.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
I'm gonna call this Hello from a grateful doc, because
that's what Doc Twilling says.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Docor Twilling sounds like the little house in the prairie
character is.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Sotal.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Pop will clear that right up. Hey guys, my name
is Chris. I'm a physician from Michigan who's been listening
for many years. Initially, I started listening to get through
medical school in those long days, and it was a
relief to learn about something other than medicine. I recently
started listening to the selects on pain scales, which inspired
me to write in. As a physician, I'm constantly assessing
pain severity to both help make diagnoses and monitor progress
(48:50):
as the patient's heal. Most of the ideas you discuss
are part of an average workday for me. However, you
taught me some new ideas, including the concept that elderly
patients may express their pain differently, like they may use
words like soreness instead of pain to describe their discomfort.
I was intrigued by this and research the idea further,
and I'm happy to say I now use this approach
(49:11):
to better treat pain in my older adult patients. I
love that Doc Chris here researched further and he wouldn't
just like Josh and Chuck said it. That's right, Sparrel ahead, Yeah,
that means doctor Twilling. Doc Twilling is doing the right thing.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
He's a sharp tech That's right.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
You guys do a great job of taking complicated subjects
and making it easier for everyone to understand. The Explanations
for medical shows you give, such as on addiction, diabetes,
and high blood pressure help me frame my own explanations
to my patients. Communicating complicated topics in a way anyone
can understand remains a challenge. But I feel in getting
(49:50):
better every day through listening to how you both do it.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
Man, how about that? Yeah, we're saving lives here, Chuck,
in a.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
Way, so Doc Twilling, Chris Twilling says, if you ever
come to the Midwest, I'd love to come see you.
So put this on the books, Doc Twilling, if we
come through Michigan or anywhere else you can get to,
you are on the guest list. Just send us an
email from this very email that you sent and remind
us a couple of weeks before the show.
Speaker 1 (50:16):
Very nice, good good thinking, Chuck. If you want to
be like Doc Toilling and get in touch with us
and let us know how we're affecting lives, saving lives,
that kind of thing, we'd love to hear that kind
of stuff, you can send us an email to Stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, if you've been sitting around thinking, man, I'd
love to see Josh and Chuck in person. Maybe late
January would be great. Well, then we have wonderful news
for you.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right. We're doing our annual Pacific Northwest and Northern
California tour. We are in Seattle on January twenty fourth
in Seattle. We're counting on you, guys. We stepped it
up to the paramount this year, so please help us
fill that beautiful theater. We are at our home away
from home at Revolution Hall in Portland on the twenty fifth,
and then as always, back at San Francisco's Sketch Fest
(00:31):
on January twenty sixth at the Sydney Goldstein.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
So here comes the info for links and tickets and
all that stuff. Go to linktree slash sysk and that
will take you where you need to go to find
a great seat. Or you can visit our website Stuff
youshould Know dot com that will also take you where
you need to go to find a great seat, and
we will see you in your great seats in January.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just sailing along.
Hopefully we're not going to stop abruptly for this episode
of stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, you know, we were actually developing a robust suite
of maritime disasters.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Well, there's plenty to talk about, for sure, So this
is I mean, we're probably mid suite at best.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I mean, depending on which ones you cover, we could
be no pun intended. Just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Oh that was pretty good though. And it's funny you
bring up the iceberg, which everybody knows is associated with
the Titanic, because I have seen, according to maritime lore
that I found on the internet written by maritime lawyers,
that this shipwreck essentially that we're going to talk about
(01:55):
is a new touchstone for the next like one hundred years,
just like the titan was for one hundred or so
years after it. It was just that much of a cluster.
Luckily not anywhere near as many people died, but it's
as not maybe not as interesting a story, but it's
a pretty gosh star and twotin interesting story if you
ask me.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing that stood
out to me about the wreck of the Costa Concordia.
Is that And you know when you see little documentary
footage and stuff like that of interviews with people, many
of the passengers are remarking like, you know, we just
couldn't believe, like something like this is happening in twenty twelve, right,
(02:40):
like the fact that it's a modern disaster, a llah
the Titanic, like that kind of thing shouldn't be happening
these days.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, And I saw somebody who compared the two described
it as where the Titanic was kind of like an
ironic twist of fate brought on by hubris. Yeah, this
was just brought on by incompetence. That's what it really
boils down to.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Yeah, I mean that's how something like this can happen
in a modern age where everything is there to prevent
something like this from happening, exactly, But you can never
count out human incompetence.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
No, no, And you said modern age, and it was
pretty modern. So on the night of Friday, the thirteenth
January in twenty twelve, not that long ago, just over
a decade, that ship, the Costa Concordia, was sailing around
the Mediterranean, which it normally did. I think. It was
launched in two thousand and five. Yeah, by the Costa
(03:39):
Crouchierre also known as Costa Cruz's line, and at the
time it was the largest ship in the Mediterranean. It
boasted the nicest spa, took up two full decks, and
it was just nice. It looks if you look at
the pictures of what it looked like when it was launched,
it looks like nineteen ninety eight Vegas came along and
(04:02):
threw up in it and just shipped it out to sea.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Yeah, not like the super classy ones these.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Days, right, but this one struck me as I mean
definitely along that same line. I mean, a cruise ship
has a certain look to it no matter what they
try to do.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yeah, there's going to be brass this one.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
This one really like pulled out all the stops, as
our organ playing friends sometimes.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Say, yeah, absolutely, I mean, this was sort of the
pride of Italy. It was their largest cruise ship at
nine hundred and fifty plus feet long and held almost
thirty eight hundred passengers along with just over one thousand
crew members for a total on this day or on
this launch, at least two hundred and twenty nine total people,
(04:48):
captained by Francesco Skatino, who had been He was a veteran,
he had been working just for this cruise company for
eleven years.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah. I think he was fairly new to the Concordia,
but like their ships were similar enough that this was
not I mean, yeah, he was totally able and capable
to captain a ship. You'd think. Yeah, So three hours
after the Concordia set sail for its seven day cruise
around the Mediterranean, which was that's just what it did.
