chengkp75

The legal requirement is that passengers must participate in one drill every 30 days. Whether the ship requires more often then that is at the Captain's discretion.

You do realize that this is what would happen in a real emergency? The muster, whether a drill or an actual emergency, is not about getting to the lifeboats, it is about passenger accountability. The muster should be signaled long before any thought is given to actually evacuating the ship, and is to remove the passengers from the area of the emergency, put them in known, controlled locations, and provide accountability (knowing that everyone is accounted for). That frees up the emergency response teams to deal with the emergency without having to look for stray passengers who may or may not be casualties. Just read about the Star Princess fire, where the passengers were mustered for several hours, yet the Captain had no inclination to evacuate the ship at any time. The muster drill is to get the passengers and crew used to working as a team, with the passengers following instructions from the crew. It provides as realistic a training scenario as possible, for both passengers and crew.

That was a public health situation (i.e. quarantine requirements), dealing with entry into the country, not an issue that deals with the ship's or cruise line's business practices. If it was that easy to require foreign ships to meet a US federal law regarding their business practices, then the foreign flag ships would have been paying US taxes decades ago. This is the basis of international law, and contrary to what a lot of folks think, US law does not apply outside of the US. If you want the price of a foreign flag cruise, you have to realize that you need to put up without many of the legal protections that a US flag vessel (the only ones that US law applies fully to) would provide.

If the Spirit does not meet the "Canadian" emissions standards, then it does not meet the standards for the North America Emissions Control Area, and would not be allowed to sail anywhere within 200 nautical miles of the North American coastline (or Hawaii, Puerto Rico, or the USVI), so your cruise, along with all the other Alaska and Hawaii cruises on the Spirit would have been canceled. Since the cruise started (or ended) in Vancouver, the ship can not have been banished from Canadian waters. The provinces do not have jurisdiction over navigable waters whether within the provincial boundaries or outside. Canada's vessel emissions limits are based on the IMO's North America ECA, as per Annex VI of MARPOL. Where did you get the information that this was due to emissions?

Doesn't really matter, since once you step into the terminal, you are in federal jurisdiction, not state.

I don't believe that the passenger muster signal was made in this case. Unlike HAL, with its 3 step emergency procedure, Carnival does not have passengers return to their cabins. All fires on ships will be first responded to by the "Code Bravo" announcement, sending fire fighting teams to the scene. At some point in the fire fighting process, the "On Scene Commander", and the Captain on the bridge, will decide if the situation warrants mustering the passengers in order to put them in safe, manageable locations, and provide accountability, or whether the situation is well enough in hand to let the passengers continue their activities. And, no ship sends the passengers to their "mustard" stations.😉

The Oasis, Quantum, Freedom, and some Voyager class ships have specially designed splash areas for kids in swim diapers.

Did the new passengers have to muster at the same time? Typically, for back to back segments, you only need to do one drill a month, so those remaining onboard would normally not have to do a second drill.

Just understand that if a trolley goes to the stop where you want to board for continuation, or return to the ship, and it is full, it won't stop, and you'll have to wait for the next one that has space available. The buses only hold about 35 passengers.

Being Russian flagged, the ships are classed by the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping, which is ranked as about the worst classification (by having the highest rate of ships detained in various countries for violations) society around. These ships would likely either cost a tremendous amount to bring up to standards of other class societies, or would just be financially unsound to do so.

Actually, the PVSA specifically allows cruises to nowhere. It is CBP's requirements for work visas for the crew.

Actually, the PVSA exemption for Puerto Rico eliminates the need for any foreign port call.

Then how are the systems different?

So, are you saying that the newer Carnival ships don't bring fresh air into the cabins? Or, are there thousands of little ducts that snake all through the ship to bring fresh air to each individual cabin? And, each one of these thousands of little ducts has a separate fan to move the air into the cabin?

Having worked for NCL, I can say that this is not correct. The line will try to wait, but they will look at the problem of a busload of unhappy passengers vs the problem of a shipload of unhappy passengers if their cruise is impacted by waiting for late excursions. Been there, seen that. The difference between ship sponsored excursions and DIY excursions, is that if the ship sponsored excursion comes back late and misses the ship, the line will pay for hotels, meals, and transportation to the next port. And, the line doesn't worry about paying for this, as this is covered by insurance, most of which the excursion operator pays for, and which you eventually pay for, as the ship sponsored excursions tend to be more expensive, to cover the added liability.

They can have self-service ice machines, but they have to have more sanitation features than the typical hotel machine, if they are not supervised full time by a food employee. The ice machines are also located in the cabin steward pantries, where the dirty glasses from the cabins are washed and stored, and the public are not allowed access to these again unless supervised, so the ice machine would need to be moved outside the pantry, with the associated plumbing and drain piping moved to the new location. USPH regulations for cruise ships are vastly stricter than land health regulations, as stated by many USPH inspectors, who tend to be former state and local health inspectors.

Any foreign flag cruise ship that calls at US ports, must adhere to the USPH Vessel Sanitation Program, at all times, even on the "high seas" or in foreign ports, or face a full sanitation and infectious disease inspection every time it returns to a US port.

Absolutely correct, USPH regulations require use of gloves when getting ice