People Fall Off Cruise Ships with Alarming Regularity

https://qz.com/1443797/why-do-people-keep-falling-off-cruise-ships-because-people-keep-stepping-onto-them/

by gscott • 8 years ago

59 46 8 years ago

Rapzid• 8 years ago

few are aware that their personal safety is in the hands of one of the world’s most globalized, legally complex, and opaque industries

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?

EliRivers• 8 years ago

Continuing the theme, are you also aware that on many cruises, sexually assaulting another passenger will be met by asking you to leave at the next port?

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.

raverbashing• 8 years ago

It's usually the law of the ship's flag country that applies when in intl. waters. Given that most ships are registered in smaller countries with lax tax laws, it's not surprising there is more trouble prosecuting those than just declaring the passenger "Persona Non Grata" (and the unplanned stop is usually costly to the passenger)

Not to say that if the crime is larger there is a greater chance of prosecution and/or other litigation.

Waterluvian• 8 years ago

The irony, in my opinion, is that the modern world has become so safe that people have come to expect safety. If you get hurt or die young, something must be wrong. A safety measure must be missing or someone has wronged you. The "default state of being" is seen as living a long happy life and anything short of that is an error state.

But in reality the cosmos doesn't owe you a thing.

taeric• 8 years ago

The flip side, looking for how to make things safer has produced a world where early death is typically a sign that something is wrong.

That is, the flippant attitude that life is dangerous would not have produced such a safe world.

siruncledrew• 8 years ago

"Why do people still die as a result of them, despite the fact that technology exists to detect falls? And, after a person is swallowed by the ocean, what power do their loved ones have to find out what happened, hold any guilty parties responsible, or demand reform?"

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...

pimlottc• 8 years ago

If the National Parks Service operated a bar on the Half Dome trail with an all-you-can-drink package, then yes, I do think people would consider them at least partially liable.

ykevinator• 8 years ago

That's what I was trying to say but you said it better. It's not black and white. 15 hours to call the coast guard is reckless when rum bar falls are inevitable.

ilikehurdles• 8 years ago

The NPS regularly arrests people doing extreme sports (like BASE jumping, or camping too long or where/when not permitted) at Yosemite. There’s an on site court and a jail. It’s become a highly policed Disney world over the last 50 years, catering to those whose idea of adventure is crowded family group tours and lugging your plush suburban lifestyle around in a camper.

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.

ekianjo• 8 years ago

I was expecting some kind of stats and charts when I see "alarming Regularity". Nothing of the sort. Totally overblown headline compared the amount of accidents. Would you make a headline for "People Die in Car Crashes with Alarming Regularity" ? probably not, even though the problem it way more important and endemic.

jopsen• 8 years ago

Since 2000, 284 people have fallen off cruise ships .... an average of about 1.5 people per month

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)

FakeComments• 8 years ago

1 in 10,000 people in the US die each year in a car accident.

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.

aga98mtl• 8 years ago

I suspect a large amount these MOB incidents are suicide. Alcohol abuse and and suicidal thought are linked. ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872355/ ) The lady in the article drank a lot and chose to sit on the railing of a private balcony alone.

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.

aaron695• 8 years ago

He asked me, as a journalist covering the travel industry, to imagine what would happen if, every month, one to two people died on an airplane for a predictable operational reason, such as sustaining a traumatic head injury during turbulence due to failure to wear a seatbelt. It’s a scenario I find impossible to imagine, after years of flight-safety demonstrations, seatbelt checks, and back-of-the-seat cards.

"At least one person a month dies of a blood clot on the lungs on arrival at Heathrow Airport, say doctors." ?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1109406.stm

danielvf• 8 years ago

I’ll never forget the day we pulled into port after a week crossing the ocean, and the cruise ship started unloading dead bodies, one after the other, into ambulance after ambulance.

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.

