http://fxn.ws/VbPa8w

Just spoke briefly to a friend who is on this ship. Roger has taken all his employees and their spouses/etc., on a Cruise to thank them for their work of Holiday. They are only able to get cell service when another ship stops by to offload supplies, so they can use the cell system on the other ship.

So, story so far: The crew/company waited 12 hours to call a tow in hopes they could repair the engines and get them working again instead of calling for the tow quickly and sending them back if they did manage to get moving again. First tow is due in another 4 hours, second tow 6 hours later. Once in port in Progreso, Mexico, reportedly late Wednesday, still going to be hell getting home. Almost 3,200 people to bus to Cancun, then fly to Houston, then bus to Galveston where their cars are, then he and his employees get to drive home to Louisiana. With luck, maybe by Friday.

No power, no A/C, no hot food, no working plumbing. No water first 12 hours. Poop in a plastic bag and set outside the door. Onion sandwiches and overipe fruit. 18 hours they finally got grills set up outside, 3 hour wait in line for a hamburger or hot dog. Promising free beer tonight.

And, folks ask me why I don't have any desire to go on a
cruise.

No good deed goes unpunished. In case you're wondering who Roger is: Knifeworks -- I guess there may be a slight delay with my next knife.

I don't do cruises either, not even if I win it as a prize and it's all free.

Does indeed seem to be the case. I feel so bad for Roger and everyone involved.

So where's the section in ETS dealing with "Cruise Ship Survival"??

I don't recall a Love Boat episode about power failure and nonfunctioning toilets.

Julie McCoy, Cruise Director, would have had a meltdown.



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Not a good week for cruise ships. There was also that British cruise ship in the Canary Islands where five crew members died and three more injured when their lifeboat fell while being lowered into the water during a safety drill. Although passengers were onboard the cruise ship, none were in the lifeboat.

Well, most credible survival manuals spend the first part of the book on "how to stay the [bleep] out of survival situations." So it would be a pretty short section I guess.

Bloody disgusting situation. I'm guessing the cruise lines have done away with yardarms generally, and take great care to keep hempen ropes out of passengers' hands particularly.

Some quote about "prison, with the chance of drowning" comes to mind.

From this article, sounds like conditions are slowly getting worse. Instead of getting towed to port in Mexico, the plan is to tow the ship to Mobile and it will arrive Thursday! That's a long wait from now.

I hate to make the comparison, but at this point, it sounds more and more like the Superdome during Katrina, minus the rumors about dead bodies piling up in the freezers.

Thank goodness there are no reports of norovirus onboard that I am aware of. With no sanitation, scarce water, and no air conditioning/ventilation, that would be a nightmare scenario.

We have had some extensive threads on the subject. It is an interesting conundrum - evidently passengers are quite limited on luggage capacity.

If I were packing today for a cruise, I'd be making room for:

Flashlight (my Fenix LD41 - takes 4 AA batteries)

Petzl Zipkas (AAA) which can be worn as headlamp or wristlamp.

Four energy bars

Micropur tablets

Antiseptic wipes

plastic bags (to get through the first 48 hours without a toilet)

pocket AM-FM-SW radio (the SW part should work at sea, right?)


A cruise on one of those massive ships is not on my short or long lists of things to do. But a Windjammer could be fun.



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In addition to what you take with you onto the ship, you could have a separate strategy for stockpiling after boarding. I've never been on an overnight cruise but surely these things would be obtainable once on board and could be stored in the room for the duration:

water bottles, soda, juice

fruit, bread, nuts, chips


It's my understanding that the big ships are 24/7 floating buffets.


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It sounds like the "lucky" cruise ship patrons only come down with projectile vomiting and diarrhea due to norovirus. The unlucky ones end up on some floating disaster like this. It sounds to me like it'd be more fun to take a "cruise canoe" through a mosquito, crocodile and snake infested swamp. At least that would be a more fun survival scenario. Trapped on a floating barge in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of people dressed to the hilt sitting at dinner tables whining about the delay of their expected lobster dinners would be a nightmare.

things are getting better.

cnn story

It seems to me that these ships are built with zero power/vital services back-up or redundancy. Everything is a "single thread" leading back to the engines. When you lose the engines, you lose everything.

