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Too Big to Sail? Cruise Ships Face Scrutiny
Peter W. Cross for The New York Times
Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas has 2,706 rooms, as well as a shopping mall, a casino and a water park.
By JAD MOUAWAD
Published: October 27, 2013
One of the largest cruise ships in 1985 was the 46,000-ton Carnival
Holiday. Ten years ago, the biggest, the Queen Mary 2, was three times
as large. Today’s record holders are two 225,000-ton ships whose
displacement, a measure of a ship’s weight, is about the same as that of
a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.
Multimedia
Italian Guardia di Finanza, via Reuters
The Costa Concordia, owned by the Carnival
Corporation, capsized off the coast of Italy last year, killing 32
people.
Cruise ships keep growing bigger, and more popular. The Cruise Lines
International Association said that last year its North American cruise
line members carried about 17 million passengers, up from seven million
in 2000. But the expansion in ship size is worrying safety experts,
lawmakers and regulators, who are pushing for more accountability,
saying the supersize craze is fraught with potential peril for
passengers and crew.
“Cruise ships operate in a void from the standpoint of oversight and
enforcement,” said James E. Hall, a safety management consultant and the
chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board between 1994 and
2001. “The industry has been very fortunate until now.”
The perils were most visible last year when the Costa Concordia,
owned by the Carnival Corporation, which is based in Miami, capsized
off the coast of Italy. The accident killed 32 people and revealed fatal
lapses in safety and emergency procedures.
In February, a fire crippled the Carnival Triumph,
stranding thousands without power for four days in the Gulf of Mexico
until the ship was towed to shore. Another blaze forced Royal
Caribbean’s Grandeur of the Seas to a port in the Bahamas in May. Pictures showed the ship’s stern blackened by flames and smoke.
Although most have not resulted in any casualties, the string of
accidents and fires has heightened concerns about the ability of
megaships to handle emergencies or large-scale evacuations at sea.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, introduced legislation this summer that would strengthen federal oversight of cruise lines’ safety procedures and consumer protections.
Cruise operators point out that bigger ships have more fire safety
equipment, and contend they are safer. After a fire aboard the Carnival
Splendor three years ago, Carnival adopted new training procedures and
added safety features that it says helped with the rapid detection and
suppression of the fire on the Triumph.
After the Triumph fire, Carnival also announced it would spend $700 million
to improve its safety operations, including $300 million on its fleet
of 24 Carnival Cruise Lines ships. Carnival is the largest cruise
operator, owning about half of all cruise ships worldwide.
“We have over time improved the safety of our vessels by better training
and better technology and learning from incidents that have happened
over the years,” said Mark Jackson, Carnival’s vice president for
technical operations, who joined the company in January after 24 years
with the Coast Guard.
Some experts doubt that ships can grow much larger than the current
behemoths, marvels of naval engineering that combine the latest
technology and entertainment. Today’s biggest ship, Royal Caribbean’s
Allure of the Seas, has 2,706 rooms, 16 decks, 22 restaurants, 20 bars
and 10 hot tubs, as well as a shopping mall, a casino, a water park, a
half-mile track, a zip line, mini golf and Broadway-style live shows. It
can accommodate nearly 6,300 passengers and 2,394 crew members — the
equivalent of a small town towering over the clear blue waters of the
Caribbean Sea. It measures 1,188 feet long. Its sister ship, the Oasis
of the Seas, is two inches shorter.
Experts point out that larger ships have larger challenges. For
instance, they have fewer options in an emergency, said Michael Bruno,
dean of the engineering school at the Stevens Institute of Technology in
Hoboken, N.J., and former chairman of the National Research Council’s
Marine Board.
“Given the size of today’s ships, any problem immediately becomes a very
big problem,” he said. “I sometimes worry about the options that are
available.”
A recent report by
the Coast Guard on the Splendor fire revealed glaring problems with the
crew’s firefighting abilities as well as failures in fire safety
equipment.
The investigation did not address the size of the ship, which carried
3,299 passengers. But it showed that big vessels can quickly become
crippled by small fires that disable complex systems. No passengers were
hurt, but the damage to the engine room was severe, disabling the
ship’s power and forcing it to be towed to port in San Diego.
