Many will remember the sinking of the cruise ship “Sea Diamond” in April 2007. She hit a reef while maneuvering to one of the permanent moorings beneath the caldera of Santorini and sank 13 hours later.
1,190 passengers were evacuated in three hours by a combination of the ships lifeboats and an armada of tourist traffic boats which were on hand. Two people died, lost belowdecks.
13 people were held culpable and tried including the ship’s captain, first officer, navigator, and representatives of the cruise line, on charges of recklessness and pollution of the sea. Prison sentences were given to the captain, firstmate and navigator and a fine levied on the management of the cruise company. Others were fined as well.
Over a series of trials the thirteen accused were whittled down to three.
The contention of the defendants is that the official navigational charts issued by the Hellenic Navy Hydrographic Service were incorrect and pollution, if any, was minimal.
The Supreme Court criminal division heard arguments and ruled that after yearly analysis of the waters near the sunken ship by the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, there was no pollution. They also agreed with the defense that the charts were in error and threw out the argument that “if the charts were wrong why hadn’t other ships crashed on the reef?”.
The trial of the three remaining defendents resumes today in Pireaus Court of Appeals.
Below are some illustrations taken from websites of shipwreck buffs and a photo of the wreck site by our own photographer. The illustrations are captioned to describe what they show.
Track of the Sea Diamond (purple line) according to the faulty chart.
Track of the ship according to the updated chart.
According to the chart, the ship’s navigator figured that the ship would clear the reef by 74 meters
The reality
In actuality the captain and crew could be hailed as heroes for temporarily righting the vessel after its initial listing and seeing the ship evacuated. It appears that the captain and crew also attempted to save the ship by trying (and failing) a maneuver to sink it in shallower waters (similar to what the Costa Concordia attempted to achieve at Giglio several years later).
October 2014 showing the pollution ring above the sunken vessel
A personal account can be seen here and there is a youtube here
skopelosnews 
I know that Skopelos is pretty boring this time of the year, but there must be something better than a Santorini shipwreck to write about ?
Sitrep on the beaches (most pretty much OK now covered with sand), quality of the fish (very good) lettuce (also very good) pine tree caterpillars (killing loads every day 🙂 )
Maybe we’ll cover sitrep on the beaches or put up a picture of lettuce.
I would think that the chart making department of the Hellenic Navy really has their hands full. With a coastline measured to be either 15147 km (World Resources Institute) or 13676 km (CIA) to keep charts up-to-date must be difficult.
However there are some places which deserve regular checking and in my opinion the caldera at Santorini would be one. The photo shows the steepness of the cliff so they might expect the occasional change in the shoreline. It is hard to tell from the story if the original chart was just wrong or changes since the last mapping rendered the chart incorrect.
Others spots to check would be any coastline which suffered an earthquake, as happened in Kefalonia.
As the article suggests, the Prosecutor tried to blame the disaster on everything except the faulty chart.