I’ll never forget the day we pulled into port after a week crossing the ocean, and the cruise ship started unloading dead bodies, one after the other, into ambulance after ambulance.
It turns out that this was normal. Outside the the party cruse lines / routes, the median age of a cruise ship passenger is “old”. When you have several thousand old people in one place for a week, statistically, one or more tend to die of natural causes.
Once we learn to look for it, we saw the unloading all the time.
I was expecting some kind of stats and charts when I see "alarming Regularity". Nothing of the sort. Totally overblown headline compared the amount of accidents. Would you make a headline for "People Die in Car Crashes with Alarming Regularity" ? probably not, even though the problem it way more important and endemic.
1 in 10,000 people in the US die each year in a car accident.
So it would require 3,000 deaths per year to approach cars.
It actually works out reasonable as an estimate: if you spend 1-2 hours in a car each day, that’s 4-8% of your year; a week on a cruise ship would be 2% of a year. So we’re within an order of magnitude on exposure to each.
So with 30 people per year dying to falling off boats, it’s much, much less dangerous than cars.
Have you read the article ? It s interesting and is actually about how few f#cks are given by those companies. And in your car, you are 100% liable and not in international waters
What’s the number of people who travel in cars or are near traffic on a daily basis, versus the number of people who are on a cruise ship on a daily basis?
I suspect a large amount these MOB incidents are suicide. Alcohol abuse and and suicidal thought are linked. (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872355/ ) The lady in the article drank a lot and chose to sit on the railing of a private balcony alone.
Drunk people manage to die in shallow water with an alarming regularity. I wonder if it is even possible to save a drunk MOB in a calm sea. Stopping a cruise ship and getting a rescue boat ready to action must take a couple of minutes. Maybe a a drone could do it.
> minimum railing heights of one meter (39 inches)
I'm surprised by how low this is. For comparison, the OSHA requirement is 42 inches -- for sober professionals on stable ground. At the cruise ship minimum, I'd need to wear fall protection to work on that deck.
I found an article [1] about a law proposing 42 inch rails for cruise ships, and apparently that was already part of USCG inspections as of 2015, but it's not clear what level of enforcement there is.
> few are aware that their personal safety is in the hands of one of the world’s most globalized, legally complex, and opaque industries
I'm just having a really hard time following the moral logic here.. To me it's like saying your life is in the hands of the fed when you go into a national park. You get blasted on a bottle of tequila, climb Half Dome and fall, but your life was in the hands of the fed?
Most people I know would be cognizant that if you get super drunk on a cruise, site on the railing, and then fall from the railing with nobody around you may not be heard from again..
And ignoring the falling off the boat bit... Just _being_ on a boat in the middle of the ocean? Your not aware that your safety is pretty much in the hands of the cruise operator?
The irony, in my opinion, is that the modern world has become so safe that people have come to expect safety. If you get hurt or die young, something must be wrong. A safety measure must be missing or someone has wronged you. The "default state of being" is seen as living a long happy life and anything short of that is an error state.
But in reality the cosmos doesn't owe you a thing.
> "Why do people still die as a result of them, despite the fact that technology exists to detect falls? And, after a person is swallowed by the ocean, what power do their loved ones have to find out what happened, hold any guilty parties responsible, or demand reform?"
This line about safety encapsulates that point. There's so much safety and rules all around us that people come to expect safety provided for them, so there is less emphasis on maintaining one's own personal safety. This is a problem in itself that people decide they could let their guard down because someone else will take care of them. There's no 100% guarantee behind that, and the randomness of the cosmos ensures it won't always happen.
There's less "free will" and more "supervised will". Of course not everything can be totally free, but if people want to preserve a notion of independence and self-autonomy, then the thinking surrounding personal safety, awareness, and responsibility should change.
Like in the quote from the article above, the immediate reaction (from the author's POV) is to blame someone/something else. Sometimes, the reality is that nothing could be done. Welcome to world: there's pitfalls, and obstacles, and things that are not safe. People fall out of hotel balconies, off of train platforms, into manholes, off of bridges, into rivers, etc. There's an infinite number of ways to die that not all of them could be safeguarded or fenced off. That's the inherent risk of being alive that every living creature deals with.
Overall, this article is basically creating a problem out of a non-problem, and the real story is that someone was served/drank too much alcohol at a bar. The article says: "Since 2000, 284 people have fallen off cruise ships..." followed by "Most of the nearly 30 million passengers who travel on a cruise each year...". Therefore, this means 1.3 people/mo fall off cruise ships... out of 2 500 000 passengers/mo. So there is a significantly greater chance of being struck by lightning (at 1:700 000 odds) than falling off a cruise ship each year [1].
If the National Parks Service operated a bar on the Half Dome trail with an all-you-can-drink package, then yes, I do think people would consider them at least partially liable.
The NPS regularly arrests people doing extreme sports (like BASE jumping, or camping too long or where/when not permitted) at Yosemite. There’s an on site court and a jail. It’s become a highly policed Disney world over the last 50 years, catering to those whose idea of adventure is crowded family group tours and lugging your plush suburban lifestyle around in a camper.
