Modern cruise ships are incredibly safe.
The crews drill regularly on every possible scenario and go over what to do should anything go wrong.
Things, of course, do sometimes go wrong. Cruise ships have fires, plumbing problems can create a mess, and bad weather can bring water to places where it's not supposed to be.
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Like plane crashes, cruise-ship disasters are rare, but when they occur, they get outsized media coverage. That has left some would-be-cruisers worried that they will be on the next Titanic, no matter how silly that idea seems.
Cinema_bear98 shared their fears in a popular Reddit post.
"I’m going solo on a cruise in January. It’ll be my first cruise and I’m excited but nervous at the same time. I just can’t get the thought of sinking out of my head," they said.
"The cruise line had an open house yesterday with a tour of the ship we’d be on and I made a fool of myself by asking what the chances of hitting something and sinking were and I brought up the Italian ship that sank in 2012."
The poster knows that the fear is not fully rational but still posed the question:
"What are the chances of another Titanic happening?"
Image source: Daniel Kline/ComeCruiseWith.com
Cruise ship officer answers question about sinking
People's fears of a cruise ship sinking make sense in the same way that people are afraid to fly even though the statistics make very clear that driving to the airport comes with much higher risk than flying in an airplane.
Going2Narnia, who identifies themselves as a cruise ship officer, offered a lengthy response:
Chances are low, never zero. Rest assured that the deck officers and engineering officers are good at their jobs. They will do their absolute best to ensure safe passage of the vessel. This sometimes means missing ports due to weather or technical issues, but at the core of every decision is the safety of you and every single other person on the ship.
The engine room is manned 24/7, meaning if there’s an alarm or issue, there is a trained engineer on hand to solve it. The bridge is equally manned 24/7 while underway by one junior and one senior bridge officer, whose sole job is to safely navigate the vessel from port to port. They plan the voyages in advance and are familiar with the routes. If not, like the ship is going somewhere they haven’t been before, the senior navigation officer will extensively research the route and plan it, even going as far as to plot it on the electronic chart, so as to never go off course.
Regarding Concordia, that was over ten years ago, and regulations have changed since then. Carnival corp also changed their tune and opened a training centre (I think in Netherlands) specifically to train officers to be way, way more vigilant. Other companies like Royal have their own training centres. An incident like Concordia will likely never happen again. To put it simply- that carry on is not welcomed anymore.
What does this mean for you when you go on board in January?
It means you can relax.
But..
My advice (as a ships officer) - take the safety drill seriously, listen to it, understand it. Be aware of your emergency escape route and how to get to your muster station. Remember- seven short blasts, one long blast of the ships horn and you better be moving to your muster station. Because, like I said at the start, the chance of an emergency impacting the integrity of the ship is very, very low, but it’s never zero.
Concordia was a Costa ship that sank in 2012. It was a tragedy, but it was not another Titanic for the Carnival-owned cruise line.
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"I don't want to minimize the awful cost to the families of those who were lost aboard the Costa Concordia, but numerically, 32 of those aboard died, which represents less than 1% of those aboard," MakingItGreen posted.
"The worst cruise ship accident in decades still had a 99% survival rate. If I think the ship I'm on will capsize, I'm getting to the top deck and staying there until the situation passes. She suffered awful damage from the initial grounding and still took nearly half an hour to roll over."
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