Carnival Triumph cruise from hell goes on as bus breaks down
and then passengers are told there is a fault with their PLANE!
Triumph passengers were stuck again! This time a bus they were aboard
broke down on its way from Mobile, Ala., to New Orleans.
The crippled Carnival Triumph cruse ship with 3,143 passengers and a crew of 1,086 docks in Mobile, Ala., Feb 14
Exhausted and bedraggled travelers had to haul down their luggage and wait for a replacement bus to arrive, according to
passenger Clark Jones.
“The bus literally breaks down,” passenger Clark Jones told Live at Daybreak. “It comes to a stop in the middle of the highway.
We have to pull over to the side. It's dark.
All the lights on the bus go out.”
Guests groaned in disbelief as the vehicle ground to halt around 2:30 a.m. and the driver told them they’d had a breakdown.
“My friend Jacob and I, we just started laughing. People were giggling. Other people were not happy,” said Jones.
Bus passenger Jacob Combs, 30, thought the worst was over after the bus fiasco – but when he got to the New Orleans
airport where his Carnival charter flight to
Houston waited, it was delayed 90 minutes.
“I was told it had an electrical failure,” said Combs, who couldn’t believe his bad luck. He landed in Houston about an hour
behind schedule Friday afternoon and
boarded yet another Carnival bus – this one to Galveston, where he’d left his car at the start of the cruise. “If this breaks down
on the way I think I’ll just give up,” he
said.
It was just the latest calamity for guests who had stepped aboard the Carnival Triumph for a pleasure cruise that left
Galveston, Tex., Feb. 7.
It was scheduled to return on Feb. 11 after a stop in Cozumel, Mexico, but an early morning engine room fire on Feb. 10
knocked out all its propulsion — and its waste
management system.
As the boat drifted northward, the 3,143 passengers and 1,086 crewmembers soon realized they were stuck on a floating
outhouse. Sewage backed up in showers,
overflowed from toilets and leaked over decks and floors.
Carnival scrambled to rescue the disabled ship and at first intended to have tugboats bring it to Progreso, Mexico, on the Gulf
Coast.
But strong northward currents quickly shifted the powerless Triumph closer to Mobile, so when tugs were ready, the company
directed them to Alabama.
It took three days at a glacial pace to get the crippled ship back to shore.
Passengers cheered and chanted “Let us off, let us off,” as they waited up to four hours to disembark late Thursday night and
into Friday.
Some boarded buses directly to Houston and Galveston, a seven-hour journey. Others, like Jones, opted for a two-hour drive
to New Orleans and a plane ride to
Houston Friday.
Debbie Moyse, a 32-year-old mother from Phoenix who was on the Triumph with four friends, said passengers slept on the
deck in tents made of sheets to escape smell
and heat below.
The hardest part was the listing of the ship.
“We kept asking ourselves, ‘Are we going to tip over?’” she said.
Triumph’s disaster is the second high-profile incident for a Carnival ship in a little more than a year. The company’s Costa
Concordia ran aground off Italy in January
2012, killing 32 people.
Passengers from the disabled Carnival Triumph cruise ship arrive by bus at the Hilton Riverside Hotel in New Orleans,
Friday, Feb. 15.
Passengers of the Carnival Triumph walk to their buses after docking at the cruise terminal in Mobile, Ala.,
Thursday, Feb. 14.
Carnival Triump passenger Clark Jones tweets a photo from inside one of the charter buses.