MIAMI/ATLANTA – A Byzantine maze of maritime rules and regulations, fragmented oversight and a patchwork quilt of nations that do business with cruise lines make it tough for consumers to assess the health and safety record of the ship they are about to board in what for many is the vacation of a lifetime.
Want to know about a ship’s track record for being clean? Want to assess how sanitary the food is? It’s not that easy to find, in part because there is no one entity or country that oversees or regulates the industry with its fleet of ships that are like mini-cities floating at sea.
In the case of Carnival Cruise Lines, the owner of the Carnival Triumph that spent days in the Gulf of Mexico disabled after an engine fire, the company is incorporated in Panama, its offices are based in Miami and its ships fly under the Bahamian flag — a matrix that is not unusual in the cruise line industry.
For potential passengers seeking ship information, there’s no central database that can be viewed to determine a track record of safety or health inspections. No one agency regulates everything from the cruise line’s mechanical worthiness to the sanitation of its kitchens.
The U.S. Coast Guard inspects each cruise ship that docks in the U.S. every year for a range of issues, from operation of backup generators to the lifeboats. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains a database of recent disease outbreaks and other health inspection information for cruise ships. Had Triumph vacationers looked up information about the cruise ship through those two agencies before boarding, they would have found mostly clean marks and few red flags.
And when something does go wrong, as it did on Triumph, there are limits to how much the coast guard can investigate.
These are not new issues — they had been raised by members of Congress before the Triumph incident.
“This horrible situation involving the Carnival Triumph is just the latest example in a long string of serious and troubling incidents involving cruise ships,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who led a committee hearing on cruise safety last year.
Last year, after the Costa Concordia, also owned by Carnival Corp., ran aground off the small island of Giglio, in Italy, Rockefeller held a Commerce Committee hearing to examine deficiencies in the cruise line industry’s compliance with federal safety, security, and environmental standards and review industry regulations.
“As I remarked then, they seem to have two lives: One is at port, where the Coast Guard can monitor their operations; the other is at sea where, it appears once they are beyond 3 nautical miles from shore, the world is theirs,” Rockefeller said in letter this week to Adm. Robert J. Papp Jr., the commandant of the coast guard. “The Carnival Triumph incident only serves to further validate this view.”
The Triumph left Galveston, Texas, on Feb. 7 for a four-day cruise to Cozumel, Mexico. An engine-room fire paralyzed the ship early on Feb. 10, leaving it adrift in the Gulf of Mexico. Passengers described nightmarish conditions on board: overflowing toilets, long lines for a short supply of food, foul odors, and tent cities where vacationers slept on deck. Tugboats slowly towed the 14-story vessel to Mobile, Alabama. It arrived there late Thursday.
Before a ship like the Triumph sets sail, it is possible — but not easy — to find information about past incidents and safety or health issues. The CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program is viewable online. The database shows recent disease outbreaks aboard cruise ships and how they were addressed.
Records for the Triumph show it was last inspected July 7, 2012. It scored 96 out of 100. The CDC considers scores of 85 or lower unsatisfactory. The lowest score the ship received was an 88, in 2009.
The coast guard also has a database, known as the U.S. Coast Guard Maritime Information Exchange, with inspections and any deficiencies found aboard ships, dating to when the vessels entered service. A search on the exchange’s website for the Triumph turns up its certifications for things like passenger safety and pollution prevention as well as inspections. No violations or red flags were immediately evident. Searching a little deeper, the most recent report shows a propulsion issue from a Jan. 28 incident involving a short in a connection box of one of the ship’s generators.
On Monday, coast guard spokesman Carlos Diaz said that a leak in a fuel oil return line caused the engine-room fire that disabled the cruise ship.
Andrew Coggins, a former navy commander who was a chief engineer and is now a professor at Pace University in New York and an expert on the cruise industry, said the fire could potentially have been serious.
“The problem is the oil’s under pressure,” he said. “What happens in the case of a fuel oil leak, where you have a fire like that, is it leaks in such a way that it sprays out in a mist. In the engine room you have many hot surfaces, so once the mist hits a hot surface it will flash into flame.”
If the crew had not reacted quickly and the fire suppression system had not worked properly, he said, “the fire from the engine room would have eventually burned through to other parts of the ship.” Engine room fires that cannot be suppressed generally result in the loss of the entire ship, he said.
Fires — though not all as major as the Triumph’s — happen virtually every year on cruise ships. There were 79 onboard blazes from 1990 to 2011, according to a list compiled by Ross Klein, a professor who specializes in cruise industry issues at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada.
In 2010, the International Maritime Organization adopted rules that require any large cruise ship built after July 1 of that year to have a separate, redundant system able to maintain the ship’s propulsion, steering and so forth in case one engine is disabled by fire. The rules also mandate that ships be capable of maintaining basic services such as sanitation, water, food and lights in such circumstances.
The Triumph was built in 1999 and is not covered by the rules, as is the case for most ships among major cruise lines. Experts say the Triumph might have been able to limp into port more quickly if it had had the newer systems, but retrofitting is costly and time-consuming.
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