From Bloomberg on the Concordia half-sinking comes this:

In 1912, the RMS Titanic, the largest and most advanced passenger liner of its day, sank in the Atlantic Ocean, reminding the world there was no such thing as an invincible ship.

The Costa Concordia, a cruise ship so enormous that it is essentially a floating town, lies half submerged off the coast of Italy, making the same point today. The Titanic tragedy, which claimed some 1,500 lives, ushered in a new era in maritime safety law. A century later, the Costa Concordia debacle, in which 11 people have died and more than 20 are missing, raises the question of whether those measures are being effectively enforced.

For the most part, they are.

This is not to say that there are not some glaring problems, which this disaster has unmasked.  One of the more-serious is the apparent lack of a full safety drill before the vessel left port.  If you've been on a US-based cruise you know this one -- everyone is required to show up at their muster station before the ship sails when the horn blows, life jacket on body, and be physically counted.  Every stateroom and public area is physically entered and checked for persons by the crew.

There are plenty of other questions as well.  Reports from passengers are that the crew originally told the guests that there was an "electrical problem" on the vessel.  It apparently was not until the ship began to list that a muster order was given.

That the bridge and engineering crew was not immediately aware that the ship had been seriously holed is inconceivable -- they most-certainly were, and decided, for whatever reason, to not immediately sound the alarm and have everyone report to their muster stations.

That is inexcusable but distressingly common among various transportation companies.  How often have you heard BS excuses when it comes to why a particular public transportation device isn't performing as it should be, whether it be a plane, ship or train?  Crew members lie all the time, frequently because they're either lied to by the conveyance's master or directed to lie by that individual or the company itself.

Even worse are reports that the captain left the vessel with passengers still on board.

I've owned boats from darn tiny to the mid-40 foot range, all of which I operated personally.  I've gone aground too -- I'm not too proud to admit it, although I've never seriously damaged a vessel by doing so.  Nobody got -- or gets today -- on board my boat without a safety briefing.  Where the lifejackets are, where the essential safety equipment (e.g. fire extinguishers, etc) are, and, when I owned my larger vessel, where the "ditch bag" and raft were -- the two essential items that had to make it off were we sinking.

Calamity comes at sea largely through lack of planning although bad luck is certainly a factor.  The Titanic sunk in no small part because her master decided to push at maximum speed in an attempt to set a transit record through waters that might contain icebergs in a world where your defenses against collision were, to the largest degree, human eyeballs and reaction time.  He lost his bet and both ship and passengers went into the icy water.

There are reports (backed up with internet-available tracks of the AIS transponder on board the ship) that Costa Concordia was sailing damned close to a known rocky shoreline.  At night.  There are also reports that the captain was "showing off" for the tourists both on board and those on the island.  Who knows -- what we do know, in retrospect, is that whether the rock he hit was charted or not he was too damned close to a known dangerous shore, at night, at both a speed and time of day at which lookouts would be ineffective.  He too, lost his bet.

I like cruises; they're zero-stress, lay-in-hottub-and-drink-booze relaxfests.  Given my usual 300mph life they offer a way to enjoy something I really love -- the rocking of the sea, the smell of the salt air, and an adult beverage or three while soaking in a cantilevered hottub 80' off the water.  If this tragedy causes people to abandon the industry as "unsafe" (despite the fact that statistically you're more likely to get run over on the way to the pier) that's fine by me, as it will drop ticket prices and thus I'll go again at a cheaper price.

But it appears to me that in this case there is an argument for serious civil and perhaps criminal liability for certain parties involved in this mess, especially the captain.  That he decided to run for the beach after he holed the ship (which, incidentally, is why it didn't sink -- the water there isn't deep enough!) almost-certainly saved lives.  That singular good decision, however, does not excuse all of the bad ones, especially the lack of a safety drill before the vessel left port and the crew's failure to accurately inform the passengers immediately following the collision that the vessel had been holed and that they should proceed to muster stations.

Those two facts and failures must be addressed.