chengkp75

Greenland, like many other cruise ship destinations, has figured out that cruise ship tourists spend far less in the local economy than other forms of tourism. They are looking at restricting ship visits as a way of minimizing the environmental impact of tourism, while maximizing the economic benefit.

If they are showing a delay, yet making 18 knots, there is still a power generation problem, as the Gulf Stream should be adding 2-5 knots to the ship's speed, so if she was at full speed, she should be doing 20-21 knots.

Yes, in Virginia, funeral homes are authorized to transport bodies. It is my understanding, though, that when a person dies when not under a doctor's care, that the attending EMT, police, or funeral home, must notify the coroner of the death, and the coroner must examine the body before transport. Only the coroner, or an attending physician, can issue a certificate of death.

There are regular methods of controlling and preventing this bacteria on the ships: HVAC systems have sanitizing pads in the condensate drains of the air handlers (where standing water could grow the bacteria and then introduce it into the HVAC air flow) Shower heads are sanitized (taken off if fixed, or dangled if hand held) in a bucket of sanitizing solution for 10 minutes. Whirlpools and hot tubs are "super chlorinated" weekly to 100ppm, in addition to the normal chlorination level Yes, chlorinating the water does kill the bacteria, which is why the ship must maintain a residual chlorine level in the water at all times. The problem with shower heads is that there is always a little water inside the head, and over time the chlorine in this water will dissipate, and then you have non-chlorinated water standing with air, and the bacteria can form and grow, and then be sprayed out of the shower head. Therefore, spraying Lysol on the shower head will do nothing. Now that the ship has had a case of legionella, the remediation measures will include more frequent sanitizing of the shower heads, more frequent super-chlorination of the hot tubs, more frequent changing of the HVAC sanitizing pads, spraying disinfectant into the air handlers of the HVAC system. As for the CDC, not all reports to the CDC are made public. As far as I know, from my experience, only gastro-intestinal illness outbreak reports (and not all of those) are made public. Since legionella is a pulmonary disease, I don't believe that the reports of mediation methods are made public. Further, the CDC, even for it's GI illness outbreak reports, is not always updated in a timely fashion.

Actually, the key thing is that the ship has zero tolerance for drugs that are illegal in the flag country, by maritime regulation. Even HAL, whose flag state of Holland has decriminalized marijuana, does not allow it on their ships, as they must meet IMO regulations. So, whether the ship went to all countries where it was legal, it is not legal on the ship.

Nope, its a thing: https://www.weather.gov/lmk/twilight-types#:~:text=Nautical Twilight%3A,visible%2C even under moonless conditions.

Gee, Andy, don't you want to get into "nautical twilight"?

Your phone does not care what power is put into the charger, just what comes out of the charger. This wattage is fixed by the charger design, from 5v and 1 amp (5 watt) to 20v and 5 amp (100 watt). This is determined by the circuitry of the charger, and is not affected by the charger input power. And, as noted, since wattage is determined by voltage, current, and resistance, and since the resistance of the charger circuit does not change when you switch from a 110v outlet to a 220v outlet, that means that when you double the voltage (220v from 110v), you halve the current. This is a known phenomenon of electrical circuits, and why many countries outside the US use 220v power, because for the same appliance, you use less current at the higher voltage, and less current means less chance of electrocution.

"Systemic" issues would be belied by the following statement. What is different from the OP's cruise and this one? The passengers.

Yes, SF to Honolulu is 2095 nm, while LA to Honolulu is 2231 nm.

Okay, perhaps I misunderstood that as a response to my post, and not their actual experience, and even if their toilet was out for 12 hours, were all the others out for that long? If you want the "flexibility" of a land hotel, then you need to book a land vacation, what most people don't want to accept is that a ship and a ship vacation is something totally different than on land. Do land hotels require a fire drill every time a new customer checks in? No, because a fire in a hotel is totally different than a fire on a ship. For 46 years, I was the guy that cleaned out the clogs and maintained the ship's sewage system. I have been a marine engineer for that long, and a Chief Engineer for over 40 years.

So, it is a systemic issue over multiple separate systems? If I had a nickel for every strange object we found in the ship's toilet system, I would have retired about 15 years early. Food bones, silverware, facial and or diaper wipes, in addition to clothing and other fabric items, and one time we found ammunition.

