Linking here to the latest news on the COSTA CONCORDIA LUXURY CRUISE DISASTER which has truly been compelling news to watch. This link is to a Yahoo news story that includes photos taken from space.
I admit it! I'm even checking on this news when I wake up early or come home late.
You see, there are some ancestors I'm looking for who are said to have "gone down with the ship." What ship? When? This story is a sign that I should start that search over again.
When I tell my fellow researchers the story they always suggest first I should check the Titanic. Did you know that the Queen Mary, harbored in Long Beach, is much larger than the Titanic was in its time? No, it was not the Titanic. But a lot of ships were sunk besides the Titanic. Now here we are in 2012 and this is a massive ship in comparison to the Queen Mary - a floating luxury liner - and yet it seems the same problem of disembarking a sinking or threatened ship has occurred.
I know the Italian authorities have the Captain under house arrest and all the press reporting seems to have designed him a scoundrel. If you read a whole lot of reports on the Internet, however, you will come across some information that I do hope will be considered. That is that there is a computer on board that does much of the navigating and the electrical problem referred to may have prevented this computer from working. If so the Captain might have misinterpreted where they were. I do think also that trying to bring the ship as close to shore as possible was brilliant and I credit him. Also they say he deserted the ship because all of the passengers had not yet left, but the numbers who were not off yet were closer to 50 and thousands had already left. How would a Captain or anyone else really know that every last person was accounted for with so many passengers?
Depending on the tides the ship lies in between 45 and 60 feet of water. And it was very close to shore as the pictures show. I asked my friends if they thought they could swim to shore in that water and most of them said they thought they could. The ship was not out to sea and the cold would have been to them the problem rather than the depth of the water or the distance. It would be frightening but achievable. I think that I would try to swim it, though I'm not a robust swimmer.
