chengkp75

And that is just what you would be doing in a real emergency.

Not defensive in the least. It's just that when people question an expert (whether medical or marine fire safety, and I'm not including myself as an expert), they should have some experience, or suggested data to back up the question. Even if you went to steel partitions, lessons learned on the Star Princess would require that they open (and the reason they open is for fire safety, not passenger comfort), so that fire teams could proceed from one balcony to the next, closing in on the fire.

Do you mean specifically for the Concordia, or are you using that as a starting point for subsequent emergencies? As you know, the Concordia did not have a muster drill before the incident, and the lack of this is mentioned in the official report. Any subsequent emergencies, would have commentary about the passenger muster in each individual accident report. I would not expect any overall review of muster drill efficacy until there is another disaster requiring a review of procedures by the IMO Safety Committee. I don't think there is any debate on the efficacy of the muster stations. Your training was getting from wherever you were to your muster station along with the hundreds or thousands of other passengers doing the same thing at the same time. As for you standing around, wondering when this is going to be over, you see, you are looking at this only from your standpoint. While you and every other passenger is standing at the muster station (being accounted for and contained in a controlled and known location, which is the primary purpose of the muster), the crew are doing other things that you don't see, because you're not wandering around the ship. They are searching every cabin, marking them as vacant, searching public spaces, and collapsing the evacuation team down, deck by deck, to ensure that no one and nothing is missed. That all takes time. And, taking this further, you standing around doing nothing simulates what an actual emergency would be like, as you would likely be mustered hours before any thought was given by the Captain to putting you in a boat. Passengers always mistake "muster" with "getting into the lifeboats". Muster is about accountability during an emergency. There have been frequent musters just for a man overboard, where there was no danger to the vessel in any way, but the muster collects and accounts for everyone.

So, the fire safety experts are wrong? The closed divider blocks 95+% of the space between the bulkhead and the rail. That's not going to slow down fire spread, and it's not going to slow down the wind that blows the fire from one balcony to the next? And, opening the 1/3 of the space closest to the rail (furthest outboard), where the wind is the greatest is not going to change the ability of fire to spread? Sorry, but my years of shipboard fire training, and actual fire fighting disagrees with you, and agrees with the fire safety experts.

So, in a real emergency, everyone should follow the new muster drill, and decide when they want to saunter down to the muster station? The purpose of a drill is to train you in what you would actually experience in an emergency, the old drill did that, but the new one doesn't.

And, this is from a cabin steward with no fire training, or they would have known about this restriction. As noted above, SOLAS requires the fire zone boundary to extend out to the railing of the balcony.

After the Star Princess fire, where the fire zone boundaries did not extend past the side of the ship (i.e. not out to the balconies), and the balconies were found to be the major cause of the extensive spread of the fire, the fire zone boundaries are now extended out to the outer rail of balconies. So, without an inplace divider at the fire zone boundary, the fire zone is easily breached, and can allow fire to spread to the next zone. As a matter of fact, the dividers are fire retardant materials, such that they only smolder, not burn. The closed divider also diminishes the wind tunnel effect that was found on the Star Princess, along the side of a moving ship, which will reduce the speed of fire propagation.

When I read this in the article: "noted the success of the new drill in demonstrating real-world application of the safety procedures." I asked myself, "has Carnival had a real emergency?" Because that would be the only way that they could have had a success in demonstrating "real-world application" of the safety procedures. 'Cause the new drill bears no worldly resemblance to a "real-world" emergency. But, I would say that Carnival, and John Heald last, would have knowledge of whether the IMO and USCG are going to decide the e-muster is going away. Since SOLAS has not been amended to reflect the e-muster, it has likely only been provisionally approved, subject to review.

If the violation is outside of the cruise line's control (act of God), such as weather, the fine is waived.

It is far more typical that booking agents will allow combined cruises to be booked, and only months later when the compliance department reviews the booking, will the passenger be notified that the cruise is in violation of the PVSA. You would not have been "hauled off the ship". The fine is against the cruise line, CBP could give a hoot who the passenger/s is/are. However, it is the ticket contract that you sign where you give the cruise line the right to pass the fine on to you. The fine would have been added to your onboard account. So, you paying a fine is between you and Princess, not you and the government.

As it's been less than a year since the incident, I would not expect the Bahamian Maritime Authority report for another 4-6 months. And, as I've said in many threads about maritime incidents, the maritime industry has moved away from the "blame culture", and uses the "root cause analysis" method of investigating incidents. If individuals are not blamed for the incidents, it is found that they tend to give more truthful reports of the incident, and the "root cause" is more easily found. If the Captain followed the prescribed procedures per the ISM manual, then no blame will be apportioned to him, and it will not be a "mark" on the Captain's history. Only if found to have not followed approved procedures will any discipline be made against the Captain.

That reinforces to me that the Australian cleaning was not a NZ "approved" cleaning, but a simple commercial cleaning contract, where the contractor and owner decide how much time and expense is to be used, not basing things on governmental regulations.

Was the NZ cleaning before or after the Oz cleaning?

Since I have no idea what the company is, I can't say whether it is on the approved list or not, but it does not have to be.

Read the regulations completely, and you will find that they do work, and are not that odious for vessels, if properly implemented. And, once again, the cleaning company, in Australia, was not "authorized" by the NZ government, and was not required to be so.

If you read the NZ regulations, the only "government approved" cleaning services are those that a vessel uses within 24 hours of entering NZ waters, and only in NZ waters. I understand the Explorer was cleaned in Australia waters, so the cleaning contractor is not "approved" by the NZ government. Typically, hulls are not cleaned regularly, except in dry dock. NZ rules are a mandatory version of the IMO guidelines regarding hull fouling, and if a cruise line maintains records of following the guidelines set by IMO, then cleaning is not required. As noted, the IMO has already accepted hull fouling guidelines, worldwide, and I would expect way more countries to adopt these as regulations in the coming years, and within a decade they will be mandatory worldwide. See my comment above about the "approved" company. The same as every other ship, cruise or otherwise, in the world, you clean the hull at dry dock, or when a local regulation requires it. Again, the cleaning company was not "approved". In addition to my comments that have been linked here from the Cunard forum, if growth is particularly "hard" (heavy mollusk encrustation), the brush carts used will not work, as they will simply crawl over the encrustation. Then it falls to hand scraping by the divers, which is extremely difficult, physically exhausting, and very time consuming for the divers. Other ships have been turned away from NZ than cruise ships, it is just that cruise ships get the publicity. Hull cleaning is not limited to a 30 day time limit, as someone posted. The inspection/cleaning needs to be done within 30 days prior to entering NZ waters, and then if the ship maintains records of how they are meeting the IMO biofouling guidelines (or the NZ regulations, which are the same), they do not need to have another inspection or cleaning.

If the reason for missing the foreign port is outside the cruise line's control (weather), then the fine is waived. Nope. It was a resort/casino in Bahamas that had a small ship that "ferried" guests from Florida to the resort, and they wanted to increase the usage of the vessel by selling casino cruises to nowhere on the other days of the week. CBP is the entity that decided that the foreign crew working on foreign ships doing cruises to nowhere were in fact working within the US, and would require work visas, not crew visas. In fact, cruises to nowhere are specifically mentioned in the PVSA, and are still allowed by the PVSA. It is the requirement to obtain work visas for the entire crew that drove the cruise lines to stop offering cruises to nowhere. Cruises to nowhere are still legal. Nowhere did the major cruise lines get involved in the situation, and in fact, they would have preferred to be able to continue to offer the occasional cruise to nowhere.

My wording stands corrected, the partitions were "not readily openable". Fire teams on the cruise ships I've worked all have the key to open dividers since the Star Princess, and the locks are redesigned. And, as someone who has extensive shipboard firefighting experience and training, yes, the fire teams would have been going from balcony to balcony on the deck of the fire, so as to get water into the cabins on fire from the outside, which you cannot do from above. Unless you are standing on the balcony directly above the fire, you cannot direct a hose stream of water into the cabin below, and even then it does not go very far into the cabin, simple geometry. Also, directly above the fire is the worst place to try to fight it from. On Star Princess, the fire teams were trying to chop through the dividers to provide firefighting from the outside into the cabins. Ships are not required to have fire suppression (sprinklers) on balconies, if they have smoke detectors there. The real reason for the extent of the fire was the fact that the balcony furniture, deck covering, and the divider partitions themselves were all highly combustible materials. This has also been remediated by requiring non-combustible materials in these areas. And, I dispute the statement that only one cabin had damage. One of the findings was that the glass balcony doors, with aluminum frames were not fire rated, and many either exploded or the frames melted in, allowing fire into the cabins. You can see in any picture of the Star Princess after the fire, where many balcony doors had failed and were completely missing, so how could the fire have not entered these cabins? 168 hi-fog sprinkler heads activated in the fire, 9 in the area did not activate. The worst damage was one cabin where the sprinkler head did not activate. Many cabins were damaged by the balcony doors failing, and the fire damage confined to the area directly adjacent to the door, but the sprinklers kept the spread from going further into the cabin. And, as noted in the MAIB report, a large contributory factor to the fire's spread was the wind generated by the ship's speed along the side of the ship. Closed dividers help to stop this wind tunnel.

Anyone who expected cruising to return at pre-Covid prices, or nearly so, and with pre-Covid service levels is smoking some real good stuff.

I believe the NZ requirement is for a diver survey, and they decide what percentage of the hull is fouled, and with what types and species of growth, to determine whether cleaning is required. A cleaning service will do a survey dive first, to determine how much work is involved, to be able to quote a price.

I think all the lines are quite a ways away from making "bucketloads of profit". The cost cutting is to offset the massive debt service they incurred.

Don't know anything about them.

The requirement to have opening balcony dividers (for firefighting reasons, not passenger comfort) were as a result of the Star Princess fire in 2006. So, any ship built before this does not have to have dividers that open, unless cabins have been added after 2006 (like the Summit). Most ships built before 2006 have not gone to the expense of replacing older non-openable dividers for openable ones. The reasons that dividers cannot be opened are: If the two cabins are in different fire zones (on either side of one of the hallway doors), then the dividers cannot be opened as this breaks the fire zone boundary. Otherwise, most ships have policies as to how many total dividers can be opened, and how many in a row, as the dividers act as fire breaks. It is also up to the Captain's personal risk tolerance to decide whether to allow dividers to be opened or not.

Here's a pretty typical brush cart, it's about 3' x 3', and is driven hydraulically (both brush motion and forward motion), and uses a suction action to keep it against the hull. Much bigger than this, and the diver can't control it. Depending on where the cleaning is done, determines whether or not the debris must be collected. Those carts use a water driven "vacuum" to lift the debris to the surface, where the debris is filtered out and the water sent overboard. Here's a link to a video about one of these systems:

Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner.