Cruise Law News : Maritime Lawyer & Attorney : James M. Walker : Walker & O'Neill Law Firm : Admiralty Law, Cruise Ship Accidents & Injuries

The popular cruise fan site Cruise Critic is reporting that the Carnival Ecstasy's return to Port Canaveral this morning was delayed due to a brief power failure last evening.  

Cruise Critic states that the Ecstasy lost power for around 12 minutes while sailing back to Port Canaveral at the end of a five-night Bahamas cruise. 

Carnival released a statement, saying that  "All hotel services and propulsion were quickly restored and the ship is currently underway on its way back to its homeport."

Carnival attributed the power outage to a "mechanical failure."

The Ecstasy is an old Fantasy class cruise ship launched in 1991. Carnival has been under criticism for neglecting maintenance on its ships.

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Photo Credit:  Wikipedia / Sparrowman980 

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WTSP in Tampa reports on the plight of the Carnival Legend cruise ship which left last Sunday from the Port of Tampa under full power but will return limping home tomorrow.

There's a problem with one of the cruise ship's two propulsion pods that is substantially reducing the Legend's speed.

Carnival canceled the ship's port stop at Grand Cayman.

Ironically, the Legend came to the aid of the fire-stricken Carnival Triumph last month. 

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With Carnival under a microscope, the cruise line continues to experience bad PR as yet another Carnival cruise ship experienced a mechanical failure.

The Chicago Tribune reports that last weekend, the Carnival Elation had to get a tugboat escort down the Mississippi River after a mechanical problem.

In the last 2 months, four of Carnival's ship suffered full or partial power failures, the Triumph, Dream, Legend and the Elation. 

It's early in the year, stay tuned.

March 16 2013 Update:  That didn't take long: Yet Another Carnival Cruise Ship Flounders - P&O Ventura Suffers Propulsion Problems
  

Photo Credit: Vacay.ca / Why You Should Say No to a Vacation Cruise 

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Cruise List broke a story today about a power outage which occurred on Holland America Line's  Statendam cruise ship last Thursday. 

The Cruise List blog explains that last Thursday evening his proprietary application which searches for cruise information on Twitter picked up a tweet about a “fuel pump explosion” that caused a “two hour Power Outage on the Statendam.”  He re-tweeted it but later deleted it when he received a direct message from the person originally tweeting the information, begging him to delete it for reasons not explained (he sounds a lot nicer than me).

Cruise List then left a post on Cruise Critic asking if anyone knew about an incident on the Statendam. Yes, several passengers responded - the cruise ship indeed "lost all power and were serving cheese sandwiches in the main dining room."

This incident seems to have passed without much consequence other than the inconvenience of cheese sandwiches. But the Statendam is almost two decades old - it is one of the older ships in the modern cruise line industry.

As the last couple of years have demonstrated, power failures on cruise ship are a very serious matter. Engine room fires and explosions which disable cruise ships, for a few hours or to the point that the ship is disabled at sea, are hardly rare. Consider these incidents in the last three years:

• The Sun Princess lost power earlier this month;
• The Costa Allegra lost all power off the coast of southern Africa earlier this year and had to be towed back to a port;
• The M/V Plancius adventure cruise ship lost power and was stranded in the South Atlantic;
• The Azamara Quest lost most of its power this year following an engine room fire near Bornea;
• The Cunard QM2 suffered what is described as a catastrophic explosion and lost power on the high seas;
• The MSC Opera lost power in the Baltic Sea, with passengers describing the ordeal as "shocking, scary, with dark hallways and backed up toilets," according to the BBC.
• The Norwegian Dawn lost power in the Caribbean; and
• The most famous recent power failure occurred aboard the Carnival Splendor. The U.S.S. Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier had to send helicopters to drop relief food to the cruise ship and a fleet of tug boats had to push and pull the Splendor to San Diego for extensive repairs.  

The cruise industry tries to keep explosions and power outages quiet, to avoid images like the Carnival Splendor cruise ship (right) stranded at sea or videos like this.  

The Statendam captain's blog mentions nothing about the power outage. I'm sure that that's not a reflection of him as much as a corporate policy prohibiting any mention of something like this.

It's important for the cruise community to keep an eye out for potential safety issues that the cruise lines would prefer you not know.

Hats off to Cruise List, which states that it "was created as a place where you could go to see what was going on aboard ships without a sales pitch." 

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A reader of Professor Ross Klein's website Cruise Junkie states that the Sun Princess cruise ship lost power for a few hours last week.

The Princess Cruises ship was apparently at the end of a 104 day "world cruise," from Sydney Australia and back.

The Incident allegedly occurred around 4:30 in the morning of Tuesday, August 27, 2012, when the cruise ship was in the Tasman Sea west of the Bay of Islands, New Zealand.  The reader states that the vessel lost all power, after a transformer had blown.  The cruise ship then floated around without any power for around three and one-half hours.  After the transformer was repaired around 8:00, the cruise ship continued sailing back to Sydney. 

Power failures like this have plagued the cruise industry over the last couple of years, with similar incidents affecting Azamara, Carnival, Costa, Cunard and Royal Caribbean ships.

Power failures during calm seas may pose nothing more than an inconvenience to the passengers, but it is a dangerous prospect if a cruise ship loses power during rough seas.

This cruise ship, built in 1995, experienced power failures in 2005 and 2007.

Anyone with more information about what happened, please leave a comment below.

Photo credit: Wikipedia / Lemeki Lenoa

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