Skip to footer

After Costa Concordia disaster: 8 safety tips for cruise ship passengers

The recent cruise ship disaster in Italy has prompted travel industry experts to advise the public about safety steps they can take, not only aboard ships but also in hotels. When the Costa Concordia ran aground off the shore of Tuscany on Jan. 13, roughly 160 yards from the shore of Giglio Island, many of the more than 4,200 passengers and crew on board the ship were reportedly unprepared for the crisis and the evacuation that followed.

Nancy Dunnan, publisher of TravelSmart Newsletter, urges cruise ship passengers to take precautions to protect themselves and their belongings. She suggests the following:

2. Find your life jacket

  • By

Cruise ships must conduct a safety drill giving instructions on the use of life jackets and where to gather in an emergency. On sailings that are longer than a week, the first drill will be held before the ship sails, with additional drills once a week thereafter. For cruises of one week or less, drills must be held within 24 hours after leaving port. 

Attend and pay attention to the location of your life jacket. TravelSmart recommends that parents have children try on a jacket so they will be familiar with them.

TIP: You may want to bring your own jackets and stash them in your cabin.

NOTE: Ships should post information in each cabin about how to recognize the ship’s emergency signals. They must also post information about the location of life preservers and how to use them and the lifeboat to which you are assigned. Families should review this information together and be sure they can identify each of these locations at the beginning of a cruise.

When leaving your cabin, each person in your group should take a piece of paper noting the location of life preservers and lifeboat assignments. On large ships, it’s very easy to forget these locations. Stash the details in your wallet, purse, tote, gym bag, or evening bag.

2 of 8
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.