Mr. Klein is an authority on the cruise industry, having testified at hearings before the House of Representatives and the Senate about onboard crimes, disappearances and industry oversights. . . .
I used the statistics Mr. Klein does have many of which were part of his testimony last year before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation to help determine just how rare (or not) the events aboard the Triumph were. Here’s what the data revealed.
Adrift at Sea Loss of power is common, according to Mr. Klein. “It’s inconvenient,” he said. But it typically lasts no more than a few hours.
Evacuation Evacuations are infrequent, and when they do happen, they are usually done safely. Mr. Klein said that about three or four times a year there is preparation to abandon a ship, though actually abandoning it is rare. One of the most recent evacuations was in 2007, when a GAP Adventures ship called the Explorer struck ice off Antarctica and began sinking. All 154 people on board were safely evacuated. Still, even larger evacuations in the ocean are possible: in 1999 a Sun Cruises ship caught fire and sank off the coast of Malaysia, but the more than 1,000 people on board safely made it onto lifeboats and rafts.
Fire Fires are not unusual. There have been about 79 fires onboard cruise ships between 1990 and 2011, according to Mr. Klein’s data. Up until about 2006 there were usually three or four fires a year. From 2006 onward the number of fires doubled to about seven or eight a year. That increase, Mr. Klein said, is the result of a combination of better reporting (thanks, social media) and the rapid growth of the cruise industry.
Overflowing Toilets Plumbing issues are, bewilderingly, par for the course. The resulting raw sewage put it in the rarest of ship categories that which inspires bathroom humor by David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and Jon Stewart.
Running Aground It’s more likely that a cruise ship will run aground than sink. From 1972 to 2011, 98 cruise ships have run aground, according to Mr. Klein’s figures. On average that’s about 2.5 ships a year.
Sinking When the Costa Concordia (a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation) partly sank last year off Giglio, Italy, killing 32 people after hitting a submerged rock, it was one of the first times a cruise ship had done so since the Explorer in 2007. From 1980 to 2012, about 16 ships have sunk. They tend to be ships that sail in inhospitable waters like the Antarctic Ocean, or ships that belong to smaller lines. One of the most devastating accidents was in 1994 in the Baltic Sea, when the Estonia sank and more than 800 people died. Today, “ships don’t sink with everybody dying,” Mr. Klein said. “The chances of loss of life are pretty minuscule.”
Bottom Line So are the events that unfolded on the Triumph normal? Yes and no. “We see maybe two to four of these kinds of incidents a year, and they range in severity,” Mr. Klein said, “with the Triumph certainly being one extreme.”
“I think that what the numbers say is that things go wrong and in most cases there is no threat to physical harm,” Mr. Klein said. “In probably 95 percent of the cases, it’s purely inconvenience.”
“Just endure it as best you can,” he advised. “If something goes wrong, your attitude is what’s going to get you through it.”