Cruise passengers are sunk before they ever sue

After an engine room fire caused the Carnival Triumph cruise ship to lose power off the coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula Feb. 10, conditions deteriorated rapidly.

With the ship adrift and power out, the onboard water and sewage systems failed. During the next five days, as the ship was being towed to port in Alabama, the Triumph listed sharply, "causing human waste to spill out of non-functioning toilets, flood across the vessel's floors and halls and drip down the vessel's walls," according to a lawsuit filed Friday in Miami by Cassie Terry, a passenger from Brazoria County.

Terry and other passengers had to "wade through human feces in order to reach food lines where the wait was counted in hours, only to receive rations of spoiled food," the lawsuit said.

What was supposed to be a four-day vacation cruise became a nightmare aboard "a floating toilet, a floating Petri dish, a floating hell."

Terry was one of the first passengers to sue Carnival over the Poop Ship debacle, but she and others considering lawsuits may find the legal journey on which they are about to embark even more harrowing.

Maritime law experts say passengers waive most legal rights when they buy cruise tickets. The fine print in ticket contracts basically requires any lawsuits be subjected to arbitration in a federal court in Miami. That's going to be inconvenient for the Poop Ship's predominantly Texas-based passengers.

Only cases involving personal injury, illness or death can be heard in court. The squalid conditions or allegations of gross negligence described in some of the lawsuits may not be enough to get around the arbitration clause.

"The cruise lines want each person to have to go to arbitration and get a lawyer and spend money," said attorney Adam Brum of Morgan & Morgan in Miami, who has talked to several passengers but hasn't filed a case yet. "It makes it very hard."

What's more, Carnival's ticket contract, available on its website, shows that passengers waive their rights to a jury trial and to joining in a class-action lawsuit. That means for most potential plaintiffs, the legal costs would exceed any amount they could reasonably hope to recover.

"There's a built-in impediment," said Michael Doyle, a Houston lawyer who specializes in maritime law and who isn't involved in any of the Triumph cases. "You don't realize how little you're protected and how few remedies you have."

Chance to cruise again

Carnival has said each passenger will receive a full refund for the cruise and transportation expenses to Galveston, where the ship departed on Feb. 7, as well as an additional payment of $500 a person.

Each will also get a credit for a future cruise. Seriously.

Not since the airline tarmac strandings of 2008 have we seen such a laughable attempt at compensation. If you fail to maintain adequate separation between passengers and sewage, offering customers a chance to experience it again isn't recompense.

"The situation onboard was difficult, and we are very sorry for what has happened," Carnival chief executive Gerry Cahill said in a statement on the company's website. "We pride ourselves on providing our guests with a great vacation experience, and clearly we failed in this case."

This, though, wasn't the only case. In 2010, a fire in the engine room incapacitated the Carnival Splendor, toilets stopped working and tugs were dispatched to tow the disabled vessel to shore. In the past three years, at least three other similar incidents involving other cruise lines have been reported, according to Cruise Critic, an online guide for cruise passengers.

Redundancy rules

The International Maritime Organization, the United Nations group that oversees safety at sea, issued new guidelines for cruise ships in 2010 that would require redundancies to maintain propulsion, steering and other vital systems in case of an accident.

The new rules, though, apply only to ships built after mid-2010, which covers just a few of those in service. Most active cruise ships are older than that. The Triumph, for example, was launched in 1999.

Retrofitting the vessels with redundant systems was deemed too expensive, Cruise Critic reported.

Instead, the cruise industry has opted to insulate itself by requiring that passengers sign away their rights before they get onboard.

That leaves little recourse if you find yourself standing in human feces, waiting hours for a ration of spoiled food.


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Source: Houston Chronicle (Steffy, 2/20)