A Titanic In The Making?
Are cruise ships adequately equipped or constructed with safety in mind? Guest columnist Bill Redmond believes rules need tightened to avert disaster...



Marine disasters, it seems, are still needed to improve safety at sea through new legislation. As usual, it is the pursuit of profit before safety that stymies progress, creates new risks and exposes the public to serious, unnecessary perils. The marine industry has long known the extant risks but seem remarkably unconcerned to make the necessary health and safety changes. The result will almost certainly be a tragedy of Titanic extent.

A cruise is a delightful way to spend a relaxing holiday and deservedly growing fast in popularity but how many passengers realise the serious deficiencies in lifeboat capacities on most ships, even though they comply with the latest SOLAS regulations?

All cruise ships must have enough life craft to accommodate all persons on board but ships do not always sink in the ways ship owners would like them to sink after an incident. If a stricken vessel lists quickly before sinking then all the lifeboats on one side cannot be launched. A survey by this columnist of large cruise ships shows that, with one exception, there is around a 25% shortfall in life craft capacity in such circumstances based on fully-occupied vessels. This bears out that ship owners are complying with the rules but only just, rather like the Titanic which complied with current Board of Trade life craft capacity rules. The peril, however, goes deeper.

To save money, many cruise ships now use much cheaper inflatables. In the cruise ship this columnist last used less than half of the 22 inflatables (capacity 520 persons) could be davit launched. The remainder would have to be jettisoned into the sea before inflating so that passengers would be expected to plunge 50 ft into, perhaps, a freezing sea with scant prospect of timely rescue. Given the age profiles of many cruise ship passengers, their infirmities and obesities, their survival chances would be further diminished.

Potential cruise passengers, therefore, might like to ask if their cruise ship has enough life craft on just one side of the ship to cope with all persons aboard, and how many of the life craft are inflatables that cannot be launched by davit. They will probably find, however, that their choice of ships will be extremely limited.

The pursuit of profit also changes ship design to safety’s detriment. Many cruise ship owners are commissioning new vessels with ever-more decks, typically up to 16, raising issues of stability. One such high-sided cruise ship recently made a sharp turn, which passengers reported almost flipped the ship, leaving 40 injured. Usually, such leviathans carry between 2,500 and 4,000 persons and there are plans for 8,000-capacity ships. We now know that 100ft-high monster waves, known to old salts for centuries but dismissed by scientists as exaggerated nonsense, until now, occur frequently throughout the world. A broadside hit from such a wave, which often cannot be detected in time, would slice through steel plate like knife through butter. More disturbingly, it could capsize a high profile ship, leaving no chance for lifeboat escape and so inevitably causing huge if not total loss of life. This problem also pertains to the latest generation of super-sized container ships.

So far, the cruise ship industry has been lucky, escaping relatively unscathed from serious loss of life. That record, however, was tarnished only last year when the Al Salam Boccaccio ’98 sank in the Red Sea after quickly listing. Out of the 1,400 on board, there were complaints among the 400 survivors that there were insufficient lifeboats. Must it take another Titanic before the authorities take long overdue action to raise safety at sea to levels passengers deserve and expect? Evidently it must, to the industry’s indelible shame.