(05:21):
It stopped in the same places. Yeah, three hour tour.
It was passing by an island off of Tuscany called Gilio,
which you can't help but just think of that Ben
Affleck movie.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
That's what I thought of.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
And Captain Skatino did something that in retrospect people are like, wait,
what did you do? But once you start to dig
into it, you're like, apparently that's a thing like cruise
ships sometimes do this. It's called the sail by. He
decided to do a sail by of the island of Giglio,
and Gilio is a seafaring fishing island of like hardy
(06:02):
see people. And then very wealthy people who like to
hang out around hardy see people.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
And any though no fifteen hundred people total right.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Around the whole island, multiple towns. The whole population the
island was fifteen hundred. So Captain Scatino decided to do
a sail by of Gilio. And a sail by is
where you sail like preposterously close to land to do
a couple of things. It thrills the passengers on board,
but it also thrills the people wherever you're passing by.
(06:34):
It's pretty neat, like it's just so close, and the
ship's always lit up, very pretty and all that stuff.
It's just something to see. But if you stop and
think about it, it's incredibly reckless. I mean, to do
this sail by, he had to deviate from his course
so much that he had to turn off like the
tracking software, like just turn it off so that he
could maneuver the ship by hand off course that drastically.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah, and you know what, I'm gonna go ahead and say,
I mean, this is like a fly by that airplanes
might do, and those have resulted in accidents here and there.
I'm just gonna go ahead and throw it out there
that no more sail buys or fly bys. Just keep
all of the dangerous heavy machinery and vehiculars. Vehiculars, sure, sure,
(07:23):
well away from everything.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
You know.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
It's always like, oh, the people love it. This would
be impressive, until there's an accident and it's like, oh
wait a minute, well, people can die doing this, so
let's just stop with this stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, and no more car surfing like they didn't teen
wool for Footloose, none of that stuff either.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah, but the one thing, the game of Chicken and footloose,
just full steam ahead with that. That's a pretty great
thing to do.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Okay, so the sail buy again. This is an enormous ship,
a thousand feet long, basically one hundred and fourteen thousand puns.
This is a ginorm a ship and it's passing by
this tiny little island, and it was doing it for
a couple of reasons. One of the reasons why Giglio
used to get sail bys fairly frequently, apparently they'd done
(08:10):
it just a week before, was that there was a
retired captain from the Costa Cruise Line. I guess he'd
been there for like ever and it'd retire and now
lived on Gilio, so they would do sail bys and
like in part and to salute him.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
That was one swing to the horn.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Basically, there was also a Matredi on board named Antonello Tievely.
He was from Giglio and he had family there. So
apparently the captain was doing this as a favor or
an honor to the matred And then thirdly, the passengers
love that kind of thing too. They're just dazzled by
how close the land is, like you could just reach
(08:49):
out and touch it kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, and this is later in court what Skatino would say,
like these were the three reasons there was And you know,
I don't super remember this for some reason, or I
didn't at least until we got to this point, which
was there was an affair going on between Captain Scatino
(09:11):
and a woman named Dominica. And how do you pronounce
her last name?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
I'd say Simmerton.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Simmartan or something like that ce M O R t
A N. Yes, she was Moldovan who had worked on
the ship the month before, like a short term thing.
Evidently had met Captain Scatino they started this affair. She
was on board, she was twenty six years old and
was on board for this cruise as a passengers, an
unpaid passenger, kind of like, you know, come on as
(09:40):
my guest type of deal, because we're having an affair.
And so prosecutors would say, hey, you wanted to impress
your your girlfriend that you were having an affair with,
so that's why you did it. And this is when
it all kind of clicked. I kind of remembered all
of a sudden that became a big deal in the trial,
and the news was the kind of public outing of
(10:01):
this relationship. And you know, cruise ship crashes because captain's
trying to impress his young girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yes, and she was on the bridge at the time
during this incident. And like I said, they had done
a sail by the week before of Gilio, Captain Scatino
did again to honor Antonello Tevily the Maitre d And
after that last one he had set some some crew
members to the task of figuring out an even closer
(10:30):
sail by route. Yeah, this was the one they were
testing out. So they had sail by Gilio before, but
apparently this is a brand new, even closer route, and
I guess they had gotten that retired Sea captain on
the phone to tell him about the sale by they
were doing, and found out that he wasn't even on
the island. He was back on the mainland at his
(10:51):
winter house. And as they were two reasons right exactly.
