How safe is cruising?
By Jill Schensul
Record Columnist, NorthJersey.com
"I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that."
"Modern," when Capt. Edward John Smith spoke these words, was 1907, on the maiden voyage of the Adriatic. He would be able to imagine such conditions five years later, at the helm of the Titanic. Famous last words.
Reading them today, we may smile bittersweetly at their bravado and irony. Then again, after the grounding of the Empress of the North in Alaska last Monday -- just a little more than a month after the 1,200-passenger Sea Diamond sank in the Aegean Sea -- these words seem more portentous than not.
I, for one, have held the same trust in modern shipbuilding -- our modern, of course, not Titanic modern -- over the years. You'd hear about the occasional problem with a ship catching fire, one going aground. But these were isolated incidents, I told myself. A 1996 survey by the U.S. Coast Guard found that cruising was the safest form of commercial travel.
But these latest [cruise ship] accidents have to give us at least a little pause.
In fact, when I started digging, I realized that cruise ship accidents may not be as rare as we would like to believe. Ross Klein, a professor at Canada's Memorial University and the man behind the Web site cruisejunkie.com, tracks cruise safety issues and has testified before Congress about them. Klein has counted 21 sinkings of passenger ships around the world since 1980, including cruise liners and major ferry operations; he's also counted 76 incidents of passenger ships that have run aground during that time, including 24 involving big companies such as Carnival, Costa, Cunard, Holland America, Norwegian, Princess and Royal Caribbean.
Surprised? Unless these incidents result in significant numbers of injuries or fatalities, the cruise lines, for the most part, are able to keep them out of the public spotlight. For example, when a Princess cruise ship was hit by a rogue wave July 18, 2006, tilting violently and injuring 93 people after it left Port Canaveral, Fla., it was only the most severe of half a dozen similar incidents in one year.
"You didn't hear about the others because cruise lines aren't required to report such events unless they cause serious injuries or property damage," said Coast Guard spokeswoman Jennifer Johnson.
After the Empress of the North incident, I wondered about the Nordkapp, which had hit something during a cruise in Antarctica just days before I left on a similar cruise. At the time, the cause of the accident was unknown. Since I returned, I found no follow-up, except for a story from a foreign news service questioning whether oil had leaked into the sea.
There had been a swift conclusion to the investigation of the sinking of the Sea Diamond, however. The ship, carrying 1,156 passengers and 391 crew, hit a well-charted reef near the island of Santorini. The captain had blamed sea currents for the accident, but Greece's merchant marine minister concluded that human error was to blame. The captain and five crew members have been charged with negligence.
For ships calling on U.S. ports, the Coast Guard conducts inspections to assure compliance with safety regulations. The Coast Guard also examines each new cruise vessel when it first enters service at a U.S. port to ensure compliance with the Safety of Life at Sea Convention. After that, vessels calling on U.S. ports are subject to quarterly inspections. The examinations emphasize structural fire safety and proper life-saving equipment.
So why, with all these precautions, are there still accidents, especially when today's passenger ships are some of the newest and most technologically advanced ever on the seas?
In some instances, such as the rogue waves, computers have indeed malfunctioned or been stymied by unusual situations.
And in a great many cases, the cause comes down to human error, specifically crew fatigue.
Labor shortages are making for an "absolute crisis," according to Andrew Linington, spokesman for the British seafarers union Nautilus. The time bomb is the aging maritime workforce, he points out. Officers are retiring and replacements with experience and skills are at a premium. "It's only going to get worse," Linington says.
The International Maritime Organization, which oversees safety on the sea, drew up a series of new regulations at its 2005 meeting. Some of these will be in place by the end of the year, the rest by 2009. These regulations require better reinforcement of ship structure and more thought to passenger evacuation.
For now, remember that the Coast Guard says cruises are the safest form of travel.
And if you're so inclined, check out the Port Exchange Information System, cgmix.uscg.mil/psix, which provides a list of active documents and certificates of all ships that call at U.S. ports. Or go to equasis.com, a public Web site (you need to register first) offering safety information on ships.