If this is so, IMO cruise ships need to be designed with some back-ups, e.g. generators to power the basic services (water, sanitation, some A/C). Oh yeah, also the bilge pumps. . .I would have thought this would be basic to the engineering of the ship. No single fault should cause this much trouble.

When I had my sailboat, I had various back-ups in place for just about everything; some were pretty basic, but they were there.

In some ways, the folks on board would be in better circumstances if they had abandoned ship in lifeboats, and the ship let to sink. They would be at home by now, instead of suffering for 2 more days.

I can see no reason that I would want to go on one of these things.

It all started with the Titanic, and has gotten steadily worse ever since.

I doubt that there's no redundancy in the design (mainstream media isn't the most accurate source of such information) but clearly the casualty overwhelmed the crew and the available systems.

Ugly situation. Best preparation for it is to NOT BE THERE!

I'm going on a cruise in August because my wife wants us to go with her family. I won't hear the end of it if I don't go. I'd rather take the chance than rock the boat in our relationship, pun intended. Since I plan to go, I appreciate the heads up and the ideas for being equipped to survive a cruise ship.

I'd add a solar charger for the batteries that would power the flashlight, headlight and radio. The other option is to take a lot of batteries. A waterproof PLB would be great too.

I think the whole cruise ship concept is nuts. Back in the days of the Titanic, folks boarded the ships to get from the US to Europe and back, it was a means of transportation. It was made luxurious for those that could afford it.

I have spent some time on the Queen Mary, now a hotel in Long Beach harbor and although the old Altantic crossing ships were huge, they did not have the passenger capacity of a modern cruise ship, The old ocean liners had to be able to navigate the rough seas of the North Atlantic and were designed with that in mind.

The modern cruise ship is not usually capable of sailing across open oceans, they stay close to shore, relatively and avoid rough seas. They are also stacked very high off the water to make room for thousands of passengers and are somewhat limited in their ability to stay upright in rough conditions.

If there is ever an incident on the ship, it is a maze and very difficult to navigate around on when the lights go out and the ship is in danger. Refer to the Concordia that capsized and partially sank off the coast a few years ago.

Bottom line, stay away, if at all possible.

Most of us engage in a far more dangerous activity every day than going on a cruise, that is driving a car.

Have fun on your vacation. Cruising is safe and fun. Make sure you go out on deck after dark and check out the stars. Dark skies at sea are awesome.

Interesting! Haven't thought of this. I'm not much into spending hours in a floating hotel on a pre-packaged itinerary that herds me from destination to destination. But it would be really nice to see the sky at night at sea, I think.

I wouldn't worry too much about dying on a cruise. Like GarlyDog says, we drive every day and we're willing to take that risk.

At least if your car stops you do not have to swim miles and miles and miles to get help. If I were to take a cruise it would be in the northern climes. I am not a fan of the tropics.

Have fun with your family! Chances are, everything will be fine and you'll return home with a tan and maybe ten more pounds!

Well, the cruise ship Triumph (kind of ironic name, come to think of it) is almost at port.

I kept reading these reports of water and sewage in the hallways and that seemed odd to me. I figured it was because the passengers were told to use plastic bags for personal sanitation and to put the bags out in the hallway for collection and maybe those bags leaks if they are not tied closed tightly.

But finally started reading some reports from passengers where actual water and sewage lines are reported broken in different parts of the ship. I don't know anything about maritime plumbing, but I'm a bit surprised that a power loss causes things like sewer lines to break. Anyway, so these reports of sewage soaked hallways really are true.

"OK, grandma, just wheel yourself down the hallway in your wheelchair back to the cabin and I'll be right there. What do you mean your hands are getting wet?..." Eiewwwww.