And as they're on the phone, Captain Scatino is like, say,
let me ask you a little bit about the rocks
around Julio that we're driving past right now. And I
guess the captain didn't even get any kind of reply
out before the line went dead. And they think that
(11:11):
at that moment the line hadn't actually gone dead, but
that Captain Scatino had hung up because he realized that
they were about to hit a rock on their port side.
Port is left. The easiest way to remember that is
left has four letters and port has four letters, and
they both the t two great ways to remember that
starboard right, you know, port left.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
It's just two things to remember. Though.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
It's not that U so I always have trouble with it.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Do you really?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah? Okay, So they're driving by Julio and they're they're
keeping away from these rocks on their starboard side on
the right side. What they didn't realize is that they're
actually driving through two outcroppings of rocks and the one
on the left side of the port side got them.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, these are called these skull rocks se ol e,
and you know they're all over the place and you
can't necesssarily see them all sticking out of the water.
And you know, the last moment, basically he orders a
course correction, Skatino does. The helmsman at the time was
an Indonesian man named Jacob rus leie Binn and went
(12:16):
the wrong way because there was a language issue. Put
a pin in that because that'll come back up later
in court. And the stern collided at nine forty five
and the timeline's pretty important here, So nine forty five
PM is when they first make contact and tear a
one hundred and seventy four foot gash in the port
side of that ship. Later on, as we'll see in court,
(12:41):
there were experts that basically said, hey, listen, there was
no course correction at that point that would have mattered.
They were just too close. So it wasn't the fact
that this guy went the wrong way. It's not like
all Jacob Bin's fault, So that would come out later.
But immediately one hundred and seventy four foot tear in
the side of the show is an immediate disaster as
(13:02):
far as how much water this thing is taking on
very very fast.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Yeah, and I mean, just to put it in sports terms,
that's like half the length of a soccer pitch or
an American football field. Like, that's a really long tear,
and it was really deep, and it ran so hard
into the rocks. Chuck an eighty ton boulder became embedded
in that tear in the ship and was there forever permanently.
(13:28):
Apparently they later on removed it and are using it
as part of a memorial. But it was this huge
bowlers a huge, huge tear, and it also was in
a terrible place. It hit some water tight compartments tore
clean into them. So now these water tight compartments are
starting to take on water, not good for any ship.
But one of those compartments was also the engine room,
(13:49):
and in very short order, the engine room started to
flood and they lost power very very quickly. It was
very clear right at the outset that they had a
huge problem going on.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah, and when you say lost power, like they lost electricity,
but they also lost you know, engine power. The engine
was off, the rudder wasn't operable. All the lights went out,
so now they're in the dark. They can't do anything
engine wise to try and you know, pry themself off
or anything like that. Skatino did it seem like I
(14:23):
do a fairly decent job steering it, I guess, gliding
it in, just steering it on inertia or whatever, toward
the port side to at least get a little closer,
which they say might have helped save some lives, but
it caused the ship to tip even more. And that
was a big, big factor in how many people ended
(14:44):
up dying, was the fact that this boat started it
turned on its side, basically not completely on its side.
What was the degree in the end seventy degrees, yeah,
I mean that's pretty close to ninety.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, I mean zero degree upright, ninety degrees is completely
on its side. This ended up listening to seventy degrees.
So yeah, for all intents and purposes, if you were
on that ship, it was basically on its side, right, Yeah.
And the idea that Skatino managed to navigate the ship
so the ship was still it was still moving, they
just didn't have any power. It was moving under momentum
(15:20):
when the power went out, and it was the scary
thing was chuck. It was starting to head out to
sea with one hundred and seventy four foot gash in
the side, taking on water, and it had it kept
going out to sea, it would have sunk and possibly
a lot more people died.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
The bone of contention is whether Skatino did anything or not.
Some maritime experts later on said he didn't do a thing.
That rudder got stuck in the perfect position and managed
to do it. Yes, it did one hundred and eighty
degree turn thanks to the wind and the rudder and
miraculously turned around and came back to land rather than
(15:57):
deep water where it kind of wedged it self against
the rocks. He probably didn't have anything to do with it,
although he tried to claim that because they're like that
probably saved lives.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Well, I will say this, if Skatino said it was
me that did it, then I'm immediately inclined to not
believe it.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
That is a good rule of thumb with this guy.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah, shall we take a break? Yeah we should, all right,
that's a good setup. This cruise ship is taking on water,
it's listing with everyone on board, and we're gonna come
back and tell you what happened right after this.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Stuff you should know, Josh, and shock stuff you should know,
(16:54):
all right.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
So remember I said to pay attention to the timeline.
This thing again hits those rocks ninetive pm. What I
would do if I was a captain and I know
nothing about captaining a cruise ship or anything larger than
upontoon boat, you don't, no, I would have immediately called
for help. But that didn't happen. Skatino did not call
(17:17):
for help immediately. I think he knew that he had
really screwed up. Yeah, and I'm not sure if he
immediately knew just how bad things were. I would say
that the listing of the boat would have been a
real key indicator that it's much worse than like anyone
could have imagined.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
He also got word almost immediately that the engine room
was flooding.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah, so he knew how bad it was pretty quickly.
