AV
Posted on 04/17/2005 4:50:14 AM PDT by Rebelbase
A "freak wave" more than 70 feet high slammed a luxury cruise ship steaming for New York yesterday, flooding cabins, injuring passengers and forcing the liner to stop for emergency repairs.
The Norwegian Dawn, an opulent ocean liner almost 1,000 feet long, limped into Charleston, S.C., yesterday afternoon after it hit vicious seas in an overnight storm off Florida - then was creamed by the rogue wave after dawn.
"[My room] was destroyed by stuff getting thrown all over the place," passenger James Fraley, of Keansburg, N.J., told NBC News before embarking on the 12-hour drive home because he didn't want to set foot on the ship again.
"It was pure chaos."
The ship, which sailed from New York last Sunday with 2,500 passengers, had been due back today.
It weathered most of a wild storm that featured gale-force winds and choppy seas. But then the vessel, longer than three football fields, was suddenly smacked by the "freak wave," said Norwegian Cruise Line spokeswoman Susan Robison. It broke a pair of windows and flooded 62 cabins, she said.
"The sea had actually calmed down when the wave seemed to come out of thin air at daybreak," Robison said. "Our captain, who has 20 years on the job, said he never saw anything like it."
The tidal wave wrecked windows on the ninth and 10th floors and wreaked havoc below decks, destroying furniture, the onboard theater, and a store that sold expensive gifts.
It also injured four passengers and terrified scores more, many of whom lost belongings and were being flown back to New York early this morning.
"My daughter said people were freaking out," said Mel Blanck, 74, whose daughter, Caren Hogan, 42, of Matawan, N.J., was vacationing aboard with her family. "She said some doors were ripped off and broken glass was everywhere."
In a message Hogan left on her parents' voice mail, she said her ship "feels like the Titanic" and described "water running everywhere, with people getting hurt and panicking."
"She felt lucky that she and her children weren't hurt," said Blanck, whose daughter had called from South Carolina last night. "She's calm now, but she said it was a nightmare."
The floating city of a ship, which was commissioned in 2002, left New York a week ago for Orlando, Miami and the Bahamas. It had started heading home when it ran into the wicked weather.
During the storm, one frightened passenger called a relative who relayed the information to the Coast Guard, which escorted the ship into Charleston yesterday.
"The ocean is unforgiving; it doesn't care who is out there," said Petty Officer Bobby Nash of the Coast Guard in Florida. "This could have happened to anyone."
Repairs were done last night, and the ship resumed it's voyage around midnight after a team of Coast Guard inspectors gave it approval.
Many of the Norwegian Dawn's passengers remained on the ship while it was readied for the sea again, Robison said. The battered vessel is expected to return to New York tomorrow.
All passengers would be given a partial refund, a credit for a future trip and access to the ship's open bar, Robison said.
Well, I did spend a vacation on Nassau one year. And the waters were gorgeous. I guess a cruise down around Florida and over to Cancun, St. Thomas and the islands would be ok. But I don't think I would trust a cruise to Alaska now.
Smoke in the cabin? Only? Gee, they are all heart. LOL!
Isn't it frustrating how a still photo cannot convey the true menace of a giant wave. Your description of "what happened next" was very illustrative.
I have been in some really bad weather in the Southern Ocean, and all I can remember is hour after hour of saying "wow, look at this one" as we were running before the seas. But the camera never did them justice because the boat was not ever level with the horizon, so the angle to the wave as caught by the camera was as you said - heading down into the trough or rising on the back of the wave.
You are correct. Any good surfer or swimmer would know.
Cruise ships are really tolerant of smokers. The only restrictions on smoking are in the dining areas, the theaters, library, etc......in other words, same as in land hotels and restaurants in most states.
Leni
He he.
I caught that too.
Must have meant Canaveral?
You might want to look up soliton as a start.
True enough there aren't very many of them, of course, but their existence has finally been acknowledged. Here's an article: "Rogue Waves The physics of pure hell at sea By Bruce Stutz DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 07 | July 2004 | Astronomy & Physics. Here's the URL for that one: http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-04/features/rogue-waves/
After reading this article try imagining the size of the soliton created when the catch basin around the Antarctic Ice Cap began breaking up 14,000 years ago. Think about how it would scour the continental shelf of everything to the North!
I would think that the navigator and the captain were asleep on this one. There isn't any reason to put to sea in this type of weather in a cruise ship. Once at sea a cruise ship should do all that is possible to navigate around this type of weather.
This thing doesn't have the luxury of water tight hatches and doors nor does it have a military mission.
I rode out a few storms in a U.S.Navy tin can that was less than five hundred feet long. Sailors in storms are one thing whereas civilians are another.
Surely this vessel had at the least the Weather Channel available.
If you REALLY want to have your hair stand on end check out the thread running that tells about the famous (infamous) typhoon of 1944 in the Pacific, where we lost three destroyers and damaged any number of other surface ships.
Huge waives, winds to 130 MPH, and a barometer that fell to 27.3 inches. That is low; the Beaufort scale meant less than nothing after that.
High seas regards,
Jimmy, I think I have seen enough to put the fear of God in me concerning the ocean. Makes me feel very small indeed.
I Googled it. http://www.roblightbody.com/liners/qe-2/1995_freak_wave.htm
Nope, no talk of RADAR.
In one prominent rogue-wave encounter, Capt. Ronald Warwick, who followed in his father's footsteps to command the British ocean liner Queen Elizabeth II, was on the bridge at 4 a.m. on Sept. 11, 1995. Two hundred miles off Newfoundland, headed for New York, Warwick had been trying, without success, to dodge Hurricane Luis.
Minutes before, monstrous seas smashed windows in the Grand Salon, 72 feet off the water. Warwick had given the order confining passengers to quarters.
Suddenly, a huge wave loomed off the bow, huge even for a ship the size of the QE2, at nearly 1,000 feet long, more than 100 feet wide, carrying nearly 3,000 people.
Hundreds of miles from shore, the face of the wave was steep, like a breaking wall of water. Warwick later described that "it looked as though the ship was headed for the white cliffs of Dover."
Officers on the bridge estimated the wave at 92 feet, because they were eyeball to eyeball with the crest.
"(I)t broke with tremendous force over the bow. An incredible shudder went through the ship, followed a few minutes later by two smaller shudders," Warwick recalled in a 1996 article in Marine Observer.
The ship's bow dropped into a "hole" of a trough behind the first wave and was hit by a second wave of between 91 and 96 feet high that cleaned a mast right off the foredeck.
Warwick, his passengers and crew were lucky. No one was injured. It was a far different fate for the German container ship Munchen, which sank in the middle of the Atlantic in 1978 with no warning, no May Day.
Its not uncommon for these waves to reach over 90 feet high. The southerns areas around the two capes are a prime area as currents along with storms brew up some real monsters.
AV
What an awesome photo - and scary story.
Most of the new liners look topheavy to me. Any pix of this ship ?
They get the same weather reports as we do. What were they thinking? Save a little fuel?
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