A seventy-two year old man was reported missing on Monday morning from the Ruby Princess when it returned to port in San Francisco following a five day cruise to Mexico, according to numerous national and local news stations.
It remains unknown how the man went overboard or the circumstances which led to the incident. A spokesperson for Princess Cruises said that after staff reviewed video footage from the ship and searched the ship several times without success, it concluded that the guest probably went overboard.
The trade organization for the cruise industry, the Cruise Line International Association (CLIA), then quickly released its standard statement that all of its “careful” investigations following man overboards have always found, in every case, that the person going overboard allegedly did so either “intentionally” or “recklessly.”
This is a bold face lie. We have written about numerous incidents where passengers were thrown overboard, typically by the guest’s husband or boyfriend.
It’s a far-fetched conclusion that all four hundred and nineteen (419) people who have gone overboard in the last 25 years have either decided to end their life or acted recklessly on the cruise ship. The primarily cause of guests going overboard is excess sale and consumption of alcohol. Probably around 75% of passenger who go overboard do so after the cruise ship sells and serves them with an excessive amount of alcohol (say, 15 to 20 drinks). Yes, it may be fair to characterize drinking twenty drinks to be”reckless” but it is clearly reckless for a cruise line, particularly the “fun ship” Carnival, to serve that much booze to try and keep its onboard sales highly profitable. There is a direct relationship between excessive booze and overboard passengers (as well as violence) on cruise ships.
Suicides involving cruise ship passengers on cruise ships are relatively rare (and comprise less than 5% of overboard incidents). It is primarily cruise ship employees who decide to end their lives by jumping overboard, often due to long hours / overwork and a lack of emotional support over the course of long (six to ten months) contracts where crew members are away from their family and loved ones.
None of the news outlets which reported on this latest incident addressed the issue of why this ship did not have an automatic man overboard (MOB) system installed. Auto-MOB systems, required since 2012 by the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act (CVSSA), include the use of motion detection which automatically sends a signal to the bridge when a person goes over the ship’s rails and then tracks the person in the water using state of the art infrared and radar technology. These life-saving safety systems have been extensively tested and have been shown to effectively signal a person going overboard and then track the person in the water, even at night.
No Carnival Corporation owned cruise ships have installed such life-saving systems. To our knowledge only Disney Cruises and MSC Cruises (on one MSC ship, the MSC Meraviglia) have state-of-the-art MOB systems on their ships.
Over 250 passengers and crew members have been died at sea after going overboard from cruise ships without MOB systems since the cruise industry was require to install such systems in compliance with the CVSSA.
There have been eighteen people who have gone overboard this year from cruise ships. None of these ships had the CVSSA-required MOB systems. The last incident was five weeks ago when a guest went overboard from the Allure of the Seas which, like all other ships owned and operated by Royal Caribbean, did not have this life-saving equipment installed.
It is a shame that the cruise industry not only refuses to install life-saving equipment but always blames their guests irrespective of the true facts.
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Image credit: Man overboard – Richard Bosman Man Overboard (1981) New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA); Ruby Princess – nbcbayarea (screen grab); CLIA statement = nbcbayarea.