Imagine paying for a tropical vacation, only to spend five days trapped on a floating toilet.
In February 2013, over 4,000 people boarded the Carnival Triumph for a four-day trip.
Halfway through, a fire broke out in the engine room. The crew put it out, but it destroyed the generators. The ship was dead in the water.
No power meant no engines and no air conditioning. Because they were stranded in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, the sun beat down on the ship and quickly turned it into an oven.
But the heat wasn’t even the worst part. The electronic plumbing system failed.
With no working toilets, raw sewage backed up and overflowed directly into the cabins and hallways. Baking inside a powerless steel box under the hot Gulf sun, the smell became unbearable.
The crew started handing out red plastic bags for people to use as makeshift toilets. Passengers used bedsheets and lounge chairs to build individual shelters on the top deck just to escape the stench. What the media later described as a floating shantytown stretched across the upper levels of the ship.
Food rotted in the unpowered fridges. People waited in line for hours just to get cold onion sandwiches and a ration of bottled water. With no cell service for the first two days, passengers couldn’t even reach their families to tell them what was happening.
It took four tugboats to finally drag the ship back to land in Mobile, Alabama.
Carnival’s compensation to each passenger was a full refund plus $500.
One passenger summed up the five days simply. “It’s like being locked in a Porta Potty for days.”
The media dubbed it the Poop Cruise, and it went down as one of the most infamous vacation disasters in history.
Related Posts
