See: http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006590
How to Survive
A Freak Wave--
And Avoid Whining
Sometimes you just have to ride out the storm.
Whiners. I would love to be on that jury.
it won't even go to trial - the cruise line will settle.
did you see the case of the woman who won a big settlement from Winnebago because they did not tell her the cruise control was not an auto-pilot, and she left the drivers seat to go make herself a sandwich while the motor home crashed?
if she can win that case, this case against the cruise line has merit. not for $100M, but for something.
This is just another shake-down by people wanting to take advantage of natural phenomena at the expense of the cruise line. The North Sea is notoriously rough, and it was not the ship's captain or the cruise line's fault that a rogue wave hit the vessel. The cruise line should fight this and not settle, which I fear it will do.
One would think you go on a cruise ship at your own risk. Stormy weather is an an act of God, and you can't hold the crew accountable. They should throw the case out!
Not if you have a choice.
The passengers, and their lawyer, claim Captain Peterstam had a choice. If he could have gone round about, roast him and Norwegian Cruise Line.
But in the end, the passengers may indeed NOT have a claim. In another article came this bit of info: "The Coast Guard has said the ship's captain acted appropriately."
A vacation is suppose to be a get-away-from-everyone, not join 1500 weirdos and drunks on a boat for 7 days.
From the story: Four passengers were injured.
These ships have schedules to keep
From another story, "and was forced to return early for a taping of Donald Trump's TV show"
By the way - you can view the whole of the posted story without NYPost registration here:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,159502,00.html
I hope they don't get one red cent.
IF BUSH WOULD SIGN THE KYOTO TREATY THIS WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED !!! ...
</sarcasm off>
Well, that took a heck of a lot of searching, but I finally found an updated link for it. Here's a video of the QE2 wave, from a lounge on Deck 2 during it's maiden crossing from Southhampton to New York. http://63.217.28.3/images/other2/colin_camerons_wave_on_www.cruiseserver.net.WMV
Note that I had to copy/paste that URL into my winamp to get it to play. Pretty freaky!
Cruise ships navigate to avoid storms. They aren't military navy ships with trained hands who are accustomed to rough seas. They are floating cities loaded with rubber legged civilians aboard who are frequently older people with health problems.
If anything, these people are owed a couple of extra days that they lost from the ship hastening back to meet someone else's timetable. Nevertheless, some of our most notable transportation disasters outside of terrorism (Titanic, Challenger, and the Andrea Gail come to mind) were because someone needed or wanted to meet an arbitrary deadline. This is the lesson that should be seared, seared into the brain of anyone taking responsibility for passengers and crew. These people were lucky, IMHO, that all they got was wet and banged up a little bit.