Carnival Cruise Line is lucky that there has been virtually no phone or Internet service during this ordeal. They'll certainly be raked over the coals shortly as soon as people get back in touch with civilization and get back on social media in droves.

Onion sandwiches? I like onions, but wow. Sounds like a good excuse to throw some Mainstay bars in the bottom of a suitcase before you take a cruise.

I never go anywhere without tucking in a least a bit of a survival snack somewhere - usually a Tanka Bar and at least two Clif bars. Indulge yourself and get something appealing and tasty.

These ship designs such as the Carnaval Triumph are inherent design death traps, another 'triumph' of profit/low cost over safety much like the American and Soviet designed nuclear power stations which have gone bang in recent years.

The main problem is low drafts, stacked hotel cabins, which raise the Center of Gravity and when combined with the center of Buoyancy results in poor stability due to a smaller metacentric height leading to very low angles of list before the whole structure capsizes with a very high roll speed making evacuation times very small. Augmented stability control systems using electric power (which have in this case failed) when combined with poor weather i.e wind shear and heavy seas could be catastrophic.

A ship of this size capsizing in less than a few minutes would result in thousands of casualties.

Probably not a question of if but when considering the numbers of these type of vessels especially as these ships begin to reach the end of their service life times and the pressure to have lower operating and maintenance costs in difficult economic times.

This article seems worth reading. I wasn't aware that cruise companies are based in other countries to avoid government safety regulations, etc. Even more alarming is what seems to me to be a poor safety record. How often are engine fires supposed to happen anyway?

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/13/opinion/walker-cruise-ships/index.html

Looks like the items in this video could have proved to be useful for passengers on this vacation cruise.

Protect and Survive - Sanitation

Very simply, cruise ships pack a lot of people together in a small space, just as occurs at a stadium or nightclub, etc. Very simply, I don't like crowds. I prefer to face challenges where at least I have room to maneuver.

Of course, creating a crowd and putting it on the water does generate some unique problems.

This, exactly. Cruises just don't sound fun to me for exactly this reason...not only is it a big crowd, but there is literally NO escape. Not cool.

Ditto again.

I would think once you reach the point of capsizing, even a very tight, stable ship would roll over just as quickly.

Cruise ships are engineering compromises. So are commercial aircraft and passenger cars and our iPhones and houses, etc. I wouldn't go so far as calling them death traps.

Unlike ships engineered to traverse the open ocean like the ocean liner Queen Mary 2 or even the Titanic, your typical cruise ship is intended to stay in calmer waters. That's not a design flaw, that's simply its intended environment. Ferries may sometimes encounter rough water beyond its intended limits, too, but that doesn't make them intentionally dangerous either.

Cruise ships could be designed to be more stable, sure. But would they be as popular when most of the cabins are in the interior of the hull and have no windows or balconies? If prices were much higher because there are fewer paying customers per ship? If there were fewer amenities, such as topside pools? If the risk of sea sickness were higher because a more stable ship rolls much more quickly back and forth with the waves? It's all a compromise. I wish my car were as safe and as robust as the Presidential limo, but it's too expensive, too big, too fuel inefficient, etc. so I would never pay for a car like that.

There is also the problem of rogue waves. Rogue waves can even occur in so called calm seas, although even the Gulf of Mexico can sometimes have some choppy seas..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Queen_Mary

I told my wife the other day that there's no way I'd set foot on a cruise ship without bringing food and water with me. And anything else I think I'd need for that duration underway.

To ask a stupid question (maybe not so stupid since I actually served in the Navy onboard a Navy ship and spent a fair amount of time at sea) - couldn't they just use the bathroom over the side?

(not to say that any member of the US Navy has ever performed such an action <snickering>)

I suppose in theory you could, but anything besides a male #1 would be entirely impractical and unimaginable given all those people onboard. The way you wrote your question is awkward. I can certainly imagine throwing waste overboard if that's what you mean.

