A Carnival Cruise Line ship appeared to be flooding this week, causing panic among passengers until the staff revealed it was a breach in the ship’s fire suppression system.
A passenger named Marla Haase posted clips of the harrowing events on Facebook. She and the other vacationers panicked when they saw water rising in the hallway of the ship, thinking that they were sinking. Thankfully, it was merely a burst pipe in the sprinkler system.
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Still an entire deck of the ship and 50 staterooms were completely flooded, and Haase was not pleased with the cruise liner’s solution to the problem. She said that she and her family had to spend the night sleeping on yoga mats on the floor of the spa room.
“Um…. FB folks… this is a rare moment of internet connection,” she wrote. “[W]e are flooding on a cruise.”
Haase posted photos and videos of the wrecked hallway filling with water, and peoples’ belongings floating out of doors and down the hall. She deleted most of the posts, though one remains showing employees scooping water into buckets in an attempt to drain the ship.
“Progress,” she wrote simply.
Haase compared the experience to the movie Titanic. “We heard the violins and the silverware all came crashing down. What in the world… say a prayer for (us) all,” she wrote.
In another post, Haase said that her brother’s c-pap machine had caught on fire after it was under the water for too long.
“We have been relocated to the floor in the spa to sleep on yoga mats on the floor,” she wrote. “Mark Haase – brother-n-law – laid down, put in c-pap machine on, started to fall asleep and it caught on fire! The transformer was submerged in water too long so medical folks on board checked it out and said it was fine… thankfully we were not asleep when it went up in flames. No alarms went off again.”
The ship left New Orleans on April 29. Haase and the rest of the passengers were on day 5 of a 7-day luxury cruise when the flooding began.
Carnival Cruise Line confirmed the incident in a report by Daily Mail, but promised that the flooding will not prevent the ship from returning to New Orleans on Sunday.
“Our onboard teams began cleanup immediately related to this clean water from a fire suppression system,” the company said in a statement to Fox News. “We appreciate our guests’ understanding and sincerely apologize for this disruption. We also thank our crew members for their quick action and hard work.”
Passengers who were affected were given a full refund as well as a 50 percent off voucher for another cruise in the future. The ship also offered to fly passengers home if they chose to leave the ship early.