The reason that the authorities on land, you know, and
even knew this was happening is because you know, they're
right there off the shore. So people on the ship
are calling to shore, and people on land like see
this happening, and they're like, hey, this cruise ship is
They're only fifteen hundred people, but it was it was
(17:57):
a big thing, and I imagine it made tons of noise.
They talk talked about the sound of the scraping, like
how loud it was and how like scary sounding it was.
So the long and short of it is, Search and
Rescue called them at ten pm, fifteen minutes later, and
Skatino kind of downplayed it a little bit.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Yeah, at first he was probably like, letter ring, just
letter ring, They'll go right.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
However, because this is modern times, and one of the
great things about something like this happening in modern times
is you have recordings of phone calls and stuff that
you can go to. You can't just you know. It's
not like the Titanic days when you could lie about
something and maybe get away with it, you know. So
they recorded this call between crisis coordinator Roberto Ferroerini from
(18:43):
Coasta Cruises and Scatino where he finally admits I've made
a mess and practically the whole ship is flooding. Yet
still at ten ten, this is almost thirty minutes later,
the Coastguard is calling again and they find learned that
it's taking on water almost a half hour later.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Yeah, because the guy he admitted it to, like you
said it was, he worked for Costa Cruises. He's like
the guy you call when when everything has just hit
the fan, and so he he didn't like the first call.
They were like, no, just tell him it's a blackout,
and that's what they told the coast guard. It wasn't
for till that second call where they're like, yeah, we're
taking it on water, why don't you send us a tugboat?
(19:23):
One tugboat, that's all they requested. Luckily, people on shore
had gotten word that there was something weird going on
and they started to move down. So yeah, basically they
started to move down toward the wreck and it became
immediately clear that there was a huge problem. The ship
was starting to tilt. It was way closer to land
(19:44):
than it should be. Apparently it came to rest one
thousand feet from land. That's how close it was.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
It looked even closer it does. You see the wreck
footage for.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Sure, like it's really really close to land, and that
there were plenty of people on board. So they started
rushing to the accident scene in boats and eventually by
helicopters and calling in the people they needed. And again
the ship is not asking for this stuff. Other people
are being like, you guys need this stuff, We're coming,
(20:14):
because Skatino was trying to downplay it to save his
reputation and the crisis coordinator was trying to save the
company's reputation.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Yeah, So rescue boats finally arrive at ten forty. This
is almost is fifty five minutes later, almost an hour
after this thing hits these rocks, you finally get rescue boats,
and Skatino finally gives the order to abandoned ship. Some
people had already taken upon themselves to get the lifeboats
going because you know, the writing was on the wall.
(20:45):
And then something happened that is really hard to believe
that A he did it and b he thought he
could get away with it. Yeah, but at eleven twenty
Skatino abandoned ship. That captain of the ship, the captain
is the oath. Well, I don't know if they take
an oath, but they probably do. Let's just say it's
(21:06):
at least figurative. The captain is supposed to go down
with the ship and be like the last person off
you know, they're in charge. They're the ones that are
supposed to make sure everything is as least chaotic as
it can be. And Skatino's skidaddles at eleven twenty and
in court later he basically got laughed at. Said that
(21:29):
he had fallen off the ship and landed in a lifeboat.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Yeah, and they're like, well, why didn't you get back off?
He's like, I don't know, I didn't want to.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, I'm in there.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yeah. They remark that when he made it to land
that he wasn't even wet, but just to get across.
Like how badly he abandoned the ship. He said, abandoned
ship at eleven and was off within twenty minutes himself.
The local authorities didn't mark the evacuation as until about
(22:01):
five am. Yeah, that's how he abandoned. Almost everybody on
that ship just left. And what's crazy is his crew,
like the higher up crew left with them. They didn't
leave anyone in charge. There was a total power vacuum.
And there was a really big problem too that they
had so at the time, under maritime law, if you
(22:23):
had a cruise ship within twenty four hours of departing,
you had to run through your emergency evacuation drill with
the passengers and the crew. Have you ever been on
a cruise ship.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
I've been on one cruise and it's a total buzzkill.
But the very first thing you do is they gather
everyone in this huge room and go over all that stuff. Yes,
it's a pass mustard.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
It's the last thing you want to do when you
first get on a cruise ship. But before I guess
they kind of acknowledged that and said just sometime within
the first twenty four hours after the Costa Concordia, They're like,
you have to do that before you even set sail now, but.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
They'll have you have your first rum punch.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
They hadn't even done that yet. So not only did
the passengers not know what was going on, not only
was there literally no one in charge, but much of
the crew was reported to have basically been throwing elbows
to get on lifeboats themselves. Ones that word stepping up
and trying to lower lifeboats clearly didn't know how to
(23:21):
do it. Apparently, there was a retired sailor who was
on board as a passenger who basically shoved one of
the crew members out of the way to lower the
lifeboat himself because the crew member was so incompetent at it.
So from top to bottom, from captain to passenger, no
one essentially knew what to do. They just knew that
the ship was tilting at some really scary angles and
(23:45):
water was starting to come up. And all of a sudden,
what used to be the walls were now the floor.
What used to be the other walls now the ceiling,
and what used to be the floor and the ceiling
are now walls. That's how much the ship tilted. I
can keep going. I could tell you, like the carpeting
went from the floor to the wall.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
If you keep going, this ship's going to be upright again.