The investigation found a wide range of problems with the engine’s
maintenance history as well as missing fire safety records. No fire
drills had been conducted in the engine room for six months. Emergency
sprinklers were turned off by mistake and then doused the wrong parts of
the engine room. Believing the fire had been contained, the captain
vented the engine room to clear out the smoke. He reignited the fire
instead.
These incidents have brought new attention to the behavior of cruise
operators. Rear Adm. Joseph Servidio, the Coast Guard’s assistant
commandant for prevention policy, said at a Senate hearing in July that
the three fires, including the one aboard the Splendor, “highlight
serious questions about the design, maintenance and operation of fire
safety equipment on board these vessels, as well as their companies’
safety management cultures.”
In July, the Coast Guard said cruise ships would need to conduct periodic engine-room fire drills.
The risks of building bigger ships became apparent over a decade ago, as
cruise companies pushed the limits of naval architecture. The head of
the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency in
charge of marine regulations, warned in 2000 of the growing hazards of
building larger ships and called for a comprehensive review of safety
rules, known as Safety of Life at Sea, or Solas. William O’Neil, the
group’s secretary general at the time, said the industry could not “rely
on luck holding indefinitely.”
One result was a set of new global regulations in 2010 called the Safe
Return to Port rules. Those require new ships to have sufficient
redundant systems, including power and steerage, to allow them to return
to port even in the worst emergency. Only about 10 ships built since
then comply with this new rule.
“The idea is that a ship is its own best lifeboat,” said John Hicks, the
vice president for global passenger ships at Lloyds Register, the
largest ship classification society. “The idea is to do everything to
keep the crew and passengers on a vessel.”
Bud Darr, the senior vice president for technical and regulatory affairs
at the Cruise Lines International Association, the industry’s trade
group, said today’s ships operated under layers of oversight.
The Coast Guard inspects each ship that calls at United States ports at
least once a year and enforces national and international norms. Private
auditors, hired by cruise operators, perform frequent safety reviews,
including comprehensive annual checks that last seven to 10 days, he
said, and flag countries like the Bahamas or Panama, where most cruise
ships are registered, provide their own oversight.
“We are subject to very close scrutiny,” Mr. Darr said. “The standards are universal.”
But incidents like the Costa Concordia grounding have raised questions
about whether evacuation regulations are still applicable in the age of
megaships. Under the Solas regulations, for instance, passengers grouped
at their muster stations must be able to evacuate on lifeboats within
30 minutes of an evacuation alarm.
The investigation into the Costa Concordia revealed that the crew and
its captain failed to sound the general evacuation alarm for more than
an hour after rocks had breached the hull. As a result, some lifeboats
could not be lowered once the ship started to list.
After the accident, cruise operators said they would change muster drill
procedures. Instead of holding a drill for passengers within 24 hours
of departure, cruise ships said they would do so before ships leave a
port.
While ships are becoming bigger, the burden on crew members is growing.
The Queen Elizabeth 2, which was launched in 1969, had one crew member
for about 1.8 passengers. On the Triumph, the ratio was one crew member
for every 2.8 passengers. The issue is also complicated by language and
communication problems, and a high crew turnover rate that can reach 35
percent a year.
The International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents
seafarers and crew members, has expressed concerns about the evacuation
time and suggested the need to limit the number of people aboard ships,
depending on where they operate and what search-and-rescue facilities
are available.
“Experience has cast doubt on the adequacy of existing lifesaving
appliances,” the group said in a report. “The current equipment,
especially lifeboats and life rafts, has proved to be inadequate when
confronted with high sea states.”
Safety rules also state that lifeboats should not carry more than 150
people. But the two largest ships, the Allure of the Seas and the Oasis
of the Seas, have much bigger lifeboats, for 370 people, because of a
provision of the 2010 rules that allows for exemptions if the cruise
line can demonstrate an equivalent level of safety.
Those bigger lifeboats have only enough room for passengers. To evacuate
the more than 2,300 crew members, the ships are equipped with
inflatable rafts that would have to be entered through 59-foot
evacuation chutes.
