maybe i am sitting here with just a little to much time on my hands wondering things

to keep it fare pick your favorite large ship over 100,000 tones carnival dream, conquest, norwegian epic, rccl voyager, freedom, oasis
princess grand class, costa conquest class, you pick
nobody over 100,000 tones is excluded.

now i know they run countless computer models whereby several thousand orderly little dots file out of a "ship" into lifeboats and voila everybody' is going home happy and safe.

but in the real world has anybody actually run a real test, with real people, some more familiar some less familiar with the ship. some more mobile some less mobile, on the moving sea
to see if in this day of mega ships it actually really possible to get 4000-50000 passengers and crew safely off a mega ship into lifeboats, in the 30 minutes required by maritime law.

i wonder this because, i wonder if we are witnessing
the making of a tragedy unfold before our very eyes, as the ships get bigger, and bigger. the odds are sooner or later there is going to be a major event happen on one of these ships (fire, sinking, terrorist event)

then the lawyers will be screaming, the lawsuits will be flying, and everybody will scream they should have seen this coming and done something to prevent it.

so again i ask can it realistictly be done? or should the maritime laws be changed/updated to reflect todays "real" sized ships

In my honest opinion if there was a serious fire, flood, collision or emergency a modern cruise ship will never be evacuated.

Even when a meal is announced the movement through a ships passageway is at snails pace.

The obstacles are:
1. Elderly frail passengers
2. Passengers in wheel chairs
3. Passengers in motor scooters
4. Passengers with walking sticks

This is not being discriminatory to invalidity problems but if one of the above were to stumble in a passageway it could block the exit of hundreds of passengers to safety. A wheel chair or motor scooter that has crashed, no one will get past unless you are prepared to just walk over the top of them.

I am not sure if anyone has heard of this but apparantly in tender ports if the safety officer deems that a passenger in a wheel chair or with a walking stick cant get off the tender at the dock then they cancell tender operations due to saftey concerns in order not to discriminate against these passegers. There are occasions where a normal fit and healthy person can get off a tender when a walking stick person cant. If this is the case they call off tender operations.

On that particular day the sea was calm, no wind and no weather problems and no currents. In fact it was a calm sunny day that and had perfect weather.

When we got to the dock I was able as well as many other able passengers to get off the tender. There were sea wall steps to negotiate and for some reason the boating crew were leaving allot of slack in the lines and not securely roping us to the pier. When it came time for wheel chair bound passengers or walking stick passengers to get off they could not. The stewards on duty refused to lift them and they had to go back to the ship.

For some unknown reason whilst on my tour the Captain canceled tender operations for the rest of the passengers.

In my professional experience from service in the Navy I determined the weather was fine and not a problem and that the frail could not get off possibly due to incompetent boat handling operations where they left too much slack in the lines and the engine from the tenders caused enough backwash to move back and forth from the pier. Had they snugly tied the tender up the frail would have had better chance. (It actually made me suspect that they did not want to scratch the tenders based on how they were docking them)

I should also point out that the 200 of us that got off no one was hurt or injured returning to the ship once the tour was completed hours later.

It may be run different from line to line, but I honestly have seen incompetent handling of tenders and also decisions to cancell tender operations based on the "weather" when the weather was fine.

now i know the law says "it shall be done"
but realisticly, and for one am not sure it really "can" be done
when a new ship enters us waters the coast guard
boards a ship and has the crew show that they can safely perform such functions as board the lifeboats
and lower them.
the ship is then issued some sort of "operating certifcate" passengers board, the ship sails, everybodys happy.

but what good is that "operating certificate" if when there is an actual emergency the dirty little joke per sey, is that they really can't get everybody safely off the ship in 30 minutes, they know it, the coast guard knows it, the home office knows it. do they all hope joe cruiser never looks past his bucket of beer, and the big screen, and thinks about his, her survival in an actual emergency.

You only have to look at the snails pace lines in the restaurants, embarkation/disembarkation or entering and leaving the theatre to realise that you will never evacuate a ship in time.

Let's face fact, I am 6'4, 235lbs, if I brush against someone by accident it normally isn't pretty (so I avoid doing it), however stop and think about the number of people on these mega liners, all trying to get to the boats in one go, someone will get knocked to the ground and unless they are very lucky they will be trampled.