cordelli

(NEW YORK) -- The 4,229 passengers aboard a Carnival cruise ship stranded in the Gulf of Mexico after an engine room fire this weekend have only limited running water and power as they await the arrival of a tug boat that will take them to Mexico.

The Carnival Triumph is now a little more than a 100,000-ton cork, bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico without propulsion for the past 24 hours after the fire broke out Sunday morning. No one was hurt in the fire, but the ship lost power and is relying on a back-up generator as it drifts 477 miles southeast of Galveston, Texas, Carnival said in a statement.

The toilets were down (though are being brought back online) and some reports are saying the buckets the bars use for buckets of beers are being used as toilets. So if you are sailing soon may want to reconsider a beer bucket.

The ship was due back in Texas today, but once the tugs get to it it will be towed to Progreso Mexico, which till take until at least Wednesday. Passengers will be flown out after that.

That's from ABC radio by the way

LeSabre74

Eeewwwww:

...Passenger Ann Barlow told CNN Monday that while the staff was doing a good job, flooded rooms, hot, humid conditions, long lines for food and overwhelming odors were making things tough for passengers.

"It's disgusting. It's the worst thing ever," she said.

Barlow's husband, Toby, said she told him there was "sewage running down the walls and floors" with passengers being asked to defecate in bags and urinate in showers due to the lack of functioning toilets. The air conditioning is also out...
http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/12/travel...html?hpt=hp_c1

JDiver

The 101,509 ton Carnival Triumph left Galveston, Texas, Thursday 7 Feb 2013 and was expected back Monday, 11 Feb 2013, but after an engine room fire (extinguished) was left without most power and propulsion Sunday Feb 10 as it went adrift ~150 miles off the coast of Yucatán, Mexico, with 3,143 passengers and 1,086 crew members.

Originally, two seagoing tugboats were dispatched to tow the boat to Pto. Progreso, Mexico, but after drifting another 90 miles, a new decision has been made to tow the ship to Mobile, Alabama.

Each day, another cruise ship (Elation on the 10th, Legend on the 11th) has passed some food and water to the ship while it drifts, but there is no power, air conditioning or power to the cabins, and passengers are reported to be camping out, and waiting hours for food and water. The Elation also evacuated a passenger in need of dialysis to Cozumel.

8 Nov 2010, the Carnival Splendor also suffered an engine room fire, and she was towed into San Diego, California on 11 Nov 2010; supplies were flown to the shop by helicopters from the US aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Morgenthau also provided escort services and supplies.

Authorities are unsure why an engine room fire caused all loss of power in either incident, as the ships have three engines in each of two separate compartments.

YVR Cockroach

These new ships are all floating power plants that have electric engines attached and a resort hotel on top. Noted on one of the newer (Island Princess) cruise ships that there is a chief electro-mechanical engineer (or some such) in addition to a chief engineer where such a position doesn't seem to exist on an old traditional ship (e.g., Prinsendam).

I imagine the fire must have damaged some generator or maybe some electrical circuit knocking out power to the whole ship despite having two engine/generator rooms.

csufabel

I have read that this same ship limped back into port into two weeks ago as it lost propulsion and was over five hours late.

YVR Cockroach

It seems the ship has been having electrical and hence propulsion problems for two weeks/three sailings prior.

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1784167

jerseygirl

Scottie, where are you?

cordelli

Some news reports are saying the alcohol is now free.

Carnival has reserved 1,500 hotel rooms in the area for tomorrow night for when it docks so it can overnight people before getting the flights in order to get them back to texas.

TMOliver

My problem with most of the modern cruise ships/liners is not the choice of using diesel generators to supply electric power to electric 'motors" which in turn power conventional screws or pods (in a basic sense, the same power plants used by modern railroad engines). Its the failure to provide any real redundancy, separate generator room spaces isolated from each other, each capable of providing power to the ship's motors, capable of being operated in a "split plant" configuration, with similar redundant, separate design standards for the spaces where motors are located and power transmission lines.

For more than a century, naval vessels with multiple screws, no matter the type of propulsion, steam recip or turbine or diesel, have been designed in that fashion. Certainly more costly, but this fire is going to be more than costly for Carnival (although what they are offering the passengers is unacceptable, demeaning and hardly appropriate (and likely to bring clamor and lawsuits).

Imagine for a moment that this fire had occurred in mid-Atlantic (not as placid a water as the Yucatan Straits) on a repo cruise, salvage tugs days away, anda long, long, slow tow to port.

The tow to Mobile instead of Progreso? While the current (a part of what becomes the Gulf Stream after it passes between Key West and Havana) flowing North at the ship's location makes a tow into Progreso slower (and likely requiring 2 tugs of the capacity available), the "real deal" involves the cost and complexity of evacuation 3000 pax from the Yucatan. Additionally, Progreso has no local repair capability, and even Vera Cruz would be a marginanl choice. From Mobile, I suspect they'll be bused to MSY (although likely up to 50% of them came from Texas and the Southwest, many driving into Galveston, with substantial "park & cruise" facilities). Now, if Carnival attempts to bus folks to Galveston or Houston, the fit has only just begun to hit the Shan.....

TMOliver

1,500 available hotel rooms in/around Mobile? That will have to include an assortment of "NoTell Motels" and a net cast far afield....

Well, unless your flight schedules suggest more than mine, flying from Mobile (or nearby Pensacola or even not so nearby NWFlorida) to IAH or HOU will require several days worth of seats or charters. Even busing 3000 pax to MSY will create a monstrous scheduling and flight problem there, and at 50+/- per bus, a fleet of buses....

Carnival is going to have its goats in the wire and its ox in the mire, big time....

formeraa

@TMOliver, that's really eyeopening! Thanks for the detailed explanation.

It's is incredible that they are building these HUGE ships without truly redundant systems. So, it basically takes one glitch and the whole ship is down.

In addition, Carnival seems negligent if the ship has already had problems and, yet, they send it out again without complete repairs.

I loved cruising when the ships were much smaller. Now, it seems like they are just too darn big.

tcook052

Yes and while 'tis the season it's no carnival for Carnival. Wonder if they'll be forced to give up the Triumph for Lent while it's being repaired.

cordelli

They have clarified it a bit

The cruise line has reserved 1,500 hotel rooms for passengers in Mobile and New Orleans, and 20 chartered flights will transport passengers to Houston, Cahill said at a press conference

Galveston to Mobile is not an impossible drive (eight hours or so?), so anybody who drove to Galveston will probably be on a bus to Mobile at some point soon.

The flights will be from either Mobile or New Orleans

Their plan is something like this

• Overnight everybody in either Mobile or New Orleans
• Fly people to Houston the next day
• Bus those who need to get to Galveston down there on Friday
• Those who have had enough, they will have bus service to Galveston and Houston tomorrow, so they can go without the hotel overnight

It will be interesting to see what happens to the passengers who did not purchase their air travel through Carnival, if Carnival will arrange their flights, or if the passengers have to do so and put in for reimbursement.

piper28

Having been in a situation where the cruise lines ended up with us having to get off in a port other than where we were supposed to, I can only say that they're actually pretty good at organizing this type of thing. In my case it was a 3k passenger ship that ended up in Port Canaveral. While for us they encouraged us to make our own travel arrangements (which they reimbursed for), they were also working on getting everyone booked back to whereever they needed to get to if you chose not to make your own arrangements. They also then had a pretty decent setup of running buses at a regular rate to MCO - we basically got off the ship when we were ready, got on a bus, and didn't have to wait more than about 5 minutes before the bus left, even though it wasn't full. So while it sounds crazy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they can get things in place to handle stuff, especially since they have a few days of prep time (which is more than be said in my situation).

Now, admittedly MCO undoubtedly has more flights than Mobile, so that certainly helps, and there was definitely more seat availability when our incident happened, but they still were doing a pretty good job of getting people onto flights. We booked our own arrangements, and because we were having some issues finding flights with space (other than some single center seats well separated), we ended up booking first class tickets and Princess never batted an eye on the reimbursement. Of course, it probably also didn't help that those tickets actually cost significantly less than I was hearing about from a number of people getting coach tickets places. (In hindsight, that was probably a bad day for the flying elites, because I imagine there were a lot fewer upgrades available for them that day. I think half the people in the first class cabin were from our ship. There were also a few people that were a little unsettled the first time the plane banked that evening - our incident was the Crown Princess tilt, so people were kinda sensitive to leaning.)

I'm also a little skeptical of some of the reports that have been coming out. I'm sure things are pretty bad, but when people are talking about sewage running down the walls, it makes me think those are likely the ones that are just waiting to get to shore to find the nearest lawyer.

I do have to admit, I've always kinda wondered what they'd do on a ship that was *really* out there in the middle of nowhere and something like this happened. I've got to think that if that happened they'd *have* to take another ship out of service and get it out there to transfer people, but that'd be a major undertaking, would take days to get anything out there, and that's even assuming they had a large enough ship somewhere even remotely close to send out.

I try not to think about these types of things when I cruise.

piper28

My guess is they've be given the option of doing it either way. I know we had that option for the Crown tilt. (And we'd driven to NY for that cruise, so hadn't had flights.)