“The simple problem is they are building them too big and putting too
many people aboard,” said Capt. William H. Doherty, a former safety
manager for Norwegian Cruise Lines, the world’s third-largest cruise
operator, and now the director of maritime relations at the Nexus
Consulting Group. “My answer is they probably exceeded the point of
manageability.”
He added, “The magnitude of the problem is much bigger than the cruise industry wants to acknowledge.”
Too Big to Sail? Cruise Ships Face Scrutiny
By JAD MOUAWAD | The New York Times – 7 hours ago- Associated Press/Miami Herald, Patrick Farrell - The Royal Caribbean cruise ship Allure of the Seas is seen as it pulls into Port Everglades in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Thursday, Nov. 11, 2010. Allure of the Seas
Related Content
View PhotoThe capsized cruise liner Costa Concordia lies on its side during the "parbuckling" operation next to Giglio Island September 17, 2013. REUTERS/Tony Gentile (ITALY - Tags: DISASTER MARITIME)
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Cruise ships keep growing bigger, and more popular. The Cruise Lines International Association said that last year its North American cruise line members carried about 17 million passengers, up from seven million in 2000. But the expansion in ship size is worrying safety experts, lawmakers and regulators, who are pushing for more accountability, saying the supersize craze is fraught with potential peril for passengers and crew.
“Cruise ships operate in a void from the standpoint of oversight and enforcement,” said James E. Hall, a safety management consultant and the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board between 1994 and 2001. “The industry has been very fortunate until now.”
The perils were most visible last year when the Costa Concordia, owned by the Carnival Corporation, which is based in Miami, capsized off the coast of Italy. The accident killed 32 people and revealed fatal lapses in safety and emergency procedures.
In February, a fire crippled the Carnival Triumph, stranding thousands without power for four days in the Gulf of Mexico until the ship was towed to shore. Another blaze forced Royal Caribbean’s Grandeur of the Seas to a port in the Bahamas in May. Pictures showed the ship’s stern blackened by flames and smoke.
Although most have not resulted in any casualties, the string of accidents and fires has heightened concerns about the ability of megaships to handle emergencies or large-scale evacuations at sea. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, introduced legislation this summer that would strengthen federal oversight of cruise lines’ safety procedures and consumer protections.
Cruise operators point out that bigger ships have more fire safety equipment, and contend they are safer. After a fire aboard the Carnival Splendor three years ago, Carnival adopted new training procedures and added safety features that it says helped with the rapid detection and suppression of the fire on the Triumph.
After the Triumph fire, Carnival also announced it would spend $700 million to improve its safety operations, including $300 million on its fleet of 24 Carnival Cruise Lines ships. Carnival is the largest cruise operator, owning about half of all cruise ships worldwide.
“We have over time improved the safety of our vessels by better training and better technology and learning from incidents that have happened over the years,” said Mark Jackson, Carnival’s vice president for technical operations, who joined the company in January after 24 years with the Coast Guard.
Some experts doubt that ships can grow much larger than the current behemoths, marvels of naval engineering that combine the latest technology and entertainment. Today’s biggest ship, Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas, has 2,706 rooms, 16 decks, 22 restaurants, 20 bars and 10 hot tubs, as well as a shopping mall, a casino, a water park, a half-mile track, a zip line, mini golf and Broadway-style live shows. It can accommodate nearly 6,300 passengers and 2,394 crew members — the equivalent of a small town towering over the clear blue waters of the Caribbean Sea. It measures 1,188 feet long. Its sister ship, the Oasis of the Seas, is two inches shorter.
Experts point out that larger ships have larger challenges. For instance, they have fewer options in an emergency, said Michael Bruno, dean of the engineering school at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and former chairman of the National Research Council’s Marine Board.
“Given the size of today’s ships, any problem immediately becomes a very big problem,” he said. “I sometimes worry about the options that are available.”
A recent report by the Coast Guard on the Splendor fire revealed glaring problems with the crew’s firefighting abilities as well as failures in fire safety equipment.
The investigation did not address the size of the ship, which carried 3,299 passengers. But it showed that big vessels can quickly become crippled by small fires that disable complex systems. No passengers were hurt, but the damage to the engine room was severe, disabling the ship’s power and forcing it to be towed to port in San Diego.
