Attorneys are circling Costa Concordia

One of the first out of the blocks is Miami’s Brett Rivkind, a ‘maritime injury attorney’—as he bills himself—who issued a news release early Sunday afternoon to express his shock about a modern cruise ship striking rocks in shallow waters and going down.

After handling maritime cases for nearly 30 years, Rivkind said he ‘thought he had seen it all.’

He was the attorney for the ‘missing honeymooner’ George Smith’s family and represented the survivors of crew aboard Windjammer’s Fantome, which vanished in a hurricane. He has handled scores of personal injury cases, many resulting in confidential settlements.

‘I never thought, although I have feared, we would ever see another disaster anything like the Titanic,’ Rivkind said in his release distributed today by PR Newswire.

He goes on to quote a client, an unnamed cruise ship captain, who speculates about the Costa Concordia incident: ‘The captain of the Costa Concordia was apparently trying to beach the ship where he could get passengers off, but there was no time. The captain didn't assess the situation properly.’

The unnamed captain further conjectures on why the ship would have been in shallow waters and expresses surprise that more information was not coming from Costa, adding: ‘… there will be heavy criticism of the cruise lines after this disaster’ before concluding, without giving specifics: ‘This disaster clearly is a result of human error.’