The year 2012 is already behind us, but for many, some events will leave lasting imprints – both in the positive and negative ways. So what happened in 2012?

The world is not ending at least for now and let the new 2013 be full of more happiness, joy, and good news.

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New York , U.S.A. —  This week, victims of the doomed Costa Concordia Cruise Ship that capsized off the Italian coast in January filed a new Complaint against Miami headquartered Carnival Corp., the builder of the Costa Concordia, for product liability, against Carnival’s Miami-based architect for defective ship design and against Carnival for a pattern and practice of concealing and/or delaying notification of life threatening situations to passengers on board their cruise ships, amongst other causes of action. Another claim, alleging wrongful death on behalf of several other parties, is to be filed shortly.

The suit alleges that Carnival was aware that the ship’s hull design and power systems were defective. In February 2010 the hull of Carnival’s Costa Europa was punctured against a dock in Egypt creating a small hole, roughly 1/30th (6 feet) the size of the hole in the Costa Concordia’s hull, yet that ship flooded and listed severely at the cost of multiple lives. To date, the company refuses to publicly release the incident report that relates to the Europa accident.

In November 2010, Concordia’s sister ship the Carnival Splendor caught fire and was stranded off the coast of Mexico due to a catastrophic failure of a generator in one of the engine rooms. Splendor’s second generator, located in another engine room, should have kicked in but failed to work. At the time, Carnival Cruise Lines’ CEO Gerry Cahill was quoted in Travel Weekly: “Having two engine rooms like we do is pretty much the norm in the cruise industry”.

Cahill added that Carnival had determined that “there are certain things that we can do to increase the effectiveness of that redundancy.” Cahill also said that these lessons would likely be applied to Carnival’s sister brands in the Carnival Corp. group, but the Concordia was plagued by multiple electrical failures after the crash, causing tremendous loss of life and property, personal injury and terror for those on board.

Indeed, as Marc Jay Bern of Napoli Bern Ripka Shkolnik, LLP, co-lead attorney along with Mitchell Proner of Proner & Proner, representing Costa Concordia victims recently noted, “No one got off the Concordia unscathed. Even those who survived and avoided serious physical injuries will never be the same after the horror they lived through. These people trusted a well-known cruise industry brand and had every reason to believe they were in responsible and experienced hands but unfortunately that proved to be anything but the truth.”

Law firms Napoli Bern Ripka Shkolnik & Associates, LLP (with offices in New York and Florida) and New York-based Proner & Proner, along with the Italian firm CODACONS, are representing the plaintiffs in their litigation against the Carnival Group and the other responsible parties. At least $2 million dollars in compensation per passenger is sought and attorneys plan to request $590 million dollars in punitive damages.

The action, filed in State Court before the Florida Circuit Court (11th Judicial Circuit) in Miami-Dade County, Florida is against Carnival Corporation, Carnival Corporation & PLC, Costa Cruise Lines, Inc. and Costa Crociere SPA, are all registered in the State of Florida and face state law claims for Maritime Negligence, Gross Negligence, Negligence – Product Defect as to Carnival Corp., Professional Negligence of the Ship’s Architect, Intentional Failure to Warn, Intentional Failure to Abandon Ship, Intentional Failure to Notify Authorities, Corporate Pattern and Practice of failure to warn, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, Negligent Retention (by the Cruise Line of Captain Schettino), Fraudulent Misrepresentation and Fraudulent Inducement.

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Port Everglades, FL, U.S.A. – Joseph Farrell, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Resolve Marine Group, among the world’s foremost maritime emergency and disaster response, salvage and ship wreck recovery companies, says, “Removal of the capsized Costa Concordia cruise ship from the Tuscany coastline is one of the largest undertakings of its kind – this is a massive and complex operation which the entire world will be watching.”

For more than 30 years, Resolve Marine Group has conducted hundreds of seafaring salvage and ship wreck removal operations. His company has responded to ship collisions, vessel fires and disabled, capsized and sunken vessels. Among Resolve’s historic headline missions is the oil spill cleanup operation following BP Deep Water Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and its recovery of the aircraft and human remains at the Value Jet Flight 592 crash site in the Florida Everglades.