NikolaeVarius• 8 years ago

15 seconds of trying to verify this sort of claim has come up with this site

https://www.cruiseshipdeaths.com/

This is going to be an interesting Saturday morning.

akudha• 8 years ago

Jeez, that is morbid. There is a website (or an app) for everything

johan_larson2• 8 years ago

I think the author is stretching to make a point. I mean, the case she opens with is a drunk woman who climbed a railing to sit on it. Guess what? She fell off into the water. If she had gone out on the water in a dinghy as drunk as she was, and had turtled the boat and drowned, no one would pity her.

cranjice• 8 years ago

At the same time if you get drunk, visit the roof of the empire state building and lean over the edge guess what? You’ll find you cant fall thanks to a tall safety fence.

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.

johan_larson2• 8 years ago

I agree it makes sense to install safety devices to protect against carelessness and inattention. But cruise ships already have that, with waist-high railings around all outdoor public areas.

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.

SamReidHughes2• 8 years ago

It's not a safety fence, it's a suicide fence. That's not a big problem for cruise ships because the bodies just hit the ocean.

astura• 8 years ago

She was a passenger, she wasn't drunk boating (which is illegal).

If someone sober took her out on a dingy and just left her there after she fell overboard, people would be pretty outraged.

sigfubar• 8 years ago

I’ve gone on almost two dozen cruises stretching back a decade and a half. Getting drunk and falling overboard aren’t things that normal people have to worry about. Truth be told, cruise ships are remarkably safe, are run by professional ship masters with multiple decades of experience, and staffed by bridge officers whose careers exist entirely outside of the cost-cutting corporate world of cruise ship operators. You have to remember that the ship master’s career track and profession are thousands of years old. Their training carries the weight of countless generations of professionals who came before the current one.

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.

Thriptic• 8 years ago

Additionally, focusing in on the cruise ship response time isn't really logical. Sure, it could be faster than 15 hours to catch an accidental fall (which it sounds like basically doesn't happen), but in the cited example of a black out drunk person falling overboard or someone committing suicide, the response time could be < 5 minutes and it would still be too late. Someone that drunk isn't going to have the faculties to be able to swim or float, and people looking to die don't want to swim or float.

coldcode• 8 years ago

Regularity can mean once every 10,000 years. In this case it's 1 or 2 a month. Not alarming. People love to use statistics in an alarmist way.

mc32• 8 years ago

Couldn’t ships put up “jumper” nets around most parts of the ships to catch these accidental overboardings? Would it do more harm than good (i.e. invite people to jump and test, or simply make people more complacent and careless?)

pdimitar• 8 years ago

I am wondering the same. Is it really so hugely expensive to add nets? Or would it hamper the functionality of the ship in some way? Compromise buoyancy?

Can somebody with more knowledge chime in?

SamReidHughes2• 8 years ago

I don't know. What if you need to abandon ship?

stephen_g• 8 years ago

I don’t think there’s any technical reason they couldn’t - often on military ships around helipads the barriers around it are netted and fold down when it’s operational so you don’t fall off.

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.

bjelkeman-again• 8 years ago

I think it would make people think about risks and start feeling unsafe. Bad for business, so that wouldn’t be implemented.

analog31• 8 years ago

Indeed, in a similar vein, it's impossible to open the windows more than just a crack in college dormitories any more.

umanwizard• 8 years ago

Not just dormitories, but many new buildings — I’m 29 years old and I can’t open the windows more than a crack in my apartment (built 2017).

boulos• 8 years ago

This quote:

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!

cardiffspaceman• 8 years ago

I took two cruises each year 2017 and 2018, and I'm not retired. I also flew somewhere on vacation those years, more times. The stats mean, some people have leisure time.

Casseres• 8 years ago

I bet the median is one per year though. Out of everyone I know who goes on cruises, they just go once a year.

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.

beginningguava• 8 years ago

seems like the problem could be solved fairly cheaply with machine learning. Just have cameras covering common areas for falls and have a model that identifies human like objects and then shoot off a signal to a human to verify, then if it's actually a person who fell over board send someone in a jetski or something to retrieve them

Also remind's me of patrice O'neal's rock coat joke 13 minutes in(NSFW)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-4k2SOD1P8

ken• 8 years ago

minimum railing heights of one meter (39 inches)

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...

People Fall Off Cruise Ships with Alarming Regularity

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