So they need they needed you there just to explain.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
That that brass the railing you used as a handrail,
you could dangle from it. It's at the ceiling exactly.
So yeah, and the other the other really scary thing
about it, aside from that that you're lucky if you're
in a deck that's just like that. There's also corridors
that go from one side of the ship to the other.
Those are no vertical shafts. I saw it put. There's
a really great shaft. Yeah, essentially that you could fall
(24:33):
into and all of a sudden, you're falling to the
other side of the ship. It was like the beside
an Adventure halfway.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
It's like whatever TV show you were watching, all of
a sudden was almost upside down.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
You would have to dangle from the floor which is
now the ceiling to watch the TV appropriately.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
That's right. So after midnight, the Coastguard captain there, Gregorio
de Falco, called Skatino and again these are recorded phone calls,
which is great. And at that point Skatino is in
that lifeboat and there was a very dramatic conversation that
(25:14):
they had which was played later on, where DeFalco says,
you got to return to that vessel. Pal you're the
captain and you oversee this evacuation. It's chaos and you
should be up there in charge. And he became sort
of a local folk hero in Italy. And there was
a line that he had which Olivia helped us with
(25:35):
this so she puts it kind of nicely. PG translation
is get back on the board, damn it. And this
was printed on T shirts and it was sold in Italy.
It became a very big part of the trial Skatino
didn't do it. He was like, nope, not going back on.
By twelve forty, so this is almost three hours later,
(25:57):
there were twenty five patrol boats, fourteen merchant vessels, and
those helicopters on the scene, and I think by you know,
by this time, the ship was listed so severely that
they'd lost like all of the port side lifeboats. They
couldn't even launch those, So you're dealing now with half
the lifeboats as well.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Yeah, the floors now walls. But the reason why you
couldn't do the lifeboats took is because on the port side,
rather than being the side of the ship that was
now skyward, that was like the top of the ship.
How are you going to lower a lifeboat like that?
You can't do it. Luckily, they got apparently twenty three
of the twenty six lifeboats launched before it just became
(26:37):
impossible to launch the last three.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
But it should be enough for all the people, right, it.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Should have been, and I think it was. But the
whole thing was done so disorderly. People were shuffled from
one place to another. Yeah, and thirty two people ended
up dying, and most of them, I should say most
of the drowning deaths apparently occurred around the set moment,
and that is so the ship was listed at twenty degrees.
(27:03):
You can work with that, but your dishes are sliding
off of your tables and stuff like that. Nothing you
want to really deal with, but you can manage. And
it started to made it to about fifty degrees. Now
it's a real problem, I think about them. They couldn't
launch any of the boats. But then from fifty degrees
it started to list to seventy degrees, that where it's
almost completely on its side, and that happened quickly enough
(27:27):
that people who had been on the starboard side and
said nope, lifeboats full, go to the port side were
actually caught in between the two inside interior rooms. And
now all of a sudden, water's coming up from the
walls and the floor, and you're trapped inside a room
that you can't swim out of. And I guess I
think like eleven or sixteen people died that way, just
(27:48):
getting caught when the ship listed and the water started
to come up, and it happened almost all at once,
So you can make a really good case that had
they not delayed this rescue, had they initially called for
help immediately. They probably would have gotten everybody off of
that ship before it listed to seventy degrees, and all
those people who drowned in the in the center of
(28:09):
the ship almost certainly would have lived.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Yeah. Absolutely. You know, we talked about all of the
upper tier crew getting off on the lifeboats with a
captain that left, and Olivia helped us with this, and
she found some pretty great examples of heroes of this
situation that left, and some of them actually did rescue
(28:34):
people that left. Musicians and waiters and bartenders to help.
These are not crew members that are trained, you know,
to run the cruise ship. These are people serving you
food and drinks or playing the drums. That was a drummer,
Giuseppe Girolamo. He is thirty years old. He had a
(28:55):
spot on that last lifeboat, but he gave it up
for a family with two kids. He perished. A bartender
named Erica Fani Soria Molina gave up her life jacket
to an elderly man and perished. You know, once this
thing is moving around, and like the currents around something
like this, you know before it's stationary, are are vast
(29:18):
and I imagine once it isn't even is stationary, just
all the transfer of air and a vacuum of water
being sucked in, like it's very perilous water that you're
getting into. So a lot of these people died by
you know, jumping in the water to try to swim
to shore, but they were just kind of sucked under
(29:38):
and kept there.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yeah, and they may have made it had they kept
their life jackets, but for one reason or another, they
gave their life jackets a way to save other people.
So yeah, that was extraordinarily sad, and there was a
lot of valiant efforts, including from people who survive too.
One of the heroes of the story was the deputy
(29:59):
mayor of Gilio Porto, I think the main pack on it.
