(CNN) -- Carnival Cruise Lines said Wednesday it will increase the number of systems and services that its ships can run on backup power -- part of a fleetwide review the company is conducting after a string of mechanical problems.The only way to do that, of course, is to add either more emergency generators or increase the capacity of the ones that they have.
And if there is a fire in the engine room, then the emergency generators will have to be somewhere else, of course. Carnival has had at least two ships in the last few years which went cold, dark and quiet after an engine room fire, which sort of suggests that the ships either lack redundant sources of power or that the redundancy has a pattern of also failing.
I have no idea what the engineering plant of those beasties looks like or how difficult those fixes would be. What I am more confident of is that Carnival will probably cut every possible corner it can on both installation and upkeep of the new emergency generator sets.
And yes, I still question the sanity of anyone who would choose to vacation at a hotel that can both catch fire and sink. At least if a resort loses power, you can hail a cab and go elsewhere.
Call me cynical, but a quick check of cruise ship fire listings show that Carnival owned ships (including Princess, Cunard, Carnival and Costa ships that reported fires) have had 9 fires in the engine room or generator room since 1995. A whopping 5 of those have been since mid-2009.
ReplyDeleteThe overall impression I got from scanning the reports was that most of the fires seemed to be related to overlooked warnings. The worst example of this was the Carnival Splendor fire of 11/8/2010. For over a week prior to this fire, a couple on the previous cruise complained of an electrical or smoky smell in their room and the crew got busy by patching and taping over any cracks that might be letting the smell into the room, located two decks above where the engine room fire occured!
I suspect, from my experience on cruise ships, that the poorly trained crew we saw in the Costa Concordia sinking is a common occurance on, at least, the Carnival ships. Consider them to be the 1920's-1990's Russian army of cruise lines. Most of the work is done by officers, the NCO's are simply sightly better trained enlisted men and not capable of doing much more than parroting what their officers tell them. It's a 800 lb gorilla with the brain of a dinosaur.