MOBILE, Alabama – Some walked off the ship and kissed the ground. The more than 4,200 people trapped several days aboard a disabled cruise ship were jubilant as they reached a US port with tales of overflowing toilets, food shortages and camping on the decks under bedsheets. The arrival of the Carnival cruise ship Triumph was anything but for the cruise company and for the industry at large, which now faces the challenge of making a trip at sea romantic again. “This is my first and last cruise,” passenger Kendall Jenkins said. The ship, left powerless and drifting in the Gulf of Mexico by an engine-room fire, arrived Thursday night to cheering from passengers wrapped in bathrobes for the cold. The ship's slow approach, pulled and pushed by tugboats, was preceded by a flood of complaints as passengers finally came within mobile phone range. “It was horrible, just horrible” said Maria Hernandez, 28, tears welling in her eyes as she talked about waking up to smoke in her lower-level room Sunday and the days of heat and stench that followed. She said her group hauled mattresses to upper-level decks to escape the heat. Frustrated by slopping sewage and nonworking toilets, people used the bathroom in plastic bags. Carnival apologized. “I know the conditions on board were very poor,” Carnival CEO Gerry Cahill said. In a text message before arrival, Kalin Hill described deplorable conditions over the past few days. “The lower floors had it the worst, the floors ‘squish' when you walk and lots of the lower rooms have flooding from above floors,” Hill wrote. “The smell down there literally chokes you and hurts your eyes.” She said “there's poop and urine all along the floor. The floor is flooded with sewer water ... and we had to poop in bags.” The company disputed the accounts of passengers who described the ship as filthy, saying employees were doing everything to ensure people were comfortable. Some travel agents said they had not yet seen an impact on bookings for other cruises, but some warned that could come. “Initial reports from travel agents indicates no impact yet, but there are clear concerns that after the ship returns to Mobile and videos come out, that may turn the tide,” said Michael Driscoll, editor of the industry newsletter Cruise Week. “No single cruise ship problem has been so vividly reported over a drawn-out period of time, other than Concordia,” the ship that capsized off the coast of Italy in January 2012, killing 32 people. The Triumph will head to a shipyard at the Alabama port for assessment. Carnival has canceled a dozen more planned voyages aboard the Triumph and acknowledged the crippled ship had been plagued by other mechanical problems in the weeks before the engine-room blaze. The National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation. Joseph and Cecilia Alvarez said some passengers passed the time by forming a Bible study group. “It was awesome,” he said. “It lifted up our souls and gave us hope that we would get back.” – AP
