There is something quietly important about a court decision that comes more than ten years after the disaster it’s about. A court in Genoa, Italy, recently told Costa Crociere to pay Ernesto Carusotti 92,700 euros, which is about $105,000. Carusotti was a passenger on the Costa Concordia when it hit a reef off the island of Giglio on January 13, 2012. A verdict has been reached in one of the few civil cases from that disaster. It also makes you think more than it answers, depending on how you read it.
32 people were killed in the Concordia disaster. Four thousand people were on board when the ship hit a reef and partially flipped over, leaving thousands of people stumbling for their lives in the dark off the coast of Tuscany. Francesco Schettino, the captain, is now in prison for 16 years after being found guilty of manslaughter and abandoning ship. He is said to have walked off the ship while people were still trying to escape. It was the kind of event that people and, it seems, courts remember.
Carusotti was one of only a few people who turned down Costa’s first offer of compensation and instead sued the company. The judge in Genoa, Paolo Gibelli, said that Costa Crociere was responsible for both the shipwreck and the mental trauma Carusotti went through because of it. This was officially recognized in the judgment as PTSD. 77,000 euros were paid out in damages, and 15,692 euros were paid out in legal fees. Carusotti was backed by the consumer group Codacons, which said it was a “very important victory.”
You can see why they feel that way. While Schettino was on trial for a crime, Costa told a court in Florence that it had already given 84 million euros in compensation to the families of the people who died, passengers, and crew. Most accounts say that most of the survivors took the money and either moved on or tried to. Some people didn’t, though. It seems that they thought the package didn’t fully reflect what they’d been through. The Genoa ruling, which confirmed PTSD as a harm that could be compensated, suggests that those who were against it may have had a point.
Codacons used the word “incongruity” to describe the difference between how much Costa had paid out in the past and how much the court said a survivor’s trauma was really worth. It is a careful word. Not fraud. Not bad behavior. There was only a difference between what the company offered and what the judge thought was fair after looking at the whole picture. Costa, which is owned by the U.S.-based Carnival Corporation, wouldn’t say anything in public but said it would respond in the right way. That measured and business-like lack of response doesn’t tell you much.
And finally, the Concordia was towed off the reef, fixed in a huge salvage operation, taken to land, and cut up into pieces. The physical proof is no longer there. The people who were on board that night are still alive, and the law is still trying to figure out what happened to them. One passenger spent ten years trying to get someone to answer for their actions, and in the end, a court said something simple: living through a shipwreck, seeing people die, and remembering it all has a price. When a check comes in the mail, it doesn’t go away.
It remains to be seen if this verdict will encourage other holdout survivors to go forward or if it will be seen as a fairly unusual outcome in a legal landscape that is mostly settled. The cruise industry doesn’t usually have to deal with this long of civil accountability. In this case, the Costa Concordia lawsuit settlement shows that some types of damage take longer to properly measure than a business deal.
