Rescued Passenger Kisses and Waves Goodbye to Cruise Ship
One of the stories I never tire of reporting is when a Coast Guard helicopter plucks a sick cruise passenger from the deck of a cruise ship and takes the passenger ashore for emergency medical treatment.
The skill of the U.S. Coast Guard in rescuing people from cruise ships is rather remarkable. The Coast Guard can fly 200 miles out to sea to medevac ill and injured passengers and crew. Other than England, Canada and perhaps a few other countries, you will not see anyone performing life saving heroic missions to rescue the needy on the high seas other than the U.S. Coast Guard.
Below is a video of a Coast Guard helicopter hoisting a young woman from the deck of the Explorer cruise ship as the ship returned from a Caribbean cruise. The helicopter took the passenger to a hospital in Key West.
At the end of the video, you can see the young lady in the rescue basket waving to the cruise ship, and kissing goodbye perhaps to a loved one below.
Video credit: U.S. Coast Guard
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dangers on cruise ships which the cruise industry would prefer the public not to know. Due to the ICV's hard work, last year President Obama passed the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act..jpg)
Over 95 percent of our firm's clients live out side of Florida. If you have a question about an accident on a cruise ship, send us an email. You can reach me directly: 
We will send you four documents..jpg)
in the Bahamas owned by HAL. This tragedy occurred in plain view of hundreds of people present and right near where a lifeguard SHOULD have been actively on duty.
The Crown Court in Southampton, England imposed an eight year jail sentence against a Princess Cruises bar supervisor who attempted to smuggle 1.29 kilos of cocaine with a 100 per cent purity worth £429,000, into the U.K. 
All of the cases fit into a pattern. 
When I was 15 years old and taking my first constitutional law course (yes, my parents sent me to a great prep school), I read for the first time something called the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
"It's Only A Matter of Time Before You All Get Sued"
“It’s unconstitutional, it would be unconstitutional.".jpg)
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I just returned from a three day trip to Montego Bay. .jpg)
defendant's name in a rape trial, and then argued that the disclosure of the name of the cruise line or cruise ship would somehow lead to the disclosure of the name of the defendant. (The ironic thing is that we learned the name of the crew member because another newspaper in Bermuda, the Bermuda Sun, published the crew member's name and then retracted it after we published our article.) 
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arriving in his native St. Vincent: His family lived two hours from the airport and didn't have a car; he had no idea how he'd get home. McDonald would arrive on the island on a Sunday morning. No doctor would see him for at least another day. .jpg)
pools. If they're lucky, they tend bar or wait tables. Others clean rooms and fluff pillows.
sink where he could dump and scour. Halfway to his destination, McDonald slipped. He felt nothing as the scalding liquid drained down inside the rubber boot on his right leg, but jolts of adrenalin shot through the numbness as the oil cooked his leg and the top of his foot..jpg)
about a week before performing skin graft surgery on the badly burned foot..jpg)
lawyer to regain his legal status. "It doesn't look good because of the paper I signed," he says.
Carnival settled such a case with Rivkind client Francisco Romero in August. "We had a case where a Carnival worker needed cataract surgery. He was using a Miami ophthalmologist, and the cruise line said, "No, no, we want to send him home to Honduras,'" Rivkind recounts. "The ophthalmologist in Honduras had just had a baby, and her husband was studying to be an ophthalmologist, so she just let him do the surgery." Fifty-year-old Romero, a long-time Carnival employee, lost his eye in 2000, and filed suit in June 2001. Carnival fought the suit for more than two years. "It's not enough they let this happen, when they could easily have gotten him a good surgeon in the U.S., but then they fought us tooth and nail when he tried to get compensation," Rivkind says. The settlement included a nondisclosure clause, so he can't reveal the amount Carnival paid Romero.
member is in transit and in the process they arrive in Miami to change planes and they do not make the flight, we have an obligation as a company to let INS know that a crew member has jumped ship, essentially."
