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The Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster on Jan 13 2010 was a powerful
news item, as the largest passenger ship sinking since the Titanic. It
has not actually sunk, and almost all the 2000 passengers and crew have
been rescued. Part of the new focus has been on the behavior of the
Captain, who abandoned ship rather than commanding the evacuation.
The 1,000ft long ship, one of the biggest passenger vessels ever to be
wrecked, foundered after striking a rock off the coast of Giglio just as
dinner was being served on Friday night.
The Italian government says it fears an ecological disaster if the
ship's half million gallons of diesel and oil start to leak into
pristine coastal waters, part of a huge marine national park around the
Tuscan archipelago of islands.
The captain was accused of “inexcusable” recklessness on Monday night
after it emerged that he steered too close to shore to come within sight
of his head waiter’s family home on the island of Giglio.
The GCP event was set for 21:30 on Jan 13 to 03:30 on the 14th (20:30
02:30 UTC). I think the impact that started the disaster was at 21:38,
so this period includes a few minutes before to 6 hours after. The
result is Chisquare 21500.472 on 21600 df, for p = 0.683 and Z = -0.476.
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish
signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be
largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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