Costa Concordia aground near Giglio
There were scenes of panic as the Costa Concordia hit a sandbar on the evening of Friday 13th January near the island of Giglio and listed about 20 degrees. People reached land by lifeboats but some swam ashore. Rescue teams went from cabin to cabin, searching for survivors.
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Created on 08 April 2011
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As part of the on-going process of making sure the volunteer crews of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution have the most reliable and up to date equipment, the RNLI is continually working, behind the scenes, to develop new lifeboats to replace older vessels coming to the end of there operational lives.
There has been a lot of development work over the past few years while designing and producing a replacement for the Mersey class lifeboat. This work has taken the shape of the Fast Carriage Boat 2 or FCB2.
There has already been a prototype built and tested which found concerns with the hull. This has been re-designed and a second prototype is currently being built by SAR Composites, a subsiduary of the RNLI, building new lifeboats 'in-house' including the Tamar class.
RNLI Trustees have decided to continue the convention of naming lifeboat classes after the rivers of the British Isles by giving FCB2 the class name of 'SHANNON'.
Current and previous classes of lifeboat carry, or have carried, the names of rivers from Wales, Scotland and England, and the introduction of the FCB2 presents the opportunity to recognise the fact that the RNLI operates lifeboats in the Republic of Ireland.
The River Shannon is, at 386km (240 miles) in length, the longest river in the British Isles, and of course the Kilrush Lifeboat Station sits at its mouth.
