Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
The results are in and a report on the Al Dana disaster is complete. It seems EVERYONE is to blame.
Lack of licensing, incomplete inspections, an unqualified captain who couldn’t communicate with anyone on board and a ship that was overweight before a single reveler got on board — these are just some of the reason so many people lost their lives unnecessarily. It would be hard to find any one person whose shoulders should carry the blame and yet it would be criminal not to apportion the blame and punishment anywhere.
If anything is to come out of this it should be a lesson learned that will hopefully prevent anything like it from ever happening again. Unfortunately the human memory is often not as long as we would like to think and, like with so many things, there is a very real risk that precautions will be taken for a certain amount of time but after a while past tragedies will be forgotten and bad habits of cutting corners will return.
Should this happen it would be an even bigger tragedy but until that day comes, we can find a minute bit of comfort in the fact that it looks like there are a lot of people out there, who after this report has been made public, will not get a relaxed night’s sleep for a long time to come.… As well it should be.