I'm reading reports of a very responsive crew attending to the needs of passengers - doing their level best, without power. That's good, or at least better than the Costa Concordia evacuation. Sorta like they might have drilled for this scenario. There are accounts of bariatric patients needing assistance going up and down stairs, continued cooling of meds, and other common everyday urgencies that have to be attended to, or a bad situation gets worse real fast. I'd say that someone on board was in command and paying a lot of attention to customer service. I'd be interested after hearing more whether this assistance extended below the water line, to the second, third or fourth class passengers (or whatever their equivalent is).

And I'm sorta curious about disposing of sewage as well. What did they do with the bags, did crew members collect them, and stow them? I find it strange that they would leave them in the hallways. Was there any disposal at sea, or dumping directly into the bilges? Inquiring minds want to know...

+1 on that one. If I cannot bug out on my own two feet...

And yeah I'm the guy who always has a torch on him.

In today's Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/...ry.html?hpid=z2


Passengers ill-suited for loss of cruise control


"...I have cruised, and I loved it, and so I say fondly: A cruise ship’s passenger log is comprised entirely of the exact demographic that is least prepared for a cruise to go to pot. A cruise is a giant boat full of your mother-in-law. Your mother-in-law does not belong in the wild."


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LOL. I just literally CHOKED on my lunch Dagny! There are several good one liners in that story.

They were 150 miles from the Mexican Peninsula. Why did they tow the ship all the way back to Mobile to offload the passengers and most of the crew instead of a flight out of Cancun?

I read that the currents were such that it was almost as quick to bring them back to Mobile. The same news article said that a number of passengers didn't have passports.

Basically, yes. Poop/pee in bucket, throw contents of bucket over side. Doesn't get much simpler than that.

Another point to consider re: towing.

Technically this ship was maritime salvage - not able to make way, drifting. If "JB's Martime Towing" got there first and was able to put a line aboard, Carnival would have owed me a bucketload of cash. At least 10% of the value of the ship and contents.

As it was, they contracted with a company to tow the ship to where they wanted - home port is probably nearest to repair facilities/resupply/cleaning. Also, consider the passengers who had flights out of the nearby area.

I still have to wonder how much was paid to have it towed.

I know nothing about maritime laws, but I would highly doubt that if your engines quit then you become immediate fodder for anybody who shows up and throws a rope around you and claims you. That's a fairly ridiculous concept to imagine.

Maritime salvage law is weird. I am not an attorney and I don't play one on the Internet, but here is my understanding:

If a vessel is abandoned, a salvage court will award some largeish amount to the salvor based on the worth of the vessel, the risk and the cost undertaken by the salvor. If the vessel is not abandoned, the owners/captain should engage in an explicit towing contract before accepting a tow, or whoever tows it may be entitled to a substantial salvage award. There's a good article about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_salvage .

I highly doubt the Captain of Carnival Triumph would have accepted a tow from a salvage vessel not under contract. The crew of Carnival Triumph would probably just refuse the tow and cut the line.

Getting a line on a ship that's been abandoned is one thing; claiming salvage rights of a cruise ship still manned by her crew and filled with passengers is an entirely different thing.

"claiming salvage rights of a cruise ship still manned by her crew and filled with passengers is an entirely different thing."
I would bet the passengers would have thrown the Captain and crew overboard to get that cruiseship in port a day or two sooner. Just my opinion.

I can see the currents being a factor but not the passports. IIRC this was a cruise from Galveston and specifically would have been stopping (or did stop) in Mexico. Wouldn't they have been required for entry back into the US? Even if they wouldn't have needed them on docking at the end of the trip, I would think that both the Mexican and US governments could have made that problem disappear.

Refugees float in on filthy human waste laiden delapidated rafts and are tentatively allowed onto US soil without passports. I don't see the cruise ship passengers being a significantly different demographic that would require us to turn them away.

