'Stranded at sea': cruise ships around the world are adrift as ports turn them away

Maritime News
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They could have helped them a few days ago by arranging repatriation flights from the Dutch colony of Sint Maarten. Instead they chose to extend the voyage to reach the port in a viral hotspot where the next cruise is scheduled to depart and turn the problem over to American medical people.

If this is not criminal it has to be as close to the line as anyone can get.

Post comments to every cruise website that exists, let people know what Carnival/Holland America did and why. Tell those people who are crying for mercy in Fort Lauderdale that HA bypassed several ports that could have got them home or to medical care much earlier. Maybe in the future people will know in advance what kind of scum businesses they are dealing with.

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The assumption that the CEOs are going to learn their lesson if enough passengers die might not hold up.

Here’s a post I read this morning. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, some factors are ignored but the gist of the article seems plausible.

Elites who are not aligned with the actual productive activities of society and are engaged primarily in activities which are contrary to production, are decadent. This was true in Ancien Regime France (and deliberately fostered by Louis XIV as a way of emasculating the nobility.) It is true today of most Western elites: they concentrate on financial numbers, and not on actual production.

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The two cruise ships are arriving in port soon:


Maybe Trump has some compassion after all?? (Or does he get something in return??)

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Ron Desantis has been an idiot since this shit began.

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Trump is incapable of empathy or compassion. Everything he does is transactional, either he gets something he wants or it doesn’t happen. He acts like an emotionally retarded. petulant child who needs to be “liked.”

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He got behind his man and marched off a cliff. Sad thing is, there are plenty of other people behind him. As for the man they marched behind, he has time to brag about his Facebook status.

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Birdy loves you Steamer and your bipartisan opinions. Perhaps contribute something worthy to your fellow mariners on this site rather than your political rantings. It serves no one except yourself.

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The majority of folks who sign up for these cruises don’t have a clue and would probably just give you a blank stare if you tried to explain just exactly why FOCs exist. Not their problem, let the merchant “marines” worry about it. They don’t care. Just don’t block the way to the buffet spread.
The cruise lines will whine for bailouts, borrow money to “restructure” and be back in business in no time. They’ve proven how ruthless they are and they’ll be even more brazen knowing how eager US politicians are to lick their boots.
It’s infuriating but nothing is going to change.

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What the fuck?!

  • The healthy go directly to chartered airplanes and go away.

  • The potentially sick (9) go ashore for monitoring.

  • The very sick (45) stay on board to recover or die.

They could have done that in Aruba or Curaçao days ago for fuck sake! Emergency? Fuck no. That was some manufactured bullshit.

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Is it known for a fact that the other ports would have allowed the passengers to disembark there?

From the NYT:

the Zaandam, after it was refused entry into Chile nearly two weeks ago.

The Costa Luminosa.

The ship, which set out from Fort Lauderdale bound for Venice, Italy, tried to dock at several ports before unloading in Marseille, France, on March 19.

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is it a fact that any of the Dutch territories could refuse to allow a Dutch ship to repatriate passengers from their airports? If the flag state means nothing then what is the purpose of a national ship registry? Is it only Dutch when the invoice for renewal of certificates arrives?

Why should any port state have to accept social and financial responsibility for a foreign flag business operation’s failure to act ethically or morally? What does it say about a ship operator that bypasses a port of its own flag and keep passengers at risk of more serious, potentially fatal, illness in order to shed the responsibility for their care?

The fact that other port states refused entry is irrelevant. The owners made no effort to have the ship continue to its purported US west coast “home port” where its “headquarters” is based. Instead it delayed treatment of the infected passengers for even longer while negotiating canal passage so the ship could reach the destination defined by the tickets it sold the hapless fools who bought them. The company then bypassed flag state ports to save the cost of repatriation flights and to reposition for the next scheduled cruise.

It really doesn’t get much more inhumane or disgusting than that.

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On the internet it’s nothing, on the ship it’s everything.

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The ships are getting some relief. USA does has some compassion. Steamer , my grass is getting a bit tall, care to stop by?

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This is evidently was the Zaandam’s planned itinerary:

ms Zaandam current cruise is 31 days, one-way from Buenos Aires to Fort Lauderdale.

The plan from the beginning was to disembark the passengers in Fort Lauderdale.

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HA opened the door for ya, come on in. The people of Florida can wait their turn:
Princess Cruises’ Coral Princess has a “higher-than-normal” number of people with flu-like symptoms and plans to bring them to Port Everglades on Saturday after a service call in Bridgetown, Barbados.

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Mission accomplished at the expense of their sick passengers.

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So when an American worker on a Liberian or MI flagged Rig gets sick with COVID, the USCG should make that unit contact their own Flag State for assistance? The only reason Bahamas is getting the brunt is because of the close proximity to the USA. Illness, Injury, it is the responsibility of the vessel and the Coastal State to secure the safety of those injured or ill. But, everyone also needs to take into consideration the infrastructure that coastal places have. We should not place blame at this time, but instead offer positive and productive advice on here. I read these forums all the time, and just see a bunch of spoiled Americans that have no idea or understanding of the real world.

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I’m not trying to defend the cruise industry, they should be forced to bear the full cost, fly everyone home in a private jet.

But as far as the decision making process seems like there are a lot of assumptions being made here. Should have taken them to this or that port. For all we know Trump may have assured them of assistance in Florida.

The business they are in presumably they understand they have significant legal risk and their decision making process will be scrutinized.

That was what it was like when I sailed master, I don’t know why the cruise industry would be different.

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I know you’re trying to project a positive outlook. I understand and I know we’ll get through this but I am too pissed off at the lies and the level of hypocrisy to ignore it.

Passengers who were either sick or possibly exposed to the virus were in some cases put on buses and planes, endangering others. Quarantine procedures for evacuees were sometimes contradictory and confusing, as the problems of holding passengers in isolation after they returned from their trips became almost as substantial as the danger of letting them go.

While U.S. health authorities took great pains to sequester passengers from affected cruise ships in the early days of the outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recent days have allowed hundreds of exposed and ill cruise passengers to travel on commercial flights across the country, potentially jeopardizing everyone from flight attendants to airport restaurant workers, to unwitting fellow passengers.

The original plan was successful but we decided to abandon it to please the cruise lines and let them infect innocent americans.

William R. Burke, the chief maritime officer for Carnival Corp., which operates more than 100 cruise vessels around the world, said companies were facing suddenly closed ports, or countries that have abruptly imposed new border rules in response to the coronavirus.

Gosh, who could have foreseen such a development?

“This week the rules are different than they were a week ago,” Mr. Burke said. “We learned a lot about how to do this, good and bad. I wish I had learned from somebody else doing it.”

Said with a straight face while counting his billions.

Passengers who were part of the chaotic scramble over the past 10 days, under rules that allowed many passengers to navigate their own way home, said that even people who were coughing and clearly sick were packed into buses and planes.

Gee, I wish somebody would have told us this thing was contagious.

I’ll be very surprised if the sycophants running the cruise lines pay the tab owed to their “rescuers.”

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Maybe better to control the rate at which the passengers leave the ship at a level they can handle. Tie up or anchor the ships however long it takes to do it right.