This story involves Ms. Valerie King who was sailing with her husband, Tony King, on the Princess cruise ship from San Fransisco to Barbados after leaving on October 9th. Ms. King suffered a heart attack while on board the cruise ship. The ship doctor informed her that she had to disembark at the next port which was Cabo San Lucas in Mexico on October 12th.
Cruise lines need to warn passengers that if they become ill while sailing into Mexico, the local medical system is designed to suck the patients like a lime at a tequila party. 
between the passenger beds. The estimated value of the seized cocaine was $84,000. 
Miami is the melting pot of the Caribbean. It is the number one place where immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Belize and Columbia decide to live once they reach the U.S. Miami is an exciting, international and great place to live. More than 50% of the residents here are Hispanic. The dominant personality of the city is unquestionably Cuban - we have a Cuban Mayor, Cuban Judges, Cuban politicians, Cuban restaurant and shop owners. .bmp)
and 70 % of liners sailing in the region have Florida as mother port.
A excursion bus carrying cruise passengers plunged into a ravine in northern Morocco (Castillejos) today and killed nine Portuguese tourists. 14 cruise passengers were injured. 
Former child sitcom star Willie Aames recently joined the crew of an Oceania cruise ship as an assistant cruise director, according to several .jpg)
the real life woes of Willie Aames. He fell into some serious hard times, due to alcohol and drugs. The bank foreclosed on his house, his wife left him, and he became homeless. In 2008, 
hard time imagining what the cruise line's human resources department was thinking when they read his resume: Child star, drug addict, born again Christian, ordained minister, furniture builder, suicide survivor, financial advisor, and bankruptcy petitioner.
This is nothing new for CLIA, which has spent millions of dollars lobbying against reforms to this archaic law enacted back in 1920..jpg)
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animal disease spreading to the human population. Years ago, he noticed an apparent link between the locations of severe animal disease and the schedules of cruise ships. The ships were calling at ports worldwide in areas where pig disease was rife..jpg)
We know that pig effluent can contaminate the surface water and the water supply. Incidents are frequent despite the best efforts of everyone. We know that pigs can carry norovirus. 
He has enjoyed a long standing relationship with the U.S., which includes working with what is now the U.S. Sealift Command. He managed his own companies (which acted as agent for U.S. Line among others). He is a well known figure in the U.K. port and shipping business, and also wrote for newspapers about the shipping and port business. He twice sold his group of successful shipping and freight businesses, and retired from the maritime freight business while he was still in his forties. 
BP and Cruise Lines Connected At The Hip Pocket?.jpg)
The families of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen learned about DOHSA when Al Qaeda terrorists killed their loved ones on the U.S.S. Cole. 17 men and women were brutally murdered when suicide bombers rammed their speed boat loaded with explosives into the U.S. navy ship. 56 family members filed suit against the government of Sudan for sponsoring the terrorist organization. 
Gordon was just 28 years old when he died on April 20th. He left a pregnant wife and child behind. His Facebook page lists his favorite movies as Caddyshack, Blazing Saddles, and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. So you know he had a great sense of humor..jpg)
Mr. Jones' emotional grief over losing his son is overwhelming. But he is objective while explaining that DOHSA's prohibition against compensating his daughter-in-law and grandchildren is as illogical as it is unfair. He is taking steps to repeal DOHSA. Due to Mr. Jones' efforts, the Senate is considering a bill (Senate Bill 3463 introduced by Senator Leahey, and House Resolution 5503 by John Conyers) to repeal DOHSA. Both bills will permit damages for the surviving family members' loss of care, company and companionship - rather than just the dead man's earnings. 
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The article mentioned that I was one of the "big three" leading adversaries of cruise lines. This was a nice compliment, I suppose, coming from a newspaper like the Miami Herald which is a big supporter of the cruise industry.