The investigation found a wide range of problems with the engine’s maintenance history as well as missing fire safety records. No fire drills had been conducted in the engine room for six months. Emergency sprinklers were turned off by mistake and then doused the wrong parts of the engine room. Believing the fire had been contained, the captain vented the engine room to clear out the smoke. He reignited the fire instead.
These incidents have brought new attention to the behavior of cruise operators. Rear Adm. Joseph Servidio, the Coast Guard’s assistant commandant for prevention policy, said at a Senate hearing in July that the three fires, including the one aboard the Splendor, “highlight serious questions about the design, maintenance and operation of fire safety equipment on board these vessels, as well as their companies’ safety management cultures.”
In July, the Coast Guard said cruise ships would need to conduct periodic engine-room fire drills.
The risks of building bigger ships became apparent over a decade ago, as cruise companies pushed the limits of naval architecture. The head of the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency in charge of marine regulations, warned in 2000 of the growing hazards of building larger ships and called for a comprehensive review of safety rules, known as Safety of Life at Sea, or Solas. William O’Neil, the group’s secretary general at the time, said the industry could not “rely on luck holding indefinitely.”
One result was a set of new global regulations in 2010 called the Safe Return to Port rules. Those require new ships to have sufficient redundant systems, including power and steerage, to allow them to return to port even in the worst emergency. Only about 10 ships built since then comply with this new rule.
“The idea is that a ship is its own best lifeboat,” said John Hicks, the vice president for global passenger ships at Lloyds Register, the largest ship classification society. “The idea is to do everything to keep the crew and passengers on a vessel.”
Bud Darr, the senior vice president for technical and regulatory affairs at the Cruise Lines International Association, the industry’s trade group, said today’s ships operated under layers of oversight.
The Coast Guard inspects each ship that calls at United States ports at least once a year and enforces national and international norms. Private auditors, hired by cruise operators, perform frequent safety reviews, including comprehensive annual checks that last seven to 10 days, he said, and flag countries like the Bahamas or Panama, where most cruise ships are registered, provide their own oversight.
“We are subject to very close scrutiny,” Mr. Darr said. “The standards are universal.”
But incidents like the Costa Concordia grounding have raised questions about whether evacuation regulations are still applicable in the age of megaships. Under the Solas regulations, for instance, passengers grouped at their muster stations must be able to evacuate on lifeboats within 30 minutes of an evacuation alarm.
The investigation into the Costa Concordia revealed that the crew and its captain failed to sound the general evacuation alarm for more than an hour after rocks had breached the hull. As a result, some lifeboats could not be lowered once the ship started to list.
After the accident, cruise operators said they would change muster drill procedures. Instead of holding a drill for passengers within 24 hours of departure, cruise ships said they would do so before ships leave a port.
While ships are becoming bigger, the burden on crew members is growing. The Queen Elizabeth 2, which was launched in 1969, had one crew member for about 1.8 passengers. On the Triumph, the ratio was one crew member for every 2.8 passengers. The issue is also complicated by language and communication problems, and a high crew turnover rate that can reach 35 percent a year.
The International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents seafarers and crew members, has expressed concerns about the evacuation time and suggested the need to limit the number of people aboard ships, depending on where they operate and what search-and-rescue facilities are available.
“Experience has cast doubt on the adequacy of existing lifesaving appliances,” the group said in a report. “The current equipment, especially lifeboats and life rafts, has proved to be inadequate when confronted with high sea states.”
Safety rules also state that lifeboats should not carry more than 150 people. But the two largest ships, the Allure of the Seas and the Oasis of the Seas, have much bigger lifeboats, for 370 people, because of a provision of the 2010 rules that allows for exemptions if the cruise line can demonstrate an equivalent level of safety.
Those bigger lifeboats have only enough room for passengers. To evacuate the more than 2,300 crew members, the ships are equipped with inflatable rafts that would have to be entered through 59-foot evacuation chutes.
“The simple problem is they are building them too big and putting too many people aboard,” said Capt. William H. Doherty, a former safety manager for Norwegian Cruise Lines, the world’s third-largest cruise operator, and now the director of maritime relations at the Nexus Consulting Group. “My answer is they probably exceeded the point of manageability.”
