The captain of a cruise ship that sank off Athens, Greece the other day blames "strong currents" for the accident. "I felt the ship, which had been on a normal course, slip to the right because of sea currents," he said. "I gave the order for a full turn left, but there was not enough time for the ship to respond." The ship struck rocks and sank, and two French tourists are still missing.
Now, call me crazy, but I don't consider this a reasonable excuse. Shouldn't a boat be, you know, prepared to handle water? Wasn't it designed to float no matter what? I mean, I don't think the designers or manufacturers have conditions attached: "Yeah, this'll be great to take out of the open sea. Just as long as the water stays calm."
This kind of stupidity makes me wonder about other modes of transportation. I mean, say you're on an airplane, flying across the country. You're reading a year-old copy of Time magazine and picking at your lunch: a piece of crusty yellow chicken and a slice of stale bread. Suddenly the plane takes a sharp nosedive. You fly up out of your seat, the oxygen masks drop, and screams of distress ring throughout the cabin. One horrifying minute later, the plane crashes into a Cracker Barrel restaurant just outside of Cincinnati. When paramedics reach the wreckage they discover all the passengers are dead and the captain is fading fast.
"It's not my fault," the captain says they strap him to a stretcher. "It's that goddamned air!"
Sunday, April 8, 2007
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1 comment:
Yeah, aren't there supposed to be shipboard pilots or navigators who know where the currents are? Maybe they need to go back to having someone dangle a bobber off the bow and yell "it's going left, must be a current!"
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