In short, the Concordia inquiry will have to be a comprehensive affair if cruise line holidays are to regain their rosy reputations. In addition, investigators will have to examine issues that include seafarers' working hours, adequate manning of the bridge and engine room, evacuation systems and more innovative methods for abandoning these giant vessels. The sheer scale of modern cruise liners therefore presents another challenge for emergency services and analysts say much more attention needs to be given to the adequacy of life-saving appliances, and the quality of crews and their training. "Many ships are now effectively small towns at sea, and the number of people on board raises serious questions about evacuation," Dickinson added. Nautilus – which represents 23,000 ship masters, officers, ratings and other shipping industry staff – is concerned not just with power issues but with the rapid recent increases in the size of passenger ships, with average tonnage doubling over the past decade. The general secretary of the union, Mark Dickinson, added that the accident should serve as a wake-up call to the shipping industry. This similarity between the two incidents was also stressed by the maritime professionals' union Nautilus International which said it was now essential that inquiries into the Concordia's grounding examine reports of electrical problems in all modern ships. "The systems need to be reset and most of these things have automatic back-up, but it takes time for them to come in," said Latarche, who added that a similar problem had caused the Queen Mary 2 to lose power in September 2010 as she was approaching Barcelona.
This would have caused the ship to lose navigational power and steering control and to veer off course. According to this scenario, a power surge or "harmonic interference" could have caused a malfunction in the generators feeding the ship's six diesel-electric engines, while back-up systems failed to provide power with sufficient speed.
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