Who is truly the commander of a ship?


In the malaugurato case have to explode did a fire in the genoese headquarters of Coast Cruises, the president and would managing director of the society, Pier Luigi Foschi, be held to exit for last from the building after being itself insured that all the offices and the other premises are evacuated and after to have recovered the essential documentation for the company? He would have, that is, to behave as he considers himself must make the commander of a ship?

Obviously it is a paradox. The differences between the managing role of Gloomy are multiple and that of the commander of the Coast Concord, Francesco Skate, accused of shipwreck, desertion of a ship and culpable homicide plurimo in order not to have adempiuto its must. But there are also some analogies between two professional figures to which great responsibility is assigned and to which, in various terms, it is entrusted the well-being and safety of the dependant and the customers and the safeguard of the business assets.

Whoever - competent or incompetent, expert or profane that is - judges the acts of the commander Skate in occasion of the disaster does again itself immancabilmente to the tradition second which the commander must be the last one to abandon the ship. The national and international norms do not seem sufficient to establish as a marine official must behave in such a dramatic event, of which she is or less responsible.

Already the definition of "official" is ambiguous. Is the commander of a ship from cruise to all purposes and effects a soldier or a civilian? The opinions on the way in which they must itself be involved clothe the uniform sometimes sometimes the civilian clothes. Is the commander of a commercial ship like a captain of infantry forced from its general to be left over under the enemy fire or is the holder of an enterprise subject simply to the civil code and penal? A doubt not clarified from the navigation code, than in this case seems to simply attribute to the commander a role of other times.

Today, according to the circumstances, the commander is a civil non-commissioned officer, a military official or a manager of the sea. Often he incarnates all these charges. In collective imagination from time to time it is the sea dog, the elegant official of the diner parties, the aseptic bureaucrat who signature papers, the representative of the shipowner, the public official of romantic wedding ceremonies in sea, the full-bore who charged civil employee to assess itself that the ship is army well, equipped and stowed, the able marine expert to dominate any type of navigation, the who charged notary public to certify the truthfulness and the regularity of relative documents to the ship, the passengers and the cargo, the judge to which is up to emit sentences and eventually to emprison criminals and criminals, the absolute monarch who decides ofthe life and of the dead women of the crew let alone of the children, the women and the men who are passing a vacation on the ship.

Perhaps now the moment has reached to update laws and codes and to define with greater precision who is truly the commander. It would be better than this it happened before the next sentence of sentence or acquittal comes pronounced.

Bruno Bellio