Where do you get this idea? While I know this is a common misconception here on CC, the port of SF, just like nearly every port in the world, charges dockage fees on a 24 hour basis. You pay the same amount for a 2 hour stay as a 24 hour stay. Sorry, Terry, didn't see your post before I did mine. About 220 of the 370 nm from Catalina to SF are required to be transited at 10 knots or less.

And, if you know anything about ships, you know that most of the accounts from that cruise are misleading at best, and mostly false. There was not sewage "running down the walls", as this is a physical impossibility, even if you were to continue to use a completely full toilet. The discolored water that was observed was from the high humidity within the ship when the AC wasn't working, and this humidity caused the dust and dirt that accumulates between the cabin ceiling and the deck above to become wet and run down the cracks in the cabin ceilings and walls. And, given that there are over 1600 passenger toilets, I doubt that anywhere near that total number were out at any one time, making a comparison to a total power outage useless.

If the problem, and the resultant time involved to clear the problem, is caused by inappropriate items being flushed down the toilet, what kind of "overhaul" would prevent this? Also, I don't recall seeing that the OP mentioned long periods of toilets being out, just repeated ones. I was the one who brought up the past instances of long outages caused by severe blockages, and the possibility that it could take hours. Most blockages are cleared in under an hour or two. And, as noted by other posters, other cruises on the Crown didn't seem to have toilet issues, so this does not point to a "systemic" or equipment problem, but a user problem, with the users changing each cruise.

This has always been a problem with US crew on the NCL Hawaii ships. They need to accomplish training, and the training requires minimum class sizes (it is third party, not NCL training), and documentation, and so potential crew have to commit to training and documentation without any guarantee that a position will be available to them when they get their training and documentation completed, and NCL, after paying for the training, is not going to pay wages for the crew to sit at home, so the crew are "let go" (to use a term that non-maritime hotel crew would think about) until someone on the ship goes on vacation. There is not a huge pool of potential crew standing by, without pay, waiting to take a job when it becomes available, unlike the international crew.

Not quite correct. The PVSA still specifically allows cruises to nowhere. What has stopped cruise lines from offering them is the requirement to have US work visas, not crew visas, for all foreign crew working a cruise to nowhere. It becomes a wage and cost issue, not one of a lack of foreign port call.

Peaks is a quaint island, within eyesight of Portland. It has some nice beaches, and some tourist shops. For more scenery and landscapes, you could try the "Mail Boat Run" of the Casco Bay Ferry (same line as the Peaks' ferry). This is about 1.5 hours, and tours, and stops at 5 islands, passes a few more. This is the boat that delivers supplies to the island residents (they shop for groceries on the mainland, and the groceries are delivered to the ferry for drop off at each island), mail, and in the afternoon acts as the school bus for the kids in middle and high school. They give a talk about the islands, island life, and great views out Casco Bay (from Cliff Island, the next land you'll see is Ireland. A walk on the Eastern Prom Trail, about 2 miles, starting almost at the cruise terminal gate, gives great views down Casco Bay towards the "Calendar Islands" (so named because there are supposed to be 365 islands). Portland Museum of Art is a mile walk away from the ship, and has a collection of Wyatt paintings. (Most things to see in Portland are a mile or less from the terminal).

How many people can you use to operate a roto-rooter? How many would be just standing around, since you can only have one person driving the machine, and one helper handling the snake. Whether the clog has affected 1 cabin or 30 cabins, only the same number of people will be able to clear it, since it is just one clog. Sorry, there are a lot of things in life that throwing more people at will not change physical laws. Based on my years of experience with cruise ship toilet systems, I can say that when you have more than one or two clogs a week, you are going to have lots of them, and all over the ship. And, if they are not flushing incorrect items down toilets all over the ship, how do you explain that redundant systems are failing? What is causing the failures, if not clogs in the lines? There are quite a few cleanout positions, but they are not necessarily in the right locations, depending on what caused the clog. A vacuum toilet system is the most efficient means of dealing with the quantity of black water that is produced. Yes, more piping would require taking more space from passenger areas to put the pipes in, and more systems would mean more cost. But, even with 20 systems, if someone at a toilet that is at the "downstream" end of the piping causes a clog, then all the cabins "upstream" will still be affected, whether it is 30 cabins for a 20 system ship, or 30 cabins for a 3 system ship. Without getting too crude, bigger pipes don't work in vacuum systems, regardless of suction power. In order to work, the "product" needs to hold together in a "plug" that is pulled down the vacuum line, and so the size piping that vacuum systems use has been shown to be the optimum for retaining this "plug" all the way down. It has been shown, and is designed into the systems, that if the piping run is too long, that there needs to be "vacuum boosting stations" that "re-form" the "plug" to get it moving down the pipe. The big drawback to gravity sanitary systems (and really, the "gray water" from sinks, showers, galley, laundry, etc, flows quite nicely in ship's systems by gravity) (unlike shore systems, the "black water" from toilets is in a separate system from the "gray water"), is that a gravity system requires larger and larger pipes as the number of inlets grows (gets further down your house or down the ship), and this takes up space. For "black water" systems, the "non-uniform" constitution of the "product" does not lend itself to slowly moving drain pipes that may or may not be sloped downwards due to vessel motion. This may deposit portions of the "product" in horizontal runs, that will tend to build up over time, contributing to the clogging problem.