He Yeah, he was the one who basically filled that
power vacuum. He went and was working side by side
with the i think the chief navigator, a guy named Simoneknesse,
who was the one who was ordered to lie to
the coastguard when they first called. Those two worked to
(30:19):
get like a couple hundred people off of the ship
that were stuck on it when it listed to seventy degrees,
and they were doing things like they found an aluminum ladder, chuck,
and you basically had to climbate to get to the
railing of one of the decks because again it's at
seventy degrees and don't get me started about what's wall
(30:40):
and what's the floor. But they were basically using this
ladder in the exact opposite direction that you normally would
and when you would get up to the top of layer,
you had to climb over the deck railing and now
you're on the port side hull of the ship and
you had to scoot down tens and tens of feet
using a rope ladder and then jumped the last three
(31:01):
to five feet onto a waiting rescue boat. And like
one hundred and ten people managed to survive by using
this exit that Canesse and the deputy mayor managed to organize.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Yeah, I mean to drive it home. This deputy mayor,
who was you know, probably just easing in for a
late dinner on his cozy island. As Skatino is bailing
off this ship. This guy is getting aboard the ship.
He was the first one from that island to get
out there and say I'm getting on board that ship
(31:37):
to help people. As the captain has bailed in a lifeboat.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah, it's a really unbelievable point out for sure. They
may have even passed one another.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, so you said one hundred and fifty, I'm sorry.
Thirty two people died, one hundred and fifty people were injured,
sixty five very seriously injured. We're talking partial paralysis. There
was one case of blindness, amputations, obviously a lot of
people that suffered from PTSD. Afterward, it took to six
(32:08):
am the next morning for everybody everyone to be evacuated
that was still alive. As we'll see, there were very
sadly some bodies that they would find in the months
as far as like recovery of the dead goes during
the operation to save this or not save the ship,
(32:29):
but to save the environment from this ship.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Basically, Yeah, that was a huge thing. So they went
from rescuing people to recovering remains to preventing a maritime
environmental catastrophe of unparalleled proportions from happening. Because this ship
had twenty six hundred I think tons of fuel and
(32:53):
oil and hydraulic lubricants and all sorts of stuff that
would just give back in the water. Yeah, on board,
and it was just waiting. All that ship had to
do was start to crack up, and it was laying
against some rocks at a seventy degree angle. No one
knew how much pressure it was having exerted in the middle.
Was it going to break in half at the rock,
(33:14):
like the rock's going to be a full crumb. They
had no idea. They just knew that they needed to
get that oil out of that ship as fast as possible.
So that was also one of the one things they
were doing while they were simultaneously searching for remains.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, so not only the fuel. And we should point
out that this is Gilio's inside the Pelagos Sanctuary, the
largest marine wildlife park in the Mediterranean, just an amazing place.
And you've got this oil, and then you have everything
on the ship, all kinds of plastics, all kinds of chemicals,
(33:49):
all kinds of nasty stuff, all kinds of food. Apparently
the food spoilage like they were right in the middle
of dinner service. So not only all the food that
they were serving for dinner, which you know, for a
cruise ship, if you've ever been to a dinner service,
it's just more food than you can ever imagine. Basically,
but all the food, you know, the freezers are bursting,
all the food that's on the ship. It's at the
(34:10):
very beginning of this crew, so it's fully stocked. And
so that was an environmental disaster attracting all kinds of
sea life making. You know, the runoff effect of that
is you have people who make their living fishing on
this tiny island, like many many people do that, and
all of a sudden their industry is wrecked for a
while because this ship, you know, to make a long
(34:31):
story short, ended up laying there for about two and
a half years. Yeah, and it was a environmental disaster.
And that Nova documentary sent me Nova did it. It's
fifty three minutes long and it's what was it called
Sunken Sunken Ship Rescue. It is if you have a
PBS subscription, it is worth your time to watch the
(34:54):
documentary on the salvage operation on this thing, because it
is unbelievable what humans can think of the ingenuity of
humans to take an unprecedented situation like this and figure
out how to safely get that boat out of there
was just I'd never seen anything like it.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Well, let's talk about a couple more things before the salvage.
We'll take a break and then come back and talk
some salvage. How about that, let's do it. So in
addition to the food that they're having to float past
the divers who are looking for remains, and apparently also
they found three people alive who were trapped after the
(35:32):
evacuation was complete. One was the ship's purser who had
fallen into a restaurant because it was sideways and he
was trapped there for thirty six hours. And then another
was a Korean couple who were on their honeymoon who
got trapped in their cabin. So there was like, wow,
we found some live people. It really made them redouble
their diving efforts. And it was really dangerous diving through
(35:56):
this stuff. Like there's bed sheets that you could get
wrapped up in as a dive. There were knives floating
around coming towards you, just tons of debris, chandeliers like
hanging over you that could just drop at any minute.
It was a bad jam as far as diving goes.
And there's some really amazing footage of divers swimming through
(36:19):
the wreckage that the Italian police posted that you can
go see. I would strongly recommend going to check that out.
But as they're doing all this, they finally I think
cleared everybody but two people. There were two bodies that
they just were like, we can't find them right now,
we need to get this salvage operation underway, and they
(36:41):
started to do that.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
All right, you want to take the break now, Yeah,
I feel like, yeah, yeah, we'll be right back. Everybody.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
Stuff you should know, show stuff should know, so chuck in.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
I think September twenty thirteen, almost Jesus is January twenty twelve,
so more than a year, almost two years after the wreck.
The boat's just been laying there on its side in
the water. Five hundred people came together to get this
thing upright again. And that was like just a crazy
(37:38):
idea because other people are like, no, we're gonna have
to just like demolish this thing in the water with explosives.
