The Getaway: Cruise Mishaps: How Normal Are They?

Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

The Triumph being towed to Mobile Bay in February.

Its name is Triumph, yet this year has been anything but that for the 14-year-old ship owned by Carnival Corporation, the world's largest cruise company.

The latest news is that Carnival is seeking to dismiss lawsuits from the Triumph passengers whose ordeal this winter transfixed the nation. In case you've blocked out the vile details: in February a fire in the engine room shut down the Triumph's power, propulsion, sewage and air-conditioning systems, leaving 4,200 passengers adrift for days in the Gulf of Mexico with little to eat and raw sewage seeping through the ship's walls and carpets. Even in the home stretch — when the crippled ship was being tugged to port — a towline snapped, prolonging the rescue.

Savvy travelers have to ask: Is this normal? How many fires, power failures and other unwelcome incidents are there in the life of the average cruise ship?

Before offering some answers, let's recount what has happened to the Triumph over the last few months.

Triumph floated around the Gulf of Mexico for five days while news of the rank conditions leaked out through Facebook, Twitter and CNN, which had a helicopter whirring around the Triumph for nonstop coverage. The notion of travelers spending their vacations trapped amid raw sewage so captured the collective American imagination that "Saturday Night Live" opened a show with a skit set onboard the Triumph in which a perky cruise director informed passengers that "the Superstar Karaoke Bar is now officially a toilet."

Amazingly, the Triumph's travails didn't end after it finally reached port in Mobile, Ala. Early last month while undergoing repairs, the ship became unmoored in strong winds, crashed into another boat and wound up with a 20-foot-long gash in its side. Could the Triumph be more unlucky? Yes. A few weeks later explosions from fuel barges on the Mobile River forced workers on the nearby Triumph to evacuate. That incident was seemingly beyond Carnival's control. And accidents happen on other passenger ships. But it's worth looking closely at the Triumph because it belongs to a company that spent more last year than any other cruise line on lobbying Congress, according to the secretary of the United States Senate.

Is what happened to the Triumph normal? Obtaining answers is not easy.

"No one is systemically collecting data of collisions, fires, evacuations, groundings, sinkings," said Jim Walker, a maritime lawyer in Miami who has attended more than half a dozen Congressional hearings about cruise ship crime and passenger safety. The reason for the lack of data is that cruise lines, while based in the United States, typically incorporate and register their ships overseas. Industry experts say the only place cruise lines are obligated to report anything is to the state under whose laws the ship operates. "The whole industry is essentially outsourced abroad," said Mr. Walker. Or, as Senator Charles E. Schumer said in a statement after the Triumph debacle: "Cruise ships, in large part operating outside the bounds of United States enforcement, have become the wild west of the travel industry."

Vance Gulliksen, a spokesman for Carnival, said that given that the company carries 4.5 million passengers annually, the incidents on the Triumph "are quite rare."

"Carnival's ships are extremely safe and we meet or exceed all regulatory standards in every respect," he said in an e-mail. "Nonetheless, Carnival has taken the recent events extremely seriously and we want to do everything we can to prevent it from happening again." To that end, Carnival said it has begun investing $300 million in enhancements across its fleet, including improved emergency power capabilities, and increased fire prevention and suppression systems.

Yet for the industry overall, there remains no comprehensive public database of events at sea like fires, power failures and evacuations. Neither the International Maritime Organization nor the United States Coast Guard track everything. But there is one unlikely man who does.

"It's a Canadian professor of sociology," Mr. Walker said, "who testifies in front of the senate."

Ross A. Klein, an American with dual citizenship and a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, was a longtime cruise enthusiast, spending more than 300 days at sea between 1992 and 2002. During that time, he saw that there were differences between what the cruise industry was saying about environmental and labor issues, and what he was observing.

Today, Mr. Klein is an authority on the cruise industry, having testified at hearings before the House of Representatives and the Senate about onboard crimes, disappearances and industry oversights. His Web site, CruiseJunkie.com, is a record of fires, sunken ships, collisions and other events at sea over the last few decades that have been culled from news reports and sources like crew members and passengers. There are some limits: Mr. Klein receives fewer reports about incidents in Asia, Africa and South America, therefore most of the information is about cruises in North America and Europe. And he is unlikely to learn about problems that are not reported by English speakers or English language news organizations. "I'm sure there are a lot more incidents going on that we don't know about," he said.