Last night ABC News aired a one hour special on 20/20 following the Triumph cruise ship fire.
In the video below, you will hear from passengers on the "cruise from hell" talk about their experiences, and see the Carnival marketing and PR people run away from ABC’s cameras.
I answered a few questions, and explained
The long tortuous tow back to Mobile ended last night with smiles of relief on the faces of the over-3,000-passengers as they straggled off the stinking stricken Triumph. It was a happy sight to me. Yes, there were people still upset, understandably so, but the sentiment seems to be that they had all encountered a
Today CNN asked me to write an opinion piece regarding the state of affairs of the cruise industry following the fire aboard the Carnival Triumph. CNN permits only the first 150 words of the article to be published so here you go:
Editor’s note: James M. Walker is a maritime lawyer and cruise safety
At this moment the 210 foot Coast Guard cutter Vigorous is escorting the disabled Carnival Triumph back to the U.S. The Coast Guard performs a remarkable job responding to emergencies such as cruise ship fires and the numerous helicopter medevacs involving ill or injured passengers who need medical treatment back here in the U.S.
But
Yesterday all of the major news stations were airing updates on the latest Carnival cruise ship fire. "Cruise from hell, "nightmare cruise" and so forth were the headlines.
It was like deja vu hearing the stories of loss of power, no air conditioning, hot cabins, cold food and toilets on the Triumph that did not work.
When the news broke that the Carnival Triumph’s engines failed due to a fire while the cruise ship was 150 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, passengers on prior cruises quickly began voicing their concerns about propulsion problems on prior cruises.
You can read the comments to our article on Sunday entitled Here We
It has been a brutal week for the cruise industry. Consider the developments over the last week:
A 24 year old dancer from Massachusetts died aboard the Seven Seas Voyager. Her body was found when the cruise ship docked in Australia.
Two passengers went overboard from MSC cruise ships in the last couple of
This morning, the Carnival Triumph lost propulsion in the Gulf of Mexico after an engine room fire disabled its main engines. The cruise ship’s fire suppression system kept the fire from spreading.
No injuries have been disclosed. Carnival says that all guests will receive a full refund and transportation expenses.
The next cruise scheduled is
.jpg)
Following the Costa Concordia disaster last year, the Cruise Line International Organization (CLIA) announced 10 new safety proposals that all of the cruise lines were suppose to follow.
One proposal was that cruise lines would no longer load crew members in the lifeboats during safety drills. Instead, cruise lines were suppose to lower the lifeboats
Cruise Law News received a message late Saturday night indicating that a passenger went overboard from the MSC Fantasia. Here’s the message:
MSC Fantasia is in first day of a Carnival cruise. It embarked 4000 drunk pax today in Santos, Brazil and around 7 PM, the time to leave the port, we had one
A reader of Cruise Law news has alerted me to another person going overboard from a cruise ship.
A newspaper in Italy states that a Portuguese man, 46 years old, was found dead off of the coast of Corsica. He was sailing as a passenger on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean sea when he went
Governor Parnell and the pro-cruise pollution legislators in Alaska have some new talking points in their efforts to weaken the cruise line waste water restrictions. They say that its not the cruise sewage that will harm the state’s image but their opponents’ "hype" that easing the standards will result in "dirty water and terrible discharges."
.jpg)
Last September Carnival won its first battle arising out of the January 2012 Costa Concordia disaster when U.S. District Court judge Robin Rosenbaum held that the lawsuits against Carnival should be filed in Italy.
In that case, a thousand businesses on the island of Giglio where the Concordia cruise ship ran aground near the harbor tried
.jpg)
A year ago. Cruise Law News was the first one in the U.S. to report that a Royal Caribbean crew member, Fabian Zanzi, claimed that movie celebrity John Travolta sexually harassed and assaulted him during a cruise. We had first heard of the alleged incident several years ago from a crew member client who worked
The news reports out of Mexico are shocking.
Six women from Spain vacationing in Acapulco were bound and raped by a gang of five men who burst into their holiday rental. Their male friends were gagged and bound by telephone cords and robbed.
One news source said the mayor of Acapulco did not help matters
In 2006, Alaskan citizens sent a clear message to the cruise industry that cruise ships could not treat the beautiful waters of Alaska like a toilet.
Seven years ago Alaskan voters approved legislation that prohibited cruise ships from discharging "untreated sewage, treated sewage, graywater or other wastewaters in a manner that violates any applicable
The Associated Press reports that cruise giant Royal Caribbean lost $392.8 million in the fourth quarter because of losses associated with its Spanish cruise line, Pullmantur.
The AP states that Royal Caribbean wrote down $413,900,000 due to a substantial drop in bookings and prices in Spain following the Spanish government’s austerity measures. Royal Caribbean also
The Smart Planet blog has an interesting article about the effects of the ever growing cruise industry upon ports in Asia.
Entitled Hong Kong Contends with Pollution from a Growing Cruise Industry, the article reveals the extent to which cruise lines are still burning bunker fuel while not even equipping their ships with the