He added, “The magnitude of the problem is much bigger than the cruise industry wants to acknowledge.”
New Carnival nightmare: Passengers being flown home from troubled cruise
Published March 14, 2013
FoxNews.com
-
The 130,000-ton Carnival Dream, Carnival Cruise Lines' largest ship, is seen above off the coast of Monaco in October 2009. Engineers are currently working on its emergency diesel generator as arrangements are being made to fly all guests home via private charter flights and scheduled flights from St. Maarten on Thursday. (Andy Newman/Carnival Cruise Lines/HO)
Carnival officials, in a statement to FoxNews.com, said the ship has a "technical issue" with its backup emergency diesel generator that is currently being worked on by its engineering team.
“Yesterday, during regularly scheduled testing of the ship’s emergency diesel generator, a malfunction occurred,” the statement read. “At no time did the ship lose power and the ship’s propulsion systems and primary power source was not impacted. The ship is at dock in St. Maarten. All guests are safe and comfortable. There were periodic interruptions to elevators and restroom services for a few hours last night. However, all hotel systems are functioning normally and have been functional since approximately 12:30 a.m.”
Approximately 4,300 passengers and roughly 1,100 crew members were aboard the ship, a Carnival spokesman told FoxNews.com.
A U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman in Miami told the Associated Press Thursday that Carnival Dream's captain reported possible trouble with the ship's propulsion system. Petty Officer Sabrina Laberdesque said the ship has sewage and power and officials are working to correct the problems. She says the Coast Guard is not involved because the ship is moored.
Carnival officials said in a statement that they “can confirm only one public restroom was taken offline for cleaning based on toilet overflow and there was a total of one request for cleaning of a guest cabin bathroom. Aside from that there have been no reports of issues on board with overflowing toilets or sewage."
As engineers work on the technical issue, arrangements are being made to fly all guests home via private charter flights and scheduled flights from St. Maarten. Passengers will receive a refund equivalent to three days of the voyage and 50 percent off a future cruise, Carnival officials said.
The ship’s next voyage, scheduled for Saturday, has also been canceled. Guests scheduled to sail on that cruise will receive a full refund and 25 percent off a future seven-day cruise. Any non-refundable transportation related expenses will also be reimbursed.
Multiple passengers aboard the Carnival Dream told CNN.com of the unpleasant unfolding situation while docked in port at Philipsburg, St. Maarten.
"We are not allowed off of the boat despite the fact that we have no way to use the restrooms on board," Jonathan Evans of Reidsville, N.C., said in an email early Thursday. "The cruise director is giving passengers very limited information and tons of empty promises. What was supposed to take an hour has turned into seven-plus hours."
Gregg Stark, who is traveling aboard the 1,004-foot liner with his wife and two children, said “human waste” was found on the floor of some of the ship’s bathrooms and that some toilets had overflowed. The ship also had mechanical issues, he said.
"The elevators have not been working,” Stark told CNN. “They've been turning them on and off, on and off."
Several passengers told The Associated Press, however, that power and water were out for just 10-20 minutes on Wednesday evening, contradicting 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, N.C., after disembarking with her boyfriend to spend the day in St. Maarten.
Mary and Terry Washington of Tampa, Florida, said the generator malfunction gave them an additional day to spend in St. Maarten.
"The plumbing is fine," Mary Washington said. "The food is fine. Everything is fine."
Ship officials announced over the liner’s public address system that they were trying to fix the problem and were working on the generators. A few hours later, another announcement was made, saying the problem was worse than expected, Stark said.
The Dream had been scheduled to leave port at about 5 p.m. ET Wednesday after sailing from Port Canaveral on Saturday.
Vance Gulliksen, a Carnival spokesman, told CNN late Wednesday he wasn't aware of a problem. In a message posted on its Facebook page later Thursday, Carnival said there were brief interruptions to elevators and toilets Wednesday night.
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Carnival Corp. following last month’s fire in an engine room that crippled the Carnival Triumph, leaving more than 4,200 passengers without power or working toilets for five days.
A Coast Guard official said a leak in a fuel oil return line caused the fire that disabled the massive 14-story vessel.
