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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.
Yeah, you know, we were actually developing a robust suite of maritime disasters.
Well, there's plenty to talk about, for sure, So this is I mean, we're probably mid suite at best.
I mean, depending on which ones you cover, we could be no pun intended. Just the tip of the iceberg.
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 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.
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, like the fact that it's a modern disaster, a llah the Titanic, like that kind of thing shouldn't be happening these days.
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.
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.
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 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 threw up in it and just shipped it out to sea.
Yeah, not like the super classy ones these.
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.
Yeah, there's going to be brass this one.
This one really like pulled out all the stops, as our organ playing friends sometimes.
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, captained by Francesco Skatino, who had been He was a veteran, he had been working just for this cruise company for eleven years.
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. 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.
That's what I thought of.
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 see people. And then very wealthy people who like to hang out around hardy see people.
And any though no fifteen hundred people total right.
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. 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.
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, well away from everything.
You know.
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.
Yeah, and no more car surfing like they didn't teen wool for Footloose, none of that stuff either.
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.
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 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.
That was one swing to the horn.
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 out and touch it kind of thing.
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 and a woman named Dominica. And how do you pronounce her last name?
I'd say Simmerton.
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 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 this relationship. And you know, cruise ship crashes because captain's trying to impress his young girlfriend.
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 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 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 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.
It's just two things to remember. Though.
It's not that U so I always have trouble with it.
Do you really?
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.
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 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, 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 far as how much water this thing is taking on very very fast.
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. 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, 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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
Yeah, for sure.
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 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.
Well, I will say this, if Skatino said it was me that did it, then I'm immediately inclined to not believe it.
That is a good rule of thumb with this guy.
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.
Stuff you should know, Josh, and shock stuff you should know, all right.
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 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.
He also got word almost immediately that the engine room was flooding.
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 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.
Yeah, at first he was probably like, letter ring, just letter ring, They'll go right.
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 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.
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?
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 than it should be. Apparently it came to rest one thousand feet from land. That's how close it was.
It looked even closer it does. You see the wreck footage for.
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, because Skatino was trying to downplay it to save his reputation and the crisis coordinator was trying to save the company's reputation.
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. 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 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 he had fallen off the ship and landed in a lifeboat.
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.
Yeah, I'm in there.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
They'll have you have your first rum punch.
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
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 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.
If you keep going, this ship's going to be upright again. So they need they needed you there just to explain.
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 into and all of a sudden, you're falling to the
other side of the ship. It was like the beside an Adventure halfway.
It's like whatever TV show you were watching, all of a sudden was almost upside down.
You would have to dangle from the floor which is now the ceiling to watch the TV appropriately.
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 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 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, 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.
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 impossible to launch the last three.
But it should be enough for all the people, right, it.
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. 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 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 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 the ship almost certainly would have lived.
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 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 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 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 and kept there.
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 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 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
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
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.
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 to help people. As the captain has bailed in a lifeboat.
Yeah, it's a really unbelievable point out for sure. They may have even passed one another.
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 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, but to save the environment from this ship.
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 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, 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.
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, 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 started to do that.
All right, you want to take the break now, Yeah, I feel like, yeah, yeah, we'll be right back. Everybody.
Stuff you should know, show stuff should know, so chuck in.
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 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.
Parbuckling.
Parbuckling. It's like turned by but for giant ships.
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 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
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 towed it away with tugboats.
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.
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 for a little while.
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. 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.
And he's a I think right.
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 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.
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 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 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 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.
It was a huge, huge international spectacle. The trial almost.
Two years, basically nineteen months.
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. 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.
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, 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 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 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 trip and any costs related to traveling for the trip, as long as you give up the right to sue.
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 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. That's yeah, WWI is the amount of costs to build the ship in the first place.
Plus they lost the half a billion dollar ship, right, so they lost You're close to two billion dollars exactly.
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
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 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.
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 salvage the thing and help the environment out.
Pretty nuts.
Yeah.
There was one other quote that DeFalco had that wasn't quite as touted in the media, but I thought it was pretty ba.
You ready, that's a spicy meatball, DeFalco.
Said to Scatino on that famous phone call. Perhaps you saved yourself from the sea, but I'll make you pay.
Oh yeah, it's a good one.
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.
Totally. That Nova Doc is well worth fifty minutes.
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. Kind of little interesting details to you, but it's really coherent and well written and really in depth.
Yeah, for sure, it's Vanity Fair Baby. That's right, that's what they do.
Yep. And since Chuck said it's Vanity Fair Baby, that means it's time for a listener mail.
I'm gonna call this Hello from a grateful doc, because that's what Doc Twilling says.
Docor Twilling sounds like the little house in the prairie character is.
Sotal.
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
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
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.
He's a sharp tech That's right.
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 better every day through listening to how you both do it.
Man, how about that? Yeah, we're saving lives here, Chuck, in a.
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.
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