COVID Response By Cruise Lines Draws Attention To Evasive, Tax-Avoiding, Polluting Industry
EDIT
Her company does seem to have been terribly unlucky. Their Diamond Princess, quarantined off Yokohama, which suffered over 700 infections and eight deaths among its passengers and crew, was a conspicuous early victim of the pandemic, its global fame growing on wry-turning-to-desperate postings from its passengers. The Ruby Princess, from which 2,700 passengers disembarked in Sydney on March 19, became the single largest source of Covid-19 cases in Australia. The Grand Princess was stuck outside San Francisco, its passengers confined to their cabins, after an outbreak in early March. Something similar happened to the Coral Princess in early April, off the coast of Florida. And this to say nothing of the Caribbean Princess, which has twice this year had to end cruises early, due to hundreds falling ill from a quite different infection, the vomiting bug norovirus.
But not everyone is yet convinced that all of Princess’s misadventures are purely bad luck. New South Wales police have launched a criminal investigation into the Ruby Princess, to see whether its owners were “transparent in contextualising the true patient and crew health conditions relevant to Covid-19”. They are suspected of lying, in other words, about conditions on the ship. Legal actions have sprung up from unhappy “guests” of the Grand Princess, their trips-of-a-lifetime wrecked by allegedly inadequate screening procedures. Professor Kentaro Iwata, a Japanese expert on infectious diseases who went on to the Diamond Princess, described the onboard response to the virus as “completely chaotic”.
EDIT
Cruise companies’ aversion to responsibility can be seen in a legendary court filing following the “poop cruise” of 2013, in which failing generators on the Carnival Triumph caused a backup of raw sewage into the passenger areas. Carnivals’ lawyers, CNN reported, said that the “ticket contract makes absolutely no guarantee for safe passage, a seaworthy vessel, adequate and wholesome food, and sanitary and safe living conditions.” Equally striking was the legal outcome to the 2012 wreck of the Costa Concordia, when the party atmosphere of cruises mixed fatally with questions of navigation: the owner Costa Crociere (another part of the Carnival empire), with the help of a plea bargain and €1m fine, and despite clear failings on its part, was freed of any management and operational responsibility.
Or you could take another incident that befell the ever unfortunate Princess Cruise lines, when the Caribbean Princess was found to have been dumping oily waste in the sea off southern England. In 2017 a Florida court found that the Caribbean and four more Princesses had been engaging in illegal practices, issued a record fine of $40m and put the company on probation for five years. President Jan Swartz performed a hand-wring to camera, as she has over Covid-19, to say that “we are very sorry for the actions of our employees” and that “the marine environment is incredibly important to us”. Princess ships then continued to pollute, for example by depositing faecal coliform in Alaskan waters. In 2019 they were fined a further $20m. If a combined penalty of $60m sounds like a lot, it is as Klein points out a small portion of the $3bn or so annual profits of Princess’s owner, Carnival. “To them, that’s just a cost of doing business,” he says.
And you have Venice, the actual city rather than the theme versions, where for years what are effectively multistorey hotels have been looming over its historic architecture, their mighty parps competing with church bells, their diesel smoke polluting the air, damaging the ecology of the lagoon and, say protesters, the foundations of buildings with the water they displace, and discharging thousands-strong fluxes of tourists on highly managed six-hour trinket-and-selfie binges in the city. Then, last summer, the 65,000-ton MSC Opera, its engine failing, crunched into a moored tourist boat like a boot on to a bug. There were miraculously no deaths, but the crash made the cruise industry’s previous assurances of safety sound hollow.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/apr/19/is-the-cruise-industry-finally-out-of-its-depth