It would have been a problem on disembarking in Mexico or after getting off the plane back in the US. For the Mexican side, I was thinking that there is probably some international agreement concerning a registered commercial passenger vessel with a declared emergency. Especially when the nearest port with the capacity to handle a ship that size is also a tourist destination.

You're guessing that the logical solution of disembarking in Mexico was impossible for legal reasons. I seem to recall that was also how the media portrayed it. What if the real reason lies elsewhere? Perhaps the "Mexican solution" just would have cost the company more?

I'm just totally guessing here. I don't think I'm the only uninformed person in this thread.

Maybe it was "safety reasons"? With all the drug cartel violence racking that country now, I'm not sure I'd want to abandon my smelly, but relatively safe floating cesspool for their shores. I guess it might make a difference what part of the country where you made landfall.

As Doug reported in the original post, Progreso, Mexico was the original destination for the tow. However, by the time towboats were in position, the Gulf Loop Current had carried the Triumph 100 miles north. At that point, Mobile, Alabama was just as close as Progreso, and going to Mobile wouldn't require towing the ship against the current back to Progreso.

And there are plenty of safe areas in Mexico. My friend works for the US State Dept in Mexico and has done a lot of driving around Mexico on vacation this past year with young kids and has never felt unsafe. Obviously, there are dangerous areas to stay away from, too, but it's not like every corner of the country is crawling with cartel thugs.

So, the lesser of two evils, huh ??

You got my sympathy

I think here in ETS we have got to look harder at this issue of prepper spouses and families, especially when they push you into unsafe situations.

If it was me, the wife will recieve all the money she wants, and SHE will go with her family, NOT me !!! No way.

Maybe you could suggest an alternative : a week of bushcraft and camping in some nearby area.

I doubt that we could seriously maintain that a cruise is inherently unsafe. Statistically, your chances of survival are pretty good - much like traveling by commercial airline. They get you there in one piece, but air travel just isn't as enjoyable as it used to be...

Well, that's in the back of my mind. I have the option of pushing the ejector button until soon before the trip. I have to test her to see how much she really wants me to go.

Anyway, that's a good suggestion about talking more about prepper spouses and families. Most of the prepping stuff I'm into gets dampenedd by the woman of the house. At the same time, I'm all-in with her. So, drawing hard lines all the time is not realistic. Frankly, I have to doubt the maturity of any guy whose automatic solution is to draw a hard line whenever the girlfriend/wife is not on board with 24/7 prepping.

There is a difference between a spouse who will not agree with you buying 10,000 rounds of ammo, and a spouse who will push you into a situation.

My wife made all kinds of fun of me when I bought several jars of honey or peanut butter. I was patient and understood that not everyone is lucky enough to be prepper-minded. Patience paid off, food prices climbed up and now we buy stuff by the case. Her view is "saving money" and mine is "be prepared", and it's a win-win situation.

Having said that, there is still no way that I will accept some of her views ( sometiomes illogical or unsafe ) and will try to convince her, then will let her do the stuff on herself, but not me. You know, even around you , you read about colloidal silver and what not. I really don't want to be a lab rat for all those unproven (I have read somewhere.....) type of thing.

One time she had some water with some mud which said to have some benefits (she heard somewhere). I insisted on filtering the mud or else I am not even touching it.

=====================
Yup!

Any write up or AAR from Roger about his experience?

Carnival cruises at it again.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/14/travel/cruise-ship-trouble/index.html

Sounds more like a prison ship than a cruise ship,,,,

This one is more of a hiccup than a horror show.

Passengers strolling about the Dutch Caribbean town of Philipsburg told The Associated Press that the power and water were out for 10-20 minutes, contradicting media reports of longer outages and unsanitary conditions.

“We have toilets. We have water. It’s no different than a regular day at sea,” said 31-year-old Tasha Larson of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, after disembarking with her boyfriend to spend the day in St. Maarten.