Resolve Marine Group also owns and operates the globally recognized Resolve Maritime Academy. Since 1994, it has trained on-board firefighting techniques to more than 18,500 professional mariners from numerous major cruise lines and scores of oil tanker and cargo companies. The Academy has also trained ship firefighting to hundreds of members of land-based port firefighting units.

Recently, the Academy – which has focused primarily on training marine firefighting, hazardous materials response and vessel damage control – expanded its curricula to include navigational safety-related programs.

Farrell says, “Resolve Marine Group has worked with Titan Salvage on a number of important maritime ship wreck projects.” Titan is the Pompano Beach, Florida, USA company that was awarded the Costa Concordia project along with the Italian marine contractor Micoperi.

“The Costa Concordia is a massive, international assignment that will involve hundreds of personnel including naval architects and engineers, highly experienced salvage masters and a variety of specialists such as environmental consultants,” explains Farrell.

“Based on my experience, Titan and Micoperio are staffed with qualified teams for this mission, which, I suspect, will require dispatching equipment and crews from around the globe,” explains Farrell.

“The plan to upright the capsized craft; then slowly tow it to a port near Rome could take more than a year to complete,” says Farrell. “Because of the magnitude of this project, unlike other salvage operations – and because the cruise ship is so close to land, – the Costa Concordia requires special attention to the environmental concerns and to limiting disruption to the community, which relies almost entirely on tourism for its economic livelihood.”

Farrell explains, “The salvage team has to be extremely careful not to cause adverse effects to the environment.” He says, “Rolling and then refloating the ship in one piece rather than dismantling it piece-by-piece will be quite a feat. The main concern will be to not further compromise the ship’s structural integrity, so that it can be maneuvered off the coast and to another port.”

Farrell started in the maritime salvage and recovery business with one tug boat more than three decades ago. He has grown Resolve Marine Group into a global company with offices or affiliates in major port cities on America’s Atlantic Seaboard; on the nation’s Great Lakes; its Gulf Coast and Pacific Coastline. Resolve maintains offices and affiliates around the globe.

In March 2012, Resolve Maritime Academy opened its 7,000 square foot new Simulation Training Center which includes a 240 degree, Class A Full Mission Bridge Simulator, suite of mini bridges and ECDIS lab. The Center was designed to accommodate the training needs of a Resolve client company, one the leading cruise line companies in the world.

The simulation technology can realistically simulate the depth and visually recreate the topography of every seaport in the world. It can create various weather, wave and other conditions. Simulator training is proven to advance the navigational skills of officers and crews; improve their abilities at collision avoidance; better develop the efficacy of command communications and enhance concentration and leadership abilities.

“Human error, poor decision-making and fractured command leadership are among the leading causes of most maritime disasters,” says Farrell. “This advanced new navigational training combined with a focus on human factors, and strict adherence to U.S. Coast Guard and International Maritime Organization safety and sailing regulations is proven to save lives.”

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Later this month, the 100th anniversary of one of history’s most tragic events will occur – the sinking of the Titanic – and the question often asked is: Could such a disaster happen again? The answer is not only “yes,” but it has happened many times since and will almost certainly happen again, says a Texas A&M University oceanographer.

Mahlon “Chuck” Kennicutt II, professor of oceanography who has conducted marine research for 30 years, says the Titanic has captured the public’s attention as few ships have ever done. The largest ship afloat at the time, the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg on her maiden voyage from England to New York City.

The ship carried more than 2,200 people – over 1,300 passengers and about 900 crew. The sinking resulted in the deaths of 1,517 people and is etched in the history books as one of the worst maritime disasters ever.

“We remember the Titanic because of so many odd things associated with it: the ship was called ‘unsinkable’ and it carried many notable people on board, not only were many lives lost but many lives could have been saved if there had been more lifeboats, it ran into an iceberg in the open ocean, it was on its maiden voyage, and on and on,” says Kennicutt.

“It has captured the public’s imagination for decades and spawned dozens of books and films. But many other maritime disasters have occurred since it sank, but they did not garner nearly the attention that theTitanic did.”