Cruise industry expert Andrew Coggins, a former Navy commander who is now a professor at Pace University in New York, said the fire could potentially have been serious.
"The problem is the oil's under pressure," he told the Associated Press. "What happens in the case of a fuel oil leak where you have a fire like that is it leaks in such a way that it sprays out in a mist. In the engine room you have many hot surfaces, so once the mist hits a hot surface it will flash into flame."
Carnival's latest incident, meanwhile, highlights the "inherent vulnerabilities" of taking a cruise, Miami-based maritime attorney Robert Peltz told FoxNews.com.
"Fortunately this latest incident occurred close to a port, but it does underscore the inherent vulnerabilities of cruise ship travel," Peltz said in a statement. "When a ship loses power while at sea, its passengers and crew are at severe risk for injury or death. Far too often, ships left without power are left at the mercy of unstable currents and unpredictable weather. The cruise industry needs to go beyond lip service and take meaningful steps to ensure this dangerous problem does not continue to keep occurring."
FoxNews.com's Joshua Rhett Miller contributed to this report.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/03/14/power-outages-overflowing-toilets-reportedly-plague-another-carnival-cruise/#ixzz2PWgPjokf
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Passengers suing Carnival over crippled cruise seek $5,000 a month for life
FoxNews.com
-
Feb. 14, 2013: In this file photo the cruise ship Carnival Triumph is towed into Mobile Bay near Dauphin Island, Ala. (AP)
The case stems from the February 2013 incident when a fire broke out in the ship's engine room during a four-day cruise, leaving the ship without engine power and most of its electricity, forcing passengers to endure human waste running down hallways, limited water supplies, noxious odors and extreme heat.
After about five days in the Gulf of Mexico, the ship was finally towed to Mobile, Ala., and Carnival sought to make amends by offering each passenger a $500 check, a voucher for a future cruise, refunds of most on-board expenses and reimbursement for transportation, parking and other expenses.
Many of the 33 passengers involved in the trial complain of lingering emotional issues such as PTSD, anxiety and depression; some have physical ailments they blame on squalid conditions, including leg pain, diarrhea, upper respiratory problems and even aggravated hemorrhoids.
Most of the passengers are seeking $5,000 in damages a year from Carnival for the rest of their lives, claiming they will need continuous medical monitoring because of what happened aboard ship. They want the money in lump sums based on government tables estimating their life expectancies.
One of the plaintiffs, Debra Oubre, 59, told Reuters she has experienced panic and anxiety attacks since the cruise, and also blames the voyage for a urinary tract infection.
"It was chaotic. People were in dire need of help," Oubre said. "We were standing in line for food for five hours."
In a statement to Reuters, Carnival Corp. said that while it recognizes its guests experienced uncomfortable conditions, all passengers returned safely and were provided with a full refund.
"This is an opportunistic lawsuit brought by plaintiff's counsel and plaintiffs who seek to make a money grab," a company spokeswoman said.
Carnival attorney Curtis Mase has asked Senior U.S. District Judge Donald Graham to reject all of the damage claims. In court papers, Mase said the passengers either haven't proved their health issues are linked to the Triumph cruise or haven't shown they suffer from any lingering problems at all.
The passengers, Mase wrote, "are not entitled to damages simply for experiencing the conditions on the vessel." And, he added, "they failed to prove that Carnival's conduct was the legal cause of the injury."
Judge Graham, who is hearing the case without a jury, has ruled that passengers cannot collect punitive damages and may only get damages for past and future medical costs that are conclusively linked to what happened on the Triumph.
Reuters reported that Graham already dealt a major blow to the cruise line by ruling that the engine catching on fire is proof alone of negligence on Carnival's part.
"It would seem rather obvious that ships shouldn't just catch fire and then have fire suppression systems that don't work," Robert Peltz, a Miami maritime lawyer, told the news agency.
After the cruise, Carnival announced a $300 million program to add emergency generators, upgrade fire safety and improve engine rooms on all 24 of its ships. The cruise line also said it would repay the U.S. government an unspecified amount for the costs to taxpayers of responses to disabling accidents on the Triumph and a previous disabled ship, the Splendor.
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