Also, generally you are held liable if you inflict suffering on someone when you are drunk. Why then should Yosemite, cruises, or the bartender be liable if you inflict suffering on yourself when you are drunk? Either you’re responsible for your own actions or you aren’t.
The NPS regularly arrests people doing extreme sports (like BASE jumping, or camping too long
I’m picturing a retired couple staying fifteen days (limit is usually 14) in the same spot, sipping a Mountain Dew while sitting in their camp chairs. Suddenly, one looks at the other and says, “I think we might be getting a bit old to keep doing this kind of craziness.”
That's what I was trying to say but you said it better. It's not black and white. 15 hours to call the coast guard is reckless when rum bar falls are inevitable.
Continuing the theme, are you also aware that on many cruises, sexually assaulting another passenger will be met by asking you to leave at the next port?
That's a specific example related to me by a chap I know; an ex-copper who now heads security on a cruise ship operating out of Southampton in the UK. I forget which nation the ship's flag is, but basically any and all crimes committed on board are met with a shrug and a suggestion to offload the offending passenger at the next stop. Actions that would lead to lengthy custodial sentences if committed in the passenger's own home are basically without consequence; he's had to deal with theft, assault, sexual assault, people getting drunk and smacking around their spouse and children. Flag state doesn't want to know. On merchant vessels that just have a small crew and no passengers (i.e. almost all of them), it's even more lawless.
In a U.S. national park, there is law. There is someone tasked with enforcing that law. At sea, at the level of individual interactions, not so much.
It's usually the law of the ship's flag country that applies when in intl. waters. Given that most ships are registered in smaller countries with lax tax laws, it's not surprising there is more trouble prosecuting those than just declaring the passenger "Persona Non Grata" (and the unplanned stop is usually costly to the passenger)
Not to say that if the crime is larger there is a greater chance of prosecution and/or other litigation.
It seems to me that the US could fix a large chunk of the problem of ignoring crime, and do it overnight. Refuse to allow cruise ships to dock in the US if they do not account for their criminal procedures and meet certain standards, and they will change.
It would probably be better if the US stopped allowing US companies to cruise from US ports carrying primarily US passengers using boats flying foreign flags--all so the company can avoid US regulations.
The trick is, of course, if the boat at least makes a 'technical stop' in another country on the cruise, then it's totally fine to be a non US flagged boat.
It seems to me that since these ships are landing in our ports and boarding passengers from our nation, it doesn't impact anyone else's sovereignty. Our sovereignty allows us to prohibit our citizens from traveling to our doing business with entire nations (whatever you think of that, it appears to be settled law).
Cruise ships would be free to cover up sexual assault for cruises going from outside the US to outside the US. Any potential violation of sovereignty seems less real than the GDPR, for instance.
It would be preferable to have meaningful international agreements for vessels, but several decades of experience show that won't happen in any meaningful way.
I think the author is stretching to make a point. I mean, the case she opens with is a drunk woman who climbed a railing to sit on it. Guess what? She fell off into the water. If she had gone out on the water in a dinghy as drunk as she was, and had turtled the boat and drowned, no one would pity her.
At the same time if you get drunk, visit the roof of the empire state building and lean over the edge guess what? You’ll find you cant fall thanks to a tall safety fence.
Sure, your own residential roof is a different story, as is a dinghy.
The difference to me is the expectation of protection from obvious hazards in public and commercial spaces.
In addition to monitoring (a last ditch effort imo) it seems relatively trivial to install nets or fencing to prevent falls off cruise ships. Why that isn't alreay mandated given the statistics provided is beyond me.
I agree it makes sense to install safety devices to protect against carelessness and inattention. But cruise ships already have that, with waist-high railings around all outdoor public areas.
Going further, with horizontal netting or 6 foot fencing, would be trying to protect passengers against injury even in the case of outright thrill-seeking or tomfoolery. I'm guessing the cruise lines resist that partly out of cost considerations and partly because they don't want the ships to start looking like prisons. Passengers aren't going to like it if they bought a luxurious getaway and they find themselves in a cage.
I’ve gone on almost two dozen cruises stretching back a decade and a half. Getting drunk and falling overboard aren’t things that normal people have to worry about. Truth be told, cruise ships are remarkably safe, are run by professional ship masters with multiple decades of experience, and staffed by bridge officers whose careers exist entirely outside of the cost-cutting corporate world of cruise ship operators. You have to remember that the ship master’s career track and profession are thousands of years old. Their training carries the weight of countless generations of professionals who came before the current one.
With that out of the way, my opinion - which is considered politically incorrect in the US - is that someone who is unable to moderate their drinking and stay aware of their surroundings doesn’t deserve the place they’re occupying in the world. To me this is a sign that the person doesn’t value their life, so they’re welcome to leave at the earliest opportunity.
