Carnival Ship Overboard Questions As Senator Calls For Cruise Ship Bill Of Rights
The Carnival ship overboard tragedy took another grim turn on Wednesday night, when Coast Guard officials called off the search for the missing man, 64-year-old John Johnson, at around 8:30 last night. The BAE Shipyard employee was working in a guard ship near the troubled Carnival Triumph cruise ship when powerful winds flung the guard shack into the Mobile River.
The gusts were so strong that in addition to tossing the guard ship into the water like a toy, they flung the 900-foot-long Carnival Triumph off its moorings and set it adrift in the river.
A 35-year-old man in the shack with him was quickly rescued and treated for hypothermia, then released. However, Johnson’s body hasn’t yet been found.
Local 15, an Alabama NBC affiliate, has reported that Johnson is presumed dead. Coast Guard officials will resume searching for the body on Thursday mornning.
Chaplain of Disaster Relief and Services Tony Dickey told Al.com, an Alabama online newspaper, that, “The family understands under the circumstances that it is very probable that he is deceased.”
Johnson’s son is traveling from Fort Bragg to join his mother, Johnson’s wife, who has asked the community for their prayers.
The unlucky Carnival Triumph first hit the news in February, when an onboard fire stranded the ship in mid-ocean without power or running water for five days. While nobody went overboard in that Carnival ship tragedy, there were plenty of passengers who might have been tempted to jump into the ocean because of the lack of showers and basic sanitation.
No one has control over Mother Nature, and some reports put yesterday’s powerful wind gusts as high as 65 miles per hour, but the continued tragedies swirling around Carnival Cruise lines has caused Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) to call for a “bill of rights” to at least provide better guarantees for cruise ship passengers.
Four Carnival Cruise ships out of 23 have experienced problems over the past few months — but the ill-fated Carnival Triumph is in a class of its own.
Let’s hope this latest Carnival ship overboard tragedy is their last disaster.
[photo Carnival Triumph by Scott L. via Wikipedia Commons]
