People Fall Off Cruise Ships with Alarming Regularity
qz.com
qz.com
It turns out that this was normal. Outside the the party cruse lines / routes, the median age of a cruise ship passenger is “old”. When you have several thousand old people in one place for a week, statistically, one or more tend to die of natural causes.
Once we learn to look for it, we saw the unloading all the time.
https://www.cruiseshipdeaths.com/
This is going to be an interesting Saturday morning.
From the article.. but yeah, with 30 million people traveling on cruise ships it's hard to tell if this is worse than regular traffic.
(Wouldn't surprise me, if cruise ships are skechy)
So it would require 3,000 deaths per year to approach cars.
It actually works out reasonable as an estimate: if you spend 1-2 hours in a car each day, that’s 4-8% of your year; a week on a cruise ship would be 2% of a year. So we’re within an order of magnitude on exposure to each.
So with 30 people per year dying to falling off boats, it’s much, much less dangerous than cars.
Drunk people manage to die in shallow water with an alarming regularity. I wonder if it is even possible to save a drunk MOB in a calm sea. Stopping a cruise ship and getting a rescue boat ready to action must take a couple of minutes. Maybe a a drone could do it.
I'm surprised by how low this is. For comparison, the OSHA requirement is 42 inches -- for sober professionals on stable ground. At the cruise ship minimum, I'd need to wear fall protection to work on that deck.
I found an article [1] about a law proposing 42 inch rails for cruise ships, and apparently that was already part of USCG inspections as of 2015, but it's not clear what level of enforcement there is.
[1]: http://www.professionalmariner.com/May-2015/Coast-Guard-prop...
I'm just having a really hard time following the moral logic here.. To me it's like saying your life is in the hands of the fed when you go into a national park. You get blasted on a bottle of tequila, climb Half Dome and fall, but your life was in the hands of the fed?
Most people I know would be cognizant that if you get super drunk on a cruise, site on the railing, and then fall from the railing with nobody around you may not be heard from again..
And ignoring the falling off the boat bit... Just _being_ on a boat in the middle of the ocean? Your not aware that your safety is pretty much in the hands of the cruise operator?
That's a specific example related to me by a chap I know; an ex-copper who now heads security on a cruise ship operating out of Southampton in the UK. I forget which nation the ship's flag is, but basically any and all crimes committed on board are met with a shrug and a suggestion to offload the offending passenger at the next stop. Actions that would lead to lengthy custodial sentences if committed in the passenger's own home are basically without consequence; he's had to deal with theft, assault, sexual assault, people getting drunk and smacking around their spouse and children. Flag state doesn't want to know. On merchant vessels that just have a small crew and no passengers (i.e. almost all of them), it's even more lawless.
In a U.S. national park, there is law. There is someone tasked with enforcing that law. At sea, at the level of individual interactions, not so much.
Not to say that if the crime is larger there is a greater chance of prosecution and/or other litigation.
Cruise ships would be free to cover up sexual assault for cruises going from outside the US to outside the US. Any potential violation of sovereignty seems less real than the GDPR, for instance.
It would be preferable to have meaningful international agreements for vessels, but several decades of experience show that won't happen in any meaningful way.
But in reality the cosmos doesn't owe you a thing.
That is, the flippant attitude that life is dangerous would not have produced such a safe world.
This line about safety encapsulates that point. There's so much safety and rules all around us that people come to expect safety provided for them, so there is less emphasis on maintaining one's own personal safety. This is a problem in itself that people decide they could let their guard down because someone else will take care of them. There's no 100% guarantee behind that, and the randomness of the cosmos ensures it won't always happen.
There's less "free will" and more "supervised will". Of course not everything can be totally free, but if people want to preserve a notion of independence and self-autonomy, then the thinking surrounding personal safety, awareness, and responsibility should change.