Lastly, I know from experience that getting grievously drunk on a cruise ship isn’t a trivial matter. Bars pour drinks in small increments even for passengers who have some variant of the “unlimited drinking package”. It takes real effort to get into a stupor bad enough to ignore the dangers of railings and falls into the ocean from 12 deck.
Additionally, focusing in on the cruise ship response time isn't really logical. Sure, it could be faster than 15 hours to catch an accidental fall (which it sounds like basically doesn't happen), but in the cited example of a black out drunk person falling overboard or someone committing suicide, the response time could be < 5 minutes and it would still be too late. Someone that drunk isn't going to have the faculties to be able to swim or float, and people looking to die don't want to swim or float.
Couldn’t ships put up “jumper” nets around most parts of the ships to catch these accidental overboardings? Would it do more harm than good (i.e. invite people to jump and test, or simply make people more complacent and careless?)
I am wondering the same. Is it really so hugely expensive to add nets? Or would it hamper the functionality of the ship in some way? Compromise buoyancy?
I don’t think there’s any technical reason they couldn’t - often on military ships around helipads the barriers around it are netted and fold down when it’s operational so you don’t fall off.
Bit cruise ships are huge. For fall nets to be really effective, you’d probably have to have one under every level you could fall from. Some of these things are dozens of storeys tall - if you just had one around the bottom, it would have to stick out and be absolutely massive. Either way, the cost would be phenomenal.
If they really wanted to make it completely safe they’d just make the balustrades taller than average head height and with no gaps a person could fit through, or put mesh screening all around or glass or something. But that would probably be ugly and would diminish the view people are paying for. So they’ve made the trade off.
> Last year, almost 27 (26.7) million people took a cruise holiday, and there were nine overboard incidents involving passengers. This equates to about one incident per seven million passengers,”
seemed like "Huh, weird math error" but then I realized that they likely meant what they said, and consider someone a "passenger" per trip. So, this implies that of the people who take cruises, they take about two per year on average. Interesting stat if correct!
I bet the median is one per year though. Out of everyone I know who goes on cruises, they just go once a year.
I imagine there are quite a few people that go multiple times a year that would pull the average away from the median. Cruises are often cheaper than retirement homes and provide better service assuming the passenger does not have a serious ailment.
I took two cruises each year 2017 and 2018, and I'm not retired. I also flew somewhere on vacation those years, more times. The stats mean, some people have leisure time.
> He asked me, as a journalist covering the travel industry, to imagine what would happen if, every month, one to two people died on an airplane for a predictable operational reason, such as sustaining a traumatic head injury during turbulence due to failure to wear a seatbelt. It’s a scenario I find impossible to imagine, after years of flight-safety demonstrations, seatbelt checks, and back-of-the-seat cards.
"At least one person a month dies of a blood clot on the lungs on arrival at Heathrow Airport, say doctors." ?
seems like the problem could be solved fairly cheaply with machine learning. Just have cameras covering common areas for falls and have a model that identifies human like objects and then shoot off a signal to a human to verify, then if it's actually a person who fell over board send someone in a jetski or something to retrieve them
Also remind's me of patrice O'neal's rock coat joke 13 minutes in(NSFW)
Meta: please avoid snarky replies. If you feel the OP is misplaced, downvote or perhaps even flag if it is egregious.
FWIW, I've found the suicide interpretation quite interesting and eye-opening: a thought of a woman, silently hiding her suffering, perhaps for several years, finally pushers herself over the edge after spending last night with dear friends.
And much more fitting the sad story than the dry, calculating "whose money and responsibilities?" tone of the article.
Your previous post wasn’t very helpful. You were speaking negatively of both the article and the site without making an actual argument about either. Unsubstantive negativity and dismissals are nether educational for everyone reading, nor encourage a good community.
Disagreeing is usually fine, but you do need to do it the right way, per Monty Python.
“An argument’s not the same as contradiction... An argument is a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition.”
“No it isn’t!”
Note also that posts from new accounts can be marked as flagged by users, not just downvoted.
The things I pointed out in my first post are not that off.
But I don't want to discuss these ridiculous cruises further, I find this topic and the article, yes I have to admit, super boring and on something like HN so off-topic. We all know why this cruise article was posted here (read on).
Re HN and depression, suicide and related topics. Just check HN's search and you will see what I mean. Compared to any other forum HN has a quite large share of such posts. This annoys me, HN is full of great people, great topics, content at the cutting edge. This stuff is not why I drop by. Hence my aggression against this article posted here.
Btw, till now I got four downvotes for my second comment in it has not been flagged yet. This is why I assumed earlier that HN or some of their mods helped. We know why this might have happened and we know that this should not happen.
Happy to hear now your, hopefully more balanced, view.
It turns out that this was normal. Outside the the party cruse lines / routes, the median age of a cruise ship passenger is “old”. When you have several thousand old people in one place for a week, statistically, one or more tend to die of natural causes.
Once we learn to look for it, we saw the unloading all the time.