P.I. Pulse: Another Cruise Ship Blunder

 

Yes, it’s happened again. Our personal injury lawyers at the Law Offices of Aronberg & Aronberg are beginning to think it might be time to create a new blog site entirely dedicated to our coverage of cruise ship disasters to which innocent individuals fall victim.

It seems like, on a more and more frequent basis, we receive information about a cruise vacation gone awry. From one cruise ship toppling off the coast of Italy to another losing electricity off the coast of Florida, cruise liners and their owners have been making headlines in recent months. It is often said that no news is bad news, but news of this recent barrage of harmful and often disgusting incidents going viral might very well lead us to question the validity of the cliché. Just last month, we penned a blog about what was deemed the “poop cruise,” on which paying customers were forced to live in squalor and sewage for days on end, without access to electricity and plumbing.

Now, this week, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship named the Explorer of the Seas returned back to land having set a new record. According to the Center for Disease Control, more people became sick on board this cruise ship than they have aboard any other cruise ship in the past two decades. According to this CNN article, almost 700 people fell ill on the cruise (including 630 passengers and 56 crew workers). However, according to a passenger on the cruise ship quoted in the article, the number is probably closer to 1,000 – many people felt too sick to go down to the infirmary and so they simply stayed in their rooms; as such, they were not counted in the official tally of “sick” individuals.

Those who were able to make it to the infirmary waited hours and hours to be seen. There they sat, waiting for medical help, while their fellow passengers around them vomited into buckets and bags.

Could it have been a simple case of seasickness and a coincidence that hundreds and hundreds of individuals all happened to be seasick on this particular cruise? It is highly doubtful that seasickness is the sole answer to what was a major problem. Cruise ships all over the world encounter unfavorable conditions, yet there are protocols in place for handling these types of situations such that the environment inside the ship does not deteriorate in the manner that it did aboard the Explorer of the Seas.

When you pay your hard-earned money to go on a cruise, you expect to sit back and relax and enjoy a trip on the open seas. You do not and should not expect to spend your trip vomiting, surrounded by various forms of excrement. Just as the hotels at which you stay have the responsibility of ensuring a safe and healthy environments, so too do the cruise ships on which you vacation.

If you’ve been injured or have suffered any damages due to an incident aboard a cruise ship, you should not have to incur the costs associated with your recuperation. For information on how you can be compensated for your struggles and losses, contact us to schedule a free consultation. You can reach us by calling 561-266-9191 or e-mailing us at daronberg@build.simple.biz

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