Like in the quote from the article above, the immediate reaction (from the author's POV) is to blame someone/something else. Sometimes, the reality is that nothing could be done. Welcome to world: there's pitfalls, and obstacles, and things that are not safe. People fall out of hotel balconies, off of train platforms, into manholes, off of bridges, into rivers, etc. There's an infinite number of ways to die that not all of them could be safeguarded or fenced off. That's the inherent risk of being alive that every living creature deals with.
Overall, this article is basically creating a problem out of a non-problem, and the real story is that someone was served/drank too much alcohol at a bar. The article says: "Since 2000, 284 people have fallen off cruise ships..." followed by "Most of the nearly 30 million passengers who travel on a cruise each year...". Therefore, this means 1.3 people/mo fall off cruise ships... out of 2 500 000 passengers/mo. So there is a significantly greater chance of being struck by lightning (at 1:700 000 odds) than falling off a cruise ship each year [1].
[1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/flash-facts...
I understand your point, but this is a cruise ship, letting your guard down and being taken care of is the whole point.
Also, generally you are held liable if you inflict suffering on someone when you are drunk. Why then should Yosemite, cruises, or the bartender be liable if you inflict suffering on yourself when you are drunk? Either you’re responsible for your own actions or you aren’t.
I’m picturing a retired couple staying fifteen days (limit is usually 14) in the same spot, sipping a Mountain Dew while sitting in their camp chairs. Suddenly, one looks at the other and says, “I think we might be getting a bit old to keep doing this kind of craziness.”
Sure, your own residential roof is a different story, as is a dinghy.
The difference to me is the expectation of protection from obvious hazards in public and commercial spaces.
In addition to monitoring (a last ditch effort imo) it seems relatively trivial to install nets or fencing to prevent falls off cruise ships. Why that isn't alreay mandated given the statistics provided is beyond me.
Going further, with horizontal netting or 6 foot fencing, would be trying to protect passengers against injury even in the case of outright thrill-seeking or tomfoolery. I'm guessing the cruise lines resist that partly out of cost considerations and partly because they don't want the ships to start looking like prisons. Passengers aren't going to like it if they bought a luxurious getaway and they find themselves in a cage.
If someone sober took her out on a dingy and just left her there after she fell overboard, people would be pretty outraged.
With that out of the way, my opinion - which is considered politically incorrect in the US - is that someone who is unable to moderate their drinking and stay aware of their surroundings doesn’t deserve the place they’re occupying in the world. To me this is a sign that the person doesn’t value their life, so they’re welcome to leave at the earliest opportunity.
Lastly, I know from experience that getting grievously drunk on a cruise ship isn’t a trivial matter. Bars pour drinks in small increments even for passengers who have some variant of the “unlimited drinking package”. It takes real effort to get into a stupor bad enough to ignore the dangers of railings and falls into the ocean from 12 deck.
Can somebody with more knowledge chime in?
Bit cruise ships are huge. For fall nets to be really effective, you’d probably have to have one under every level you could fall from. Some of these things are dozens of storeys tall - if you just had one around the bottom, it would have to stick out and be absolutely massive. Either way, the cost would be phenomenal.
If they really wanted to make it completely safe they’d just make the balustrades taller than average head height and with no gaps a person could fit through, or put mesh screening all around or glass or something. But that would probably be ugly and would diminish the view people are paying for. So they’ve made the trade off.
> Last year, almost 27 (26.7) million people took a cruise holiday, and there were nine overboard incidents involving passengers. This equates to about one incident per seven million passengers,”
seemed like "Huh, weird math error" but then I realized that they likely meant what they said, and consider someone a "passenger" per trip. So, this implies that of the people who take cruises, they take about two per year on average. Interesting stat if correct!
I imagine there are quite a few people that go multiple times a year that would pull the average away from the median. Cruises are often cheaper than retirement homes and provide better service assuming the passenger does not have a serious ailment.
"At least one person a month dies of a blood clot on the lungs on arrival at Heathrow Airport, say doctors." ?
Also remind's me of patrice O'neal's rock coat joke 13 minutes in(NSFW)