A weird dissonance between two cruise stories struck me recently. On one hand, Carnival Cruise Lines is “the official confetti sponsor of the Times Square New Year’s Eve 2011 celebration.” As reported by the the Maritime Executive “the sponsorship includes multiple opportunities to associate the “Fun Ship” brand with the annual excitement.” A You-tube video of Carnival’s Senior Cruise Director is also featured. On the other hand several media sources have been quoting from an excellent and timely post from last March on Jim Walker’s Cruise Law News blog, Ten Years of Cruise Ship Fires – Has the Cruise Industry Learned Anything?
What do these two stories have to do with one another? John Heald was aboard the Carnival Splendor when the fire broke out in November that completely disabled the ship. Carnival chose to feature his rather odd blog posts as part of their media response to the incident. (See our post Smoke on the Water – A Post from Carnival Cruise Director’s Blog.) In his posts, Heald relates how the Captain gave the order to flood the engine room with CO2. We now know that the main firefighting system on the ship failed completely and CO2 never reached the engine room. Also, the manuals and diagrams for operating the fire fighting systems were written in broken English and did not reflect the actual system, which in any event, failed. The ship had been in service for over two years. It goes without saying that during a fire is not the preferred time to discover that the firefighting diagrams do not agree with the ship and that the CO2 system doesn’t work.
Perhaps it is just the choice of the messenger that bothers me. When Heald posted on his blog about the fire, he begins the post describing in lurid detail a dream involving “rumpy pumpy” with a naked woman. He also comments that “I didn’t realise how serious this was until something slapped me in the face as hard as the time I tried to grope Sally Poole’s breasts behind the bike shed at school.” And so on. Now Heald is in Times Square announcing the confetti sponsorship while making references to it being “as cold as as a polar bear’s dangly bits” and joking that he will be having beer for breakfast. By selecting Heald as their spokesman, Carnival seems to wish to convey a certain oblivious joviality. That may be fine for a cruise director but, based on the failure of critical safety systems on the Carnival Splendor, decidedly not the right approach to ship operations.
Jim Walker’s question about cruise ship fires remains highly timely – after the onboard fires of the last decade, “has the cruise industry learned anything?” We can hope so, though recent events are not encouraging.