First off, I was speaking of my personal experience in clearing clogs on ships, not on Princess ships, and not in the cases you mention. Let's say that you report a toilet being out of service, and the maintenance people get there within 15 minutes, yet it requires several hours to clear the clog. Is this "not prompt enough", or is this the physical limitations of clearing a clog. If your sewer clogs up at home, and the roto-rooter guy takes several hours to clear it, is this "not prompt" service? What do you do for a toilet in this case? This could affect all the drains in your house, do you have a neighbor you can go to to uses the bathroom? As for the time involved, the incident I mentioned was to grind through an entire bath towel that had been flushed, this is not a quick and easy job to do, and you may well ask why someone would flush a bath towel down the toilet, but that does not change the time involved to get things cleared. As I noted above, there are completely separate systems for the toilets around the ship, so having toilets go down "all over the ship" does not indicate a "systemic failure", but does indicate that many people are flushing things down the hopper that they shouldn't. I don't know what the level of noro you had on this cruise, but I have certainly found over the years, that the incidence of toilet clogs goes way up during times of noro illness (to put it bluntly, people mess their underwear and then flush it down the toilet rather than deal with it themselves).

By the physical limitations of vacuum toilet systems, the larger the ship gets, the more systems they have. Even a "small" ship of about 2400 capacity will have 3 completely separate toilet systems, and larger ships will have more, each system handling a "zone" of the ship (forward, midships, aft, for the three system ship), to prevent one clog from disabling the entire ship's toilets, though a clog in any one system can take down the entire zone (perhaps 1/3 of the ship). Each of these systems has redundant pumps to prevent a pump failure from taking down the system. The problem is that all of the toilets combine into common piping (just like the sanitary lines in your house, not every drain is separate all the way to the sewer), and a clog in the piping will affect every toilet "upstream" of the clog, just like a clog in the sanitary lines in your house can affect toilets, sinks, and showers "upstream" of the clog. Not certain what other kinds of "redundancy" you think would help, unless you have every toilet have its own piping all the way to the engine room.

98% of all toilet issues are caused by people flushing things down the toilet that don't belong. Who does it can be learned from where the problem happens. Crew don't have toilets up where passenger areas are, so if they cause a problem, an entire section of the ship loses toilets. Clogs don't always happen directly where the item was flushed, but may travel down the piping for a ways until it finds a particular elbow or junction where it hangs up. It requires maintenance to check pipes to find the exact location of the clog, and then it can be extremely difficult to roto-root out some clogs, particularly when people flush things like underwear, swimwear, dinner napkins, towels, face cloths, and other fabrics down the toilet (over the years that I worked cruise ships, this was far more common than most passengers will believe). I've seen it where it took my men, working round the clock, several days to roto-root out a towel that was causing loss of 20 or so cabin toilets, so to say that the crew are not responding "promptly" enough is disingenuous.

Well, records have to be kept, and the USPH looks at the records and the tubs themselves when they do inspections. Several layers of supervision would have to cover up any lack of compliance.

USPH VSP requires that in cabin whirlpool tubs be disinfected either between occupancies or weekly, whichever is less, by a 10ppm chlorine solution for 60 minutes.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of methanol produced these days is made from fossil fuels (natural gas or coal), and so the "well to engine" carbon footprint is worse than conventional fossil fuels. Until large quantity production of "green" methanol (made from biomass) comes online, this step will not help the environment all that much, and the production of green methanol is quite a bit (up to 15 times) the cost of conventional fuels.