Carnival Execs Announce Immediate Multi-Million Dollar Spending to Remedy Electrical Power Production on Older Ships

Ironically enough, it may be that Carnival Cruise passengers may enjoy greater safety than the passengers on other cruise lines in the immediate months ahead. That's because Carnival's management, frantic over a series of power-outages or failures that so bedeviled the lives of passengers these past two weeks, are apparently taking emergency measures to equip their ships with back-up power sources. According to a conference call by Carnival to various financial analysts, made more specific to Gene Sloan, cruise editor of USAToday, Carnival will spend "tens of millions of dollars" in immediately upgrading the electrical connections from one set of generators to another on its ships needing such improvements.

By way of explanation: the newest cruise ships -- those built, say, within the last several years -- apparently have redundancy in their electrical generators, according to recent reports. Older ships sometimes do, and sometimes don't, possess such back-up facilities. Older ships in the Carnival fleet will be equipped with substitute sources, or access to substitute sources via more powerful and protected power cables, as a result of the considerable immediate expenditures that Carnival executives have promised.

"We expect to make an announcement early next week on the initial steps of our implementation program…," said a formal statement issued by Carnival. By "implementation program," they mean the physical upgrades that will be made to existing electrical equipment.

And what will now happen to older ships of other cruiselines? There's been silence, complete silence, on the part of the other companies. Whether they are taking similar steps to insure the availability of back-up programs if one source of power should go dead, is simply not known.

If I were a passenger scheduled to sail in the weeks ahead, I would pose some urgent questions to the company whose ship I have chosen. I would demand to know whether the ship in question has back-up generators far removed from the main generators. And if such companies should refuse to provide that information, then I would demand the right to cancel without penalty and to make a similar cruise booking on another line.