Photo of Jim Walker

Jim Walker

Everything the cruise lines don’t want you to know” is the motto of Cruise Law News, authored by Jim Walker.

Jim is the founding partner of Walker & O’Neill, a Miami-based maritime law firm that has represented more than 2,500 clients, including survivors who testified before Congress on cruise ship safety.

Several cruise passengers have stated that a jet flew closely over the Harmony of the Seas earlier this evening (around 5:30 P.M. Miami time). At the time of the incident, the Royal Caribbean ship was reportedly “North of Cuba but closer to the Florida Keys.”

The person who initially contacted me from the cruise ship

Cruise ships are a major source of air pollution which causes and/or contributes to a wide range of serious health problems such as respiratory ailments, lung disease, cancer and premature deaths. The pollutants from ship engines exhaust gases include sulfer oxides(SOx) as well as non-combustible particulate matter and black carbon. A video of a Carnival

The State of Alaska yesterday fined Holland America Line (HAL) around $17,000 for dumping untreated grey water from one of its cruise ships.

NPR reported that HAL’s Westerdam cruise ship was visiting the national park a year ago, on September 11, 2018, when a crew member illegally discharged grey water.  Details of the illegal dumping

A man reportedly went overboard from Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas last night, according to a passenger on the cruise ship.  His twitter account contains a graphic reference to the recovery of the overboard man’s body by a rescue boat. The passenger states that the person apparently went overboard around 3:00 a.m. last night,

A  passenger disappeared from the Sun Princess cruise ship during a five-day cruise to Okinawa, Japan after from the port of Keelung in Taiwan on Wednesday, August 7, 2019.

The forty-one year old woman was reportedly traveling with her mother and aunt, according to the Focus Media News Channel.

The article does not state

Numerous news sources are reporting that the Carnival Fantasy failed a recent sanitation inspection (on July 17, 2019) by the United States Public Health. The USPH gave the ship a score of just 77.

This is the lowest sanitation score in the nearly thirty year history of this particular Carnival ship. The Carnival Fantasy failed

Today a video taken by a passenger from the Disney Fantasy cruise ship was posted on Twitter. It shows a dummy tethered to a rope being dropped over the railing of a passenger balcony at the stern of the Disney ship, violently twisting at the end of the rope, and then being slowly pulled back

A violent brawl broke out on P&O’s Britannia last night as the ship was sailing from Bergen, Norway to Southampton.  A Chief Correspondent of ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Richard Gaisford, tweeted about the melee which occurred as the Britannia cruise ship was returning to the UK following a one week cruise to ports in

Today the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeal published an opinion in a case where a group of passengers reportedly gang raped a heavily intoxicated minor aboard Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas.

A Christmas Nightmare

In December of 2015, the day before Christmas, the girl (age 15) in question boarded the Oasis of the

Four years ago today, Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas caught on fire as it approached the port of Falmouth, Jamaica. A former Royal Caribbean crew member, Kevin Chambers who lives near Falmouth, and who we previously represented, videotaped the blaze. The video below has been viewed on Facebook over 1,200,000 times.

https://www.facebook.com/cruiselawnews/videos/880933585288232/

When

A little over a month ago, the MSC Opera cruise ship smashed into a dock and another smaller, cruise ship which was disembarking tourists in Venice.

Videos of the huge, out-of-control cruise ship, smashing into the dock and knocking tourists from the little ship in front of it into the water, looked like an attack-of-the-aliens