Oversight of Cruise Lines at Issue After Disaster

Oversight of Cruise Lines at Issue After Disaster

PARIS — As the world was transfixed by the Titanic-like imagery of the partly submerged Costa Concordia and the frantic efforts to save the fuel-laden vessel in rough seas off the Tuscany coast, questions swirled on Monday about the enormous cruise line industry, which operates without much regulation.

The ship’s detained captain, Francesco Schettino, was accused by his bosses of deviating from a fixed, computerized course to show off his beautiful $450 million boat, carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew members, to the people of Giglio Island on a still Friday night, crashing it on a reef.

But as shares in the ship’s parent company — Carnival Corporation of Miami, the world’s biggest cruise line operator — slid by nearly a fifth and the owners and insurers tried to add up the cost of the disaster, there were more troubling issues raised about how the cruise industry is supervised and controlled.

Those issues included how much safety information and training are required for the crew and passengers, and how much discretion a captain has to alter routes, especially in an age when electronic radar, charts, GPS and other guidance systems are supposed to keep these large, sleek ships on course.

“There are legitimate questions as these vessels have substantially evolved in recent years,” said Helen Kearns, a spokeswoman for Siim Kallas, the European Union transportation commissioner. “The boats have gotten a lot bigger, as it’s economically advantageous to have more passengers,” she said. “But the way these vessels have grown in size does mean finding the right balance to make sure regulations are stringent enough to ensure there are procedures like safe evacuations.”

More than 72 hours after the accident killed at least six people, confusion still reigned over how many were missing. Italy’s coast guard abruptly raised the total to 29 late Monday after having said 16, including 2 Americans, remained unaccounted for. Worries also grew that the ship’s half-million gallons of fuel could leak into a marine wildlife sanctuary.

While airline pilots are directed and guided by controllers on the ground, sea captains are considered to be in complete control. “It’s not like the aircraft industry, where you file a flight plan,” said Peter Wild, a cruise industry consultant at G. P. Wild (International) Limited, a consultancy outside London. Rather, at most cruise lines, company directors determine the routes, which are then transmitted to the captain and a navigating officer, who scrutinize the charted course but are meant to follow it.

Captain Schettino’s boss, Pier Luigi Foschi, insisted that a safe route had been programmed into the navigating computers and that alarms would have sounded for any deviation. “This route was put in correctly,” said Mr. Foschi, who is chairman of Costa Crociere S.p.A.

“The fact that it left from this course is due solely to a maneuver by the commander that was unapproved, unauthorized and unknown to Costa,” he said at an emotional press conference in Genoa. “He wanted to show the ship, to go nearby this island of Giglio, so he decided to change the course of the ship,” Mr. Foschi said, admitting that the ship had done a similar but approved maneuver last summer for a festival.

The captain, who may face criminal charges of manslaughter, failure to offer assistance and abandonment of the ship, had said he struck an uncharted rock.

But an Italian prosecutor, Francesco Verusio, had harsh words on Monday. “We are struck by the unscrupulousness of the reckless maneuver that the commander of the Costa Concordia made near the island of Giglio,” he told reporters. “It was inexcusable.”

For many years, the global cruise line industry has operated under a loosely defined system that tends to escape scrutiny by courts and regulators. Cruise line instances of crime, pollution and safety and health violations have often gone unpoliced because no single authority is in charge.

A United Nations agency, the International Maritime Organization, oversees maritime safety through international conventions, including one for the Safety of Life at Sea, known as Solas, adopted in 1914, which grew out of the global anger that stemmed from the loss of the Titanic in 1912. But the agency has no policing powers.