With the miniseries airing on Sunday I thought I’d ask how realistic is the Poseidon Adventure? Has a large cruise ship ever capsized like that? Wouldn’t every part of the ship above the hull flood?
I’m not really much of an expert on cruise ships, cargo vessels are more my thing. But nonetheless, my answer would be:
1/ There are instances of vessels losing stability and turning turtle, and crewmembers being rescued by cutting through the hull. This happened to the m/v Rocknes in Norway last year. However the circumstances of that casualty were very unusual and it was an unusual vessel. The vessel probably capsized as a consequence of loss of ballast (due to grounding) and then shifting of a cargo of pebbles and rock (ie very heavy cargo).
2/ Cruise vessels don’t carry cargo that can shift
3/ They could suffer holing that might cause a loss of ballast and hence loss of stability. I don’t know that cruise vessels rely on temporary water ballast for stability to the same extent that cargo vessels do, because cruise vessels do not go through such major changes in mass and mass distribution as cargo vessels. No doubt a cruise vessel could suffer damage that would make it unstable, but query whether one could lose stability so fast that it would turn turtle rapidly enough to create large air pockets (as opposed to slowly enough for water to displace air as she rolls).
4/ I’ve never seen the beginning of the Poseidon Adventure, so I don’t know what they say caused the capsize.
5/ I have seen some of the middle parts of the movie where the survivors are in passenger accommodation and entertainment areas of the vessel (the ballroom etc?). These spaces are going to be in the superstructure of the vessel, which will not be watertight. So when/if the vessel rolls, these areas will all go under and be flooded. If there are going to be air pockets, they are going to be in the areas below (above, when capsized) the load line (ie the line below which everything must be waterproof). Such areas, on a cruise vessel, are going to be in the bowels of the hull, an area of tanks, machinery etc. Not ballrooms and chandeliers.
So in summary, I suppose a cruise vessel could turn turtle and have trapped air pockets in which you survive, but I don’t think the scenario would play out at all like in the movie.
Yes, everything above the hull, and possibly the Main Deck (the one approximately at the water line, well below the hull line) would probably flood.
This would actually be a bigger problem for the current crop of cruise ships than it would have been for the older ships such as portrayed in the earlier movie. There is a lot more ship above the hull line in newer ships, providing a lot more space to fill with water and drag it down. (Not that the earlier movie was particularly accurate: ships are not designed to sustain stresses in the inverted position and I suspect that a large ship turning turtle would break up pretty quickly.)
In the original, of course, the very act of cutting open the hull to pull out some survivors (that no one could know were there) would have released the pent up air sending the ship to the bottom even more quickly. If a capsized ship is not stuck on the bottom (as the USS California was following the attack on Pearl Harbor), the odds of extracting people by cutting through the hull are nil. I am given to understand that the current rollover will be attributed to a bomb, (probably piercing the hull and making any trapped air a serious plot failure).
OK, now I’m learning things.
From here:
So they do have ballast, the loss of which makes them precarious. However, I’m guessing she rolled only quite slowly, otherwise no way would all but 54 of 1600 passengers and crew have survived.
Gulp…
September 11, 1995. North Atlantic. Aboard the Queen Elizabeth II enroute from Cherbourg to New York.
"During this crossing of the Atlantic, the Queen Elizabeth II had to change course to avoid Hurricane Luis. Despite this precaution, the vessel encountered seas of 18 meters with occasional higher crests. At 0400 the Grand Lounge windows, 22 meters above the water, stove in. But this was only a precursor.
"At 0410 the rogue wave was sighted right ahead, looming out of the darkness from 220°, it looked as though the ship was heading straight for the white cliffs of Dover. The wave seemed to take ages to arrive but it was probably less than a minute before it broke with tremendous force over the bow. An incredible shudder went through the ship, followed a few minutes later by two smaller shudders. There seemed to be two waves in succession as the ship fell into the ‘hole’ behind the first one. The second wave of 28-29 m (period 13 seconds), whilst breaking, crashed over the foredeck, carrying away the forward whistle mast.
…
“Captain Warwick admits that sometimes it can be difficult to gauge the height of a wave, but in this case the crest was more or less level with the line of sight for those on the bridge, about 29 m above the surface; additionally, the officers on the bridge confirmed that it was definitely not a swell wave. The presence of extreme waves was also recorded by Canadian weather buoys moored in the area, and the maximum measured height from buoy 44141 was 30 m (98 feet.)”
the first three photos are sick…
Incorrect. Three crew were rescued from the Rocknes last year by cutting through the hull. I expect the crew in the hull closed watertight doors behind them to avoid the problem of flooding once a hole was cut.
"…There are eyewitness accounts of similarly enormous waves at sea. In 1995, the Queen Elizabeth 2 liner survived an encounter with one about 30 metres high in the North Atlantic, and six years later a similar wave smashed windows on the cruise ship Bremen in the South Atlantic and nearly sank it.
It is now widely suspected that such rogue waves, generated by wind and currents, might explain the mysterious, regular disappearance of large ships at sea. One, the German supertanker München, vanished in 1978…"
Freak Waves and the Munchen. Ugly photo…
Surely that’s an illustration, not a photo? No one could have been there to snap that one.
Admission: I did it myself while kneeling on a Costco dinghy. Watercolors, not acrylic.
yes, an artist’s rendering 