There's nothing we can do. And some people are like, no,
we can float it again, and they did. They managed
to figure out a way. I'm using a technique called
turnbuckling that got the ship back upright.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Parbuckling.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Parbuckling. It's like turned by but for giant ships.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yeah, I mean, I think initially, I mean, the reason
it took almost two years is they were coming up
with a plan to do this, so, like when they
hit the ground running in September twenty thirteen. Initially they
were going to try and cut it into pieces, which
is a method that's been used before. But they were like,
there's no way we can do that without causing more
environmental mess. And that's the kind of thing when something
(38:26):
like this happens these days, the environment is takes precedent
and you have to do it in such a way that,
like you said, you don't blow it up and you
don't cut it into pieces and wreck the local environment.
So they had to figure it out and they I mean,
I suggest watching that documentary, it's amazing. They ended up
building these huge platforms underwater that the boat would sit
(38:48):
on once they rolled it back upright. But the whole
rolling it upright process was fraught with peril of the
boat breaking apart. No one knew what exerting that kind
of pressure to kind of pull this thing back over
these huge steel cables would take. So it was it's amazing.
There were a lot of very tense moments, but they
did manage to get this thing upright and floating and
(39:12):
towed it away with tugboats.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Yeah, it was an engineering marvel. Apparently, they had lasers
and microphones and everything on all over the ship to
make sure it wasn't settling or moving at any point.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Still, it had become part of the rock over that
time too, which was a very tense moment in the
Nova Special because when it was go time, that's when
they realized it was like it is now attached to
the seabed in places, and they were like, we don't
know what's going to happen, and it dislodged and it
actually worked out, but it was very very tenuous there
(39:42):
for a little while.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
So they got it upright and after that apparently it
opened up parts of the ship to exploration that hadn't
been available before it was just too dangerous. And they
found the remains of the second to last missing victim,
Maria Grasia trick car Trick Riichi. She was celebrating her
fiftieth birthday with a friend and her daughter when she died.
(40:07):
She and her friend died, her daughter survived, and there
was just one last person to be found after that,
and they didn't find him. His name was Russell Rebello.
He was another hero who gave away his life jacket
to save someone else.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
And he's a I think right.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
He was a waiter and he was organizing people to
get out of there. He's helping people get off of
the ship and died as a result. And once they
floated the ship and towed it back to Genoa for recycling,
they were just turning it into scrap, one hundred and
forty four thousand tons of scrap. The people doing that
(40:44):
project found the remains of Russell Rebello in a cabin
behind some furniture on the eighth deck. He had just
been trapped there the whole time that the boat was underwater,
and they found him after it was in the ship
jarden dry dock.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Yeah. Obviously, the legal fallout from this was pretty broad.
Skatino was dubbed Captain Coward by the media in Italy.
And on January fifteenth, actually two days after the prosecutor
came forward confirming the events as we have detailed. Two
(41:22):
days after that they placed Skatino under house arrest. Obviously,
that audio with DeFalco was released very damning evidence. And
then July twenty thirteen, that crisis coordinator Ferrorini, who was
on the phone with Skatino. Four members of the crew
pled guilty. They took a plea bargain basically where they
(41:44):
pled guilty to manslaughter got sentences from one and a
half years to close to three years, including Jacob rus
Lee Benn, who was the helmsman who steered the wrong way.
And Skatino says, oh, this plea deal sounds like a
pretty good thing. I'd like to get in on that,
and they're like, oh no, no, there's no plea deal
(42:06):
for you. You're going to go to full trial on
a manslaughter charge causing the wreck and abandoning ship. And
they opened it up into a one thousand seat court
theater basically in Tuscany so people could go and watch
this play out in person.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
It was a huge, huge international spectacle. The trial almost.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Two years, basically nineteen months.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Like it's it's pretty rare that somebody who's like roundly
vilified isn't in some way like being unfairly villified. But
Skatino is one of those rare people where he totally
deserved every bit of scorn and disdain that that was
heaped upon him. And it was still heaped upon him.
(42:51):
He was a national embarrassment for Italy but just a
just an international snake as far as everybody else was concerned.
And from what I can tell, I'm like, surely there's
something this guy did that was like, oh, actually he
did this. Nope, it does not exist, which is you
just don't run into that very often.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah, he was sentenced to sixteen years. He appealed, that
appeal was uphild in May twenty seventeen, and he is
currently serving that sentence. There are people, and I'm glad
Livia pointed this out. I don't think anyone, like you said,
is defending Skatino. But there was more scorn heaped upon
Coasta Cruises as a whole because they pointed out things like,
(43:33):
you know, I said, put a pin in the fact
that there was a language barrier between the helmsmen about
which way to steer. Like they're like, that shouldn't happen.
There shouldn't be a language barrier between who's steering the
ship and the captain of the ship. You got to
work that out. There were safety and evacuation procedures that
were basically either not known or ignored, right, And that's
(43:56):
you know, that falls on the company to some degree
for sure. And then there were technical things. There were
some I believe watertight doors that were left open. It
was they were either malfunctioning or the crew just didn't
shut them because it reduced like the amount of work
to like unseal those doors, and you know, made their
workflow easier. So you know, there were a few things
(44:17):
that popped up. The fact that they the company even
said like sail buys are fine, like we do it.
It's something that we all do and it's fine. Like
all these things popped up to put coast to cruises
and hold their feet to the fire. So they ended
up offering a payout of eleven thousand euros to anyone
who was on board, plus obviously reimbursing them for the
(44:40):
trip and any costs related to traveling for the trip,
as long as you give up the right to sue.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Yeah, and they settled with Italy itself for a one
million euro fine, which kept them out of criminal lawsuits
or criminal charges as a company. They just basically shoved
skete know forward and said here, everybody have at and
again rightfully so, but the company didn't take the kind
(45:07):
of responsibility that it should have, like you were describing,
and they got off easy, I mean a couple million
and settlements. I mean they really skin flinted the people
who were affected by this. But that's not to say
they got off scott free as far as finances go. Yeah,
the salvage operation itself cost one point two billion dollars.
(45:30):
That's yeah, WWI is the amount of costs to build
the ship in the first place.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Plus they lost the half a billion dollar ship, right,
so they lost You're close to two billion dollars exactly.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
So, so Skatino's little sale by costs that company two
billion dollars. It cost the world thirty two lives and
some serious injuries as a result, and of course the
area around Julio Island is not probably never going to
be the same again, or it won't be for a
really long time. But there was an interesting little post
(46:00):
because somebody else lost out on this deal too. You
may or may not feel bad for them, but the
Calabrian mafia a few years ago came out that the
Italian police were recording their conversations and found out that
the Calabrian mafia had had a bunch of cocaine aboard
the Costa Concordia, and it's not clear if it was
(46:24):
still there or if somebody swam aboard and got it,
or what the deal was. But it was never like
the salvage crew was never like we found the cocaine.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah. Pretty interesting. Yeah, and we should also mention too,
during that the salvage operation, remarkably only one person died,
considering how dangerous the work was that they were doing these
industrial divers. Yeah, and one of them, there was a
Spanish diver who died February first, twenty fourteen, trying to
(46:57):
salvage the thing and help the environment out.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Pretty nuts.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
There was one other quote that DeFalco had that wasn't
quite as touted in the media, but I thought it
was pretty ba.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
You ready, that's a spicy meatball, DeFalco.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
Said to Scatino on that famous phone call. Perhaps you
saved yourself from the sea, but I'll make you pay.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Oh yeah, it's a good one.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
He got them too. Wow. So that's it for the
Costa Concordia. And if you heard all this and you're
like this is really interesting stuff, there's a lot of
stuff out there for you to go check out.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Totally. That Nova Doc is well worth fifty minutes.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, I mean that alone is worth it. What was it?
It's a sunken ship rescue. It's a terrible title. It's
really hard to get in there. Also, there's a really
great Vanity Fair article called Another Night to Remember. I
don't remember who wrote it, but like they described the
people involved as like ruggedly handsome, receding hairline, just Vanity Fair.
(47:57):
Kind of little interesting details to you, but it's really
coherent and well written and really in depth.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
Yeah, for sure, it's Vanity Fair Baby. That's right, that's
what they do.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yep. And since Chuck said it's Vanity Fair Baby, that
means it's time for a listener mail.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
I'm gonna call this Hello from a grateful doc, because
that's what Doc Twilling says.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Docor Twilling sounds like the little house in the prairie
character is.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Sotal.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Pop will clear that right up. Hey guys, my name
is Chris. I'm a physician from Michigan who's been listening
for many years. Initially, I started listening to get through
medical school in those long days, and it was a
relief to learn about something other than medicine. I recently
started listening to the selects on pain scales, which inspired
me to write in. As a physician, I'm constantly assessing
pain severity to both help make diagnoses and monitor progress
(48:50):
as the patient's heal. Most of the ideas you discuss
are part of an average workday for me. However, you
taught me some new ideas, including the concept that elderly
patients may express their pain differently, like they may use
words like soreness instead of pain to describe their discomfort.
I was intrigued by this and research the idea further,
and I'm happy to say I now use this approach
(49:11):
to better treat pain in my older adult patients. I
love that Doc Chris here researched further and he wouldn't
just like Josh and Chuck said it. That's right, Sparrel ahead, Yeah,
that means doctor Twilling. Doc Twilling is doing the right thing.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
He's a sharp tech That's right.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
You guys do a great job of taking complicated subjects
and making it easier for everyone to understand. The Explanations
for medical shows you give, such as on addiction, diabetes,
and high blood pressure help me frame my own explanations
to my patients. Communicating complicated topics in a way anyone
can understand remains a challenge. But I feel in getting
(49:50):
better every day through listening to how you both do it.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
Man, how about that? Yeah, we're saving lives here, Chuck,
in a.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
Way, so Doc Twilling, Chris Twilling says, if you ever
come to the Midwest, I'd love to come see you.
So put this on the books, Doc Twilling, if we
come through Michigan or anywhere else you can get to,
you are on the guest list. Just send us an
email from this very email that you sent and remind
us a couple of weeks before the show.
Speaker 1 (50:16):
Very nice, good good thinking, Chuck. If you want to
be like Doc Toilling and get in touch with us
and let us know how we're affecting lives, saving lives,
that kind of thing, we'd love to hear that kind
of stuff, you can send us an email to Stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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