"For lawyers interested in suing cruise lines, South Florida is the place to be..jpg)
pipe and casing into the Sahara Desert. This was big business. I remember when he came home with a vial containing a sample of the 5,000,000,000 barrel of crude oil he discovered beneath the Libyan sands..jpg)
at the photograph below of Royal Caribbean's Vision of the Seas - smoking up a port in Alaska with bunker fuel. Nasty. Nasty. Nasty. 
Technically, there is no "statute of limitations" for cruise ship injuries. Rather, there is a limitations period in the passenger ticket issued by the cruise line which contains the one year period in the "fine print." Courts have consistently enforced this limitations period..jpg)
where they boarded the cruise ship, where the cruise ship is going, or where the accident occurs. 
Do you handle only maritime cases? Yes. We handle only maritime cases involving accidents and injuries on cruise ships. We have handled high profile cases involving cruise ship fires, collisions, and sinkings. .jpg)
The Crown charged Wilhelm of manslaughter of Ms. Brimble who died on the P&O cruise ship in September 2002 after being given the illegal drug GHB, also known as fantasy or liquid ecstasy. In addition to the manslaughter charges, the Crown charged Wilhem with the lesser charge of providing an illegal substance to Ms. Brimble.
Over ten years ago, I was interviewed by Linda Coffman who has a very nice and exceedingly polite blog called 
Perhaps the idyllic and carefree perception of cruise vacations is as much to blame as anything for passenger discontent when the slightest out-of-the-ordinary incident crops up. Cruise lines tout their products as 'simply the best' and 'like no other vacation on earth.' Are they telling the truth? Absolutely. It's true--the worst day on a cruise is better than any day on land. Unless, of course, your ship is on fire, the plumbing doesn't work, or you're dead in the water with a tropical storm fast approaching. 
Take the fire aboard the Tropicale. Despite wide spread media coverage, few major news organizations reported the Tropicale’s prior problems which could be traced back to 1982 when a fire broke out during its inaugural cruise. 
After each incident of this type, the cruise lines immediately offer a reimbursement of some type and, perhaps, a free cruise. Inevitably, the story becomes old and everyone - including the cruise line - forgets about what happened, until the next collision, fire, or other mishap occurs.
Of course, the debate of a “free cruise or not” ignores the real issue of passenger safety. The important question is whether the cruise industry is devoting adequate financial resources to make their fleet as safe as possible for families and their children. Things like state of the art sprinkler systems, sophisticated security monitoring, and vigorous background checks on their employees. 
line’s legal responsibility. An example would be when cruise lines change the itinerary and the passengers miss a popular port.
seems reasonable enough. But even if the cruise lines is negligent, there is a $100 limit of liability for lost valuables, and a $500 limit if the valuables are deposited in a safe-deposit box in the purser’s office and then lost or stolen. 
the cruise line knew or should have known of the hazard, yet failed to correct the hazard or warn passengers of the danger. This is often quite difficult to establish. 
Many lawyers by-pass the negotiation stage and file suit immediately. This is not always in a passenger’s best interest. The passenger usually lives in a distant state or in Canada or Europe. All cruise lines require that the lawsuit must be filed in a certain city, such as Miami. The passengers will therefore have to travel to Miami to appear for a deposition and for trial. Over 90% of our clients live outside of Florida, and over 30% live abroad. It is expensive to travel to and from Miami, and these expenses usually cannot be recovered from the cruise line even if they are found responsible. 
One of the subscribers to this blog commented on an earlier article about the danger presented when 
"I can’t think anything I’d rather less do than go on holiday with five thousand three hundred and ninety-nine other people. Imagine the rush for the boats – or taxis – during shore excursions. Imagine the stress of finding a space by the pool. Or queuing for dinner. One may as well go to the Med and scrap with the Russians and Germans for sun loungers. No wonder people get punchy. Who wouldn’t?"
Jim Walker practices admiralty and maritime personal injury law. He has been involved in maritime litigation since 1983. Based in
