My wife asked that question earlier this evening and I WAGged an answer ('cause I’m that kind of guy). With all the misery the Carnival Triumph’s passengers are enduring, why can’t Carnival or other authorities take the passengers off the ship and transport them to port via a means that doesn’t take days?
My WAG was that a cruise ship carries a LOT of people and that moving 4000 people would be difficult. Carnival has many other cruise liners, but they’re all busy with their own itineraries and are not available. So, unless the navy has an aircraft carrier nearby, what would be large enough to withstand the sudden arrival of more than 4000 unhappy people?
However, that begs the question, what if the ship were unsafe and the people had to leave? Obviously, the ship is carrying lifeboats that can carry all of the passengers and crew. However, once the loaded lifeboats are launched, where do they go? Would they convoy to a port? How far can they go with crowded, possibly seasick, passengers?
Finally, do cruise lines carry insurance for this sort of thing? Will insurance pay all of the refunds, etc., that Carnival is incurring, or is Carnival eating the loss all on its own?
Our company happens to have ships in the Gulf that regularly transfer personnel to and from shore on a regular rotation. Usually it’s less than a half dozen people at a time each way.
It’s not easy, and it’s not safe.
There are generally 2 methods - helicopter and chase vessels. Neither holds that many passengers. Coordinating the flotilla of necessary vessels would take longer to set up than towing the cruise ship.
As for transfers to bigger vessels, to get enough capacity, we’d need to disrupt regular Gulf business for some boats at a cost of millions a day in lost revenues. Worse, they’re not set up for even a hundred passengers, much less 4000. That’s what cruise ships are for, after all. I guess it’d only be for a day or so, but that’s still a crowding/plumbing problem now spread to other boats and also health/safety issues since working boats aren’t set up to be passenger friendly = multiple injuries and accidents.
Worse yet, transfers between large boats aren’t easy (small flotilla of smaller vessels again or some rigged up solution). That’s more chances for injury and mishap.
This. I was talking with my father (Navy vet) and he said transfering passengers is the absolute option of last resort. He described running a line from ship to ship and sending passengers across it in a cage one by one. Dangerous & time consuming. The alternative would be to launch all the life boats and have them picked up by another ship, but that’s also very risky (obviously it’s safer than staying on a sinking ship). So far nobody’s died, but he was very clear that with that many people (especially civilians) there would be fatalities.
Yes, and if the Capt ordered the passengers to the lifeboats and launched them, but without declaring an official MAYDAY, no ship would be legally bound to render aid. And considering the expense & legal nightmare, no ship *would *respond! Not to mention that the Capt, having unnecessarily endangered his passengers by setting them adrift in lifeboats, would probably be looking at not just the end of his career, but jail time!
Who knows until an official report comes out, but this is simply something that should not have happened. The diesel APUs on a cruise ship are mission critical and should have redundant systems far enough away from each other as to make it very unlikely for them to all fail.
You’d need more than one aircraft carrier to board an additional 4,000 people. Aircraft Carriers are not great big floating empty boxes. They already have a few thousand people each and they’re crowded as it is now.
I agree this should not of happened. Shows a disreguard for failure.
I have missed just what happened. All I know is an engineroom fire. All I canthink of is that the main electrical buss had to be damaged and takenout. some of the cruise ships do not have a hotel load buss and everything is run from the main buss. That is the main motors and all the auxilary equipment. Any lighting that is now working is probably coming from an emergency generator through an emeergency buss. I can see tieing it all together for normal operation but the main motors buss should be able to be seperated from the hotel (house) bus and auxillary equipment buss. cost a little more to build but what is this going to cast the cruise co.
Oh by the way I was in a life boat that was lowered and cast off in the middle of the ocean. Not something most passengers would want to do. And as it is not a life threatening emergency the cruise company would have to contract with the pick up ship.
This thing about transferring passengers at sea being dangerous bothers me. I recently (as in three weeks ago) was on the Carnival Magic. The port of Belize City was a tendered port. The Magic and other ships anchored off-shore and smaller boats from Belize came to gather passengers and bring them ashore. Moving from the lower gangway to the tender boat did not seem to be an especially risky process, though it would have been problematic for mobility-limited passengers.
Several years ago, we were on the Rhapsody of the Seas (Royal Caribbean). Georgetown, Grand Cayman was a tendered port. In this case, two of the lifeboats were launched and passengers boarded them at the lower gangway. We did not board them at the lifeboat embarkation point, as we might have in an emergency. Again, the process did not seem to be especially onerous. In calm seas and without a panic and the fullness of time, I don’t see what is so dangerous. However, this does not address where to take the evacuated passengers. Surely, even without power, the Triumph, or whatever ship, retains the ability to drop its anchors.
Even if it can drop anchor, I believe the anchor has to hit the seafloor to be effective, and I’m not sure the ship was in shallow enough water to do so. (and while I assume that the ship can drop anchor without power, I’m not sure it would be able to raise it without power, which might result in an interesting challenge)
It would have been problematic, at the least, if it had been on the open ocean instead of in port waters.
No doubt, the decision as to which two of the lifeboats to be launched was a bit more involved than just, “Let’s drop that one there and that one over there.” Additionally, dropping a lifeboat into the waters of a port is a bit different than dropping one while on the open ocean.
By the way, the Triumph was without its stabilizers so the ship was listing. That, of course, presents a couple of problems with deploying boats and evacuating people.
Well, there are all those [del]passengers[/del] extra people who could help turn (Drat! I can’t remember the name of the thing used to do this.) that thing ships use to weigh anchor.
The water is a lot calmer in port normally. A ship dead in the water can drop its anchors by releasing the break. But if the water is deeper thanthe lenghtof the anchor chain it will be of no use. A ship with no way on will be rocking and rolling.
I don’t think it would an insurmountable engineering task to design a ship to ship transit system. Nobody’s going to build it because there’s no practical need for it. It’s rare to have a complete engine failure on a ship of that size and the most sensible thing to do is just tow it to shore. What surprises me is the lack of backup generator(s) that would have made the wait more tolerable. They really must have bollixed up the electrical system on this one.
There are already cost-effective methods in place. The issue with those is the risk involved. You want to completely minimize the risk of transiting from one ship at sea to another? Then you’ll have to basically build the two ships into one ship and while you’re doing that, you’ll have to take into account the stresses involved in the structure. That’s going to be quite an expensive proposition, especially if you’re planning on putting that thing together while it’s at sea.
I hate to ask this, but I’m really feeling compelled to now. Are you guys aware that we’ve been talking about a ship on the ocean, not some building going up in the empty lot next-door?
Tenders can only go about 20 miles, and they’re not designed for long term uninterrupted use. They were more than 20 miles from land. Even assuming you could get them to stay calm and not trample each other during an evacuation, and further assuming that whatever system they have to release the tenders safely was unaffected by the poltergeist apparently haunting this cruise, there would still be no where to go. You’d just need a dozen tugboats to tug a dozen overcrowded, uncomfortable, too cold, too hot, getting smelly *tenders *to shore.