Isn’t It Obvious that Cruise Ships Should Have a Back-Up Source of Electricity Located Far From the Engine Room?

To install such a facility on existing ships will cost a lot of money. To make space for another massive generator will probably mean eliminating as many as 200 passenger cabins. No longer will such ships carry 3,000 passengers, but rather 2,500 passengers.

But isn’t that a small price to pay for avoiding such tragic events as recently endangered the Carnival Triumph and its passengers? Imagine if that loss of power had occurred on a transatlantic or transpacific crossing while the ship was several hundred -- even a thousand -- miles from land!

A cruise ship is like a city at sea. And like any city, it should have an alternate source of energy and power, located at the other end of the ship from where the basic source of power is found. To rely on a single producer of energy located in or near the engine room entails a giant risk, as Carnival discovered.

Most cities have back-up plans, back-up connections to other electric grids that can be used if the main source of power fails. And such a back-up source should also exist on cruise ships carrying a thousand and more passengers. New ships should be re-designed to enjoy such alternate remedies; old ships should be altered -- sent back to the shipyard -- to install such alternate remedies.

And that way, we won’t encounter an even greater disaster than the one that was partially avoided on the Carnival Triumph. Since the large cruise lines -- Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian -- now enjoy earnings measured in the billions per year, they have the obvious wherewithal to institute this improvement in the reliability of their systems of energy.