Feb15
The Crippled Cruise Ship
on February 15, 2013 at 7:45 amI’ve been thinking of writing a piece about how the passengers were transported back in time to when immigrants came over in steerage (or worse, were slaves chained in the hold, lying in their own filth for weeks), and still may, but Lileks has some biting criticism of the media coverage so far.
When my great grandmother came over in 1908, she knew what she was in for, she planned ahead, she had the opportunity to bring her own food and bedding, and most of all the ship had a way of getting human waste off the ship. Steerage was better because you could be prepared for it.
As to disregard for the crew, few of them are our countrymen, and this is an occuppational hazard. Most Americans don’t get a lot of vacation time and drifting about the Gulf of Mexico is a pretty lousy way to spend it. Of course the audience’s sympathy is going to be for the passengers. Have you ever seen a Titanic movie focused on the crew?
The biggest issue to me is how Carnival, and the whole industry usually gets a huge pass on these kinds of screw ups because of their cozy and corrupt relationship with the travel press. This ship has been having power failures for over six months and they never took it out of service.
What struck me about this Charlie Foxtrot was:
1) The horrible lack of redundancy. All the generators for a diesel-electric ship were in one compartment? God help them if the fire had occurred during a storm or in restricted waters.
2) Why did Carnival tow the ship all the way to Mobile with the passengers aboard? She sailed from Houston – at least go there, offload, and then take the hulk to Mobile for repair.
The original plan was to tow the ship to Progresso, Mexico, but by the time tugs had arrived the ship had drifted northward on the current and Mobile was closer. A tow-line break and rough seas further delayed her arrival.
And then the bus taking passengers from Mobile to New Orleans broke down…
Mobile closer than Progresso? That’s a couple of hundred miles of drift. I could see that if she’d been caught in the Gulf Stream, but I don’t recall that part of the Gulf having that big of a current.
Yeah, doesn’t really sound right to me either, but that’s the official line.
Sadly this isn’t the first time this has happened. There was another similar incident in 2010.
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/state&id=7775706
Stranded cruise ship towed to San Diego port
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Fortunately in that incident there was an aircraft carrier training nearby to airlift food and water to the ship.
I’ll cross-post a random musing I Facebooked this morning:
“News of the ironically-named Carnival Triumph got me to thinking about the centuries of progress in sanitation. I vaguely recall anecdotes of pre-Industrial-Era urbanites tossing their refuse off of balconies onto the street. Would the living conditions of, say, Shakespeare’s London have been closer to those of its current self, or to those of the beleaguered ocean liner?”