The recent capsizing of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia (which carried more than 4,200 passengers and crew) resulted in 30 deaths and has captured worldwide attention, but since the Titanic,there have been numerous other ship tragedies.

He notes that in 1987 in the Philippines, the passenger ferry Dona Paz collided with an oil tanker, igniting more than 8,000 barrels of petroleum products. More than 4,300 people died and later it was shown that the ferry had far exceeded its passenger and cargo limits.

In 2002, another ferry, the Le Joola capsized off the coast of Africa and killed more than 1,800, while in 2006 another ferry had mechanical trouble and coupled with high winds, sank in the Red Sea, killing more than 1,000 people. One highly publicized disaster occurred in 1994 when the cruise-ferry Estonia had faulty locks and it sank in the Baltic Sea, killing 852. There are dozens of other examples.

“The Titanic was the most technologically advanced ship at the time, with the latest in navigation and radio equipment. It even had its own newspaper,” Kennicutt says.

“But as so often the case, sometimes it’s just not enough, especially when humans are involved. There is no such thing as a 100 percent safe or ‘unsinkable’ ship as we learn time and again. The space shuttle, for example, was the most complex machine ever built, with 2.5 million moving parts, but suffered two catastrophic failures ending in tragedy,” pointing to the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters.

Kennicutt says one reason there are bound to be future maritime disasters is the sheer number of ships in the water. It’s been estimated there are about four million commercial fishing vessels in the water at any given moment, not to mention the tens of thousands of military ships, oil tankers, cruise liners and pleasure craft.

“The Gulf of Mexico is a good example,” he points out.

“It has thousands of shrimp and fishing boats, recreational craft, commercial shipping lanes and don’t forget the nearly 4,000 oil and gas platforms that have supply ships constantly departing and arriving.

“The oceans have become a virtual interstate highway system multiplied many times over being critical to global commerce,” he adds. “With that many ships, accidents are bound to happen.

“Despite our best efforts and highly sophisticated technologies, human error is the one major unknown that is difficult to control as we tragically saw in the recent BP oil spill. No matter how advanced we make ships, they are still operated by people. Even highly trained and experienced ship captains make mistakes. As they say …’to err is human.’”

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Following the tragic Costa Concordia accident, Carnival Corporation & plc, parent company of Costa Cruises and nine leading cruise lines around the world, announced a comprehensive audit and review of all safety and emergency response procedures across all of the company’s cruise lines.

Carnival Corporation & plc and the cruise industry as a whole have maintained an excellent safety record over the years.  “However, this tragedy has called into question our company’s safety and emergency response procedures and practices,” said Micky Arison, chairman and CEO of Carnival Corporation & plc. “While I have every confidence in the safety of our vessels and the professionalism of our crews, this review will evaluate all practices and procedures to make sure that this kind of accident doesn’t happen again.”

The review is being led by Captain James Hunn, a retired U.S. Navy Captain and currently the company’s senior vice president of Maritime Policy & Compliance.  Following a 32-year career in the Navy, Hunn has held senior positions at Carnival Corporation & plc for nearly a decade, focusing on corporate-wide efforts to establish maritime policy standards, while overseeing the company’s health, environmental, safety, and security practices.

Hunn and senior health and safety executives from each of the lines will review all safety and emergency response policies and procedures, officer and crew training and evaluation, bridge management, and company-wide response and support efforts. Hunn will report to the Health, Environment, Safety, & Security Committee of the Board and to Howard Frank, vice chairman and chief operations officer of Carnival Corporation & plc.

In addition, the Health, Environment, Safety, & Security Committee is engaging outside industry-leading experts in the fields of emergency response organization, training, and implementation to conduct an audit of all of the company’s emergency response and safety procedures and to conduct a thorough review of the Costa Concordia accident.

Frank said, “This company-wide initiative will identify lessons learned and best practices to further ensure the security and safety of all of our passengers and crew.”

Carnival Corporation & plc also supports the call for a comprehensive evaluation of safety regulations by the International Maritime Organization, which was requested by the Cruise Lines International Association.

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