Read Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry Online

Authors: Ross A. Klein

Tags: #General, #Industries, #Transportation, #Hospitality; Travel & Tourism, #Travel, #Nature, #Essays & Travelogues, #Environmental Conservation & Protection, #Ships & Shipbuilding, #Business & Economics

Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry (10 page)

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•    the 1992 collision of the
Royal Pacific
with a fishing vessel, resulting in both ships sinking and the deaths of approximately 100 people

•    the 1993 collision of the
Noordam
with a freighter in the Gulf of Mexico.
5

There have also been serious near misses. In 1997 Carnival Cruise Line’s
Jubilee
barely avoided a middle-of-the-night collision with a fishing vessel off the California coast.
6
A year earlier Holland America Line’s
Statendam
narrowly missed colliding with a barge carrying 21,000 gallons of propane and palettes of dynamite in the Discovery Passage, British Columbia.
7

Ships Do Sink

In addition to the
Royal Pacific
sinking in 1992, other cruise ships have sunk. In 1998 Windjammer Cruises’ flagship,
Fantome,
sunk

as it attempted to avoid Hurricane Mitch. There were no passengers aboard but 30 crew members died. In December 1999 Premier Cruises’
Seabreeze
sank in high seas off the east coast of the United States. No passengers were aboard and all seafarers were rescued.

 

INVESTIGATIONS

Between 1980 and 1992 the US Coast Guard investigated 73 accidents involving large cruise ships. These included 13 collisions, 16 fires, 22 equipment or material failures, and 22 groundings.

 

Other ships that have gone down in recent years include: the
Sir Francis Drake,
which sunk in 1999 while moored during a hurricane; the
Sun Vista
(previously Celebrity Cruises’
Meridian),
which also in

1999 sunk off Malaysia following an engine room fire that could not be contained; New Paradise Cruises’
Romantica,
which sunk in the Mediterranean in 1997 after an engine room fire;
8
and Starlauro’s
Achille Lauro,
which went down in the Indian Ocean off the Seychelles in 1994. Only in the sinking of the
Achille Lauro
was there any loss of life: four people died and eight were injured.

Interestingly, Holland America Line’s new
Prinsendam
— previously sailing as the
Seabourn Sun
and before that as the
Royal Viking Sun
— is named after a vessel which in 1980 sunk 140 miles off the coast of Alaska following an engine room fire that necessitated a middle-of-the-night abandoning of the ship.

Who’s Responsible for Cruise Ship Safety?

In May 2001 Norwegian Cruise Line’s
Norway
was detained in Miami following a US Coast Guard inspection that found 106 leaks in the ship’s fire sprinkler system. The leaks had been temporarily patched with soft rubber, which “a fire could melt ... and the compromised pipe’s loss of pressure would threaten the entire

 

EUROPEAN COUNTRIES TARGET CRUISE SHIP SAFETY IN 2003

Under the July 2001 Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control (Paris MOU), European countries will target cruise ships in a concentrated inspection campaign beginning in May 2003.
13
The 2001 Paris MOU grew out of concerns about operational standards on passenger vessels following the release of inspection data for 2000, which indicated an 80-percent increase in operational deficiencies — including inadequate firefighting and safety equipment — over the previous four years.

The Paris MOU cited the human element as the weak link in onboard safety and emphasized that it should remain a focus of attention for port state control. Richard Schiferli, secretary of the Paris MOU, suggested that many ship owners did not pay enough attention to the interaction between "hardware" and "software"; that is, between the physical facility (the ship itself) and the workers (hired to supposedly make things run smoothly and safely).

The Paris MOU was issued after a high profile incident in which a cruise ship,
Ocean Glory I,
was detained in Dover after the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency discovered 35 deficiencies and refused permission for the ship to sail. Built in 1950, the
Ocean Glory I
was flagged in Panama and operated by Greece-based Cruise Holdings, which had the ship on long-term charter from Mediterranean Shipping Cruises. Following this incident the ship was retired rather than repaired.
14

sprinkler system.”
9
A passenger report led to the investigation; the situation had been overlooked in the ship’s semi-annual inspection just three months earlier.
10

All ships visiting American ports undergo Coast Guard inspections, and generally, serious safety problems are found. With ships that do not visit American ports, safety is left up to the cruise line.

unfortunately, safety is taken less seriously than many of us might like. The Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control (Paris MOU) is one of several regional agreements the world over between countries sharing common waters (in this case, the North Atlantic and Europe); its focus is on harmonized inspection regimes of ships to ensure compliance with international rules on safety, pollution prevention, and the living and working conditions of crew. In July 2001 Canada and the 18 European countries then party to the agreement identified cruise ship safety as a major problem, but a delay of almost two years precedes any concerted effort to deal with it.
11
Like the recent inquiry into ship safety by the International Commission on Shipping (ICONS) — the final report subtitled
Ships, Slaves and Competition
12
— the participating governments acknowledge human error as the principal cause of shipping accidents and pollution incidents.

There are two elements to the human factor. The most serious problem, identified by both ICONS and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) — a worldwide federation of transport workers’ trade unions that represents the interests of shipboard employees — is worker fatigue. Many of the people responsible for navigation of the ship simply fail to receive enough rest.

In its study entitled
Seafarer Fatigue: Wake Up to the Dangers,
based on a survey of 2,500 seafarers representing 60 nationalities and 63 flags of registration, the ITF reports two cases of officers on watch dozing off while supposedly in control of fast ferries; and one case of a grounding that occurred after deck officers had been working an average of 16 hours a day, with no opportunity for sleep longer than 3 hours. One respondent, a first officer on a cruise ship, reported that on his previous ship he had worked 12- to 15-hour days, never had 6 hours of continuous sleep, and had worked 87 hours a week for three months straight. He said he regularly made errors in passage planning and execution, and that he dared not sit down while on watch.
15
The problem of cruise line employee fatigue is addressed in greater detail in Chapter 5.

The second major problem is that cruise lines do not always follow their own operational guidelines. Investigators into the 1999 collision between the
Norwegian Dream
and the
Ever Decent
found that although NCL company policy required two officers to be on watch, only one officer was on the bridge prior to the collision. In addition, the report issued by the government of the Bahamas (the country of registry for the
Norwegian Dream)
said the single officer on watch became confused immediately before the collision, and in several areas his bridge practice fell short of the ideal. While he relied heavily on the use of radar for his anticollision work, he did few visual checks and did not make the most effective use of the radar data provided. As well, he appeared to ignore warnings of the impending collision and he was distracted by a series of clerical tasks that were his responsibility in addition to his being the only officer on the bridge.
16
It is hard to know whether the collision would have been averted had company policy been followed.

SHIP SECURITY — THE THIN VENEER OF FEELING SAFE

Aside from safety of the ship itself, there is the issue of the security of those onboard. Security involves a number of different facets, including, for one, fire safety. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has raised the issue many times during the 1990s.

Following a 1991 fire on Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s
Sovereign of the Seas,
17
the NTSB was able to effect several new safety features. However, it has not always been that successful. Its concerns about the chimney-effect presented by atriums on new cruise ships were ignored. In 1996 a fire on the
Universe Explorer
caused the deaths of 5 crew members and injuries to 67 crew and 3 passengers.
18
Two fires the following year aboard the
Vistafjord
resulted in no injuries in the first incident but one crew member died and six passengers and nine crew suffered minor injuries in the second fire.
19
Following those events, the NTSB called for fire and smoke alarms that sounded in passenger cabins rather than only on the bridge. The industry response was negative.

Five years later, in 2001, the cruise industry finally conceded and agreed to install local-sounding smoke detectors and fire alarms in passenger cabins. Considerable media attention was given to that commitment, made by the industry’s lobbyist and political spokesperson, the International Council of Cruise Lines (ICCL); however, the ICCL made no commitment as to when its promise would be fulfilled.

Among the various security issues, foremost to many people is personal safety.

Feel Secure: We Check Photo IDs of Everyone Coming Onboard

Following the events of September 11, 2001, considerable attention has been given to shipboard security. The cruise industry first confronted this issue following the hijacking by terrorists of the
Achille Lauro
in 1985. A year later, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) adopted a set of voluntary guidelines, published under the title
Measures to Prevent Unlawful Acts Against Passengers and Crews On Board Ships.

In 1987 the US Coast Guard put forth its own Voluntary Guidelines for Cruise Ship and Terminal Security, patterned after the IMO measures. By 1994 the Coast Guard had concluded that many security measures were being ignored or only partially implemented. It therefore announced plans for a set of mandatory security regulations for passenger vessels and passenger terminals.

The Coast Guard believed that cruise ships and cruise lines should maintain the highest level of security at all times and asserted that, despite the expenses associated with its proposal, the benefits would far outweigh the costs. The cruise industry opposed the guidelines on the basis that they were “too stringent and inflexible” and voiced its concerns to the American government.

Industry opposition led to a revised set of rules, implemented in 1996. The Coast Guard introduced a three-level security system, based on assessment of the risk level. At the lowest level were nine mandatory standard measures for all cruise ships homeported or calling at ports in the United States. These include denying boarding to unauthorized visitors, requiring photographic identification cards for officers and crew members, conducting metal-detector screening of all boarding passengers, randomly inspecting hand-carried baggage and ship’s stores (food and supplies loaded in port), and restricting access to the ship’s bridge, engine room, and radio room.

BOOK: Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry
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