Passengers Mary and Terry Washington of Tampa, Florida, said they were grateful because the malfunction gave them an additional day to spend in St. Maarten. “The plumbing is fine. The food is fine. Everything is fine,“ Mary Washington said.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/03/15/...anical-trouble/

The only question I have relates to the potential for a charge of "unlawful/forced detention" (kidnapping) of a passenger. Of course, we incomplete facts. Even so, if a passenger wants to disembark while the gangplanks, boarding walkways, or whatever they are call are deployed, then how can you tell them they can't?

Keeping people on board might be about passenger safety as much as anything. Or it might be a delay for customs formalities.

I imagine that the captain of the ship has this authority based on the jurisdiction the ship is registered in. I assume this is spelled out in the legal documents that passengers sign.

Depending on the situation, police from the local jurisdiction could conceivably be stationed on the land end of the gangplank.

If someone wants to jump overboard and swim to shore, no-one could stop them. But they would then have to work through the customs/immigration authorities in that jurisdiction. Potentially messy.

But this is hypothetical. It sounds like passengers were taking day trips on the island. Hardly a floating gulag.

Great points. I know that things are interesting on these excursions. The passengers have to be aware of the possible consequences of their actions. I was not intimating a gulag situation. My comments were triggered by the experience of a guy I knew that was working a cruise line operating around the Hawaiian Islands. Now, he was not a passenger, but an employee, so I am not sure how different it would be. Anyway, he got ticked off and quit. He gave them his badge and was going to just leave the ship. They (some other employee) physically blocked his departure from the ship and told his he could not leave before doing paperwork for the company and so on. He tried to alleviate the situation by asking a question about his right to leave the ship. It was docked and people were coming and going. So, as you can imagine, things got heated. He called 911 saying he was being held against his will. Needless to say, the guys with guns and badges showed up. When they sorted it all out, the guy was within his rights to make the call he did. He could have proceeded with legal action. As it stands, they let him off the ship, the company "reeducated" the employees about things along those lines.

Actually, I suspect it is very different.

The stories that leak out give the impression that cruise ship staff are treated as indentured servants rather than employees as we would understand the term.

Staff from first-world countries only put up with so much. Staff from other parts of the world probably put up with a great deal more. Particularly since, if you quit and get off the ship, you're on your own in terms of getting home.

This is all pure hearsay, of course. And from disgruntled employees. But then again, where there's smoke ...

If I want off the ship when it's stranded in port and the ship's crew won't let me, things are going to get unpleasant. I'm 100% willing to call the local constabulary and file charges. I'm equally willing to file a lawsuit on my home turf.

Based on Carnival's recent history I think I'd rather get my teeth drilled than go on a cruise.

I’ve been on a river boat once and on a ferry many times. I love being on the water, especially on a ferry out to sea. As Aurora put it, in The Story of Santa Claus, “I just love the sensation of high air velocity in my hair.”

I don’t know how it would be on a cruise ship.

Jeanette Isabelle

cruise ship = lots of people in a very urban environment. Not for this dude. Give me a kayak.

I think the coast guard has sole jurisdiction over ships at sea. wildman will know how it actually works but I assume the local coast guard commander has the last word on what happens.

There was an incident during Sandy when a cruise ship was refused permission to enter port and disembark passengers ahead of the storm: the coast guard commander judged it already too dangerous to disembark passengers and ordered the cruise ship back out to sea to ride out the weather there.

I don’t think I would be able to experience “the sensation of high air velocity in my hair” in a kayak.

Jeanette Isabelle

You may well be correct. I'm sure there are members who know a heckuva lot more about this than a lubber like me.

I believe when a cruise ship docks in a port there is a blanket VISA for its passenger list.The local government may not want too many people(two ships worth) out in town.It could potentially overwhelm the local area.Large ships have a strict schedule to keep.Docking permits,tugboat contracts and resupplies are all considered.Even tides on a deep draft vessel could cause a ship from docking for a couple of days til it can be scheduled.When a ships captain makes a decession to not let passengers off for a couple of hours it may be to save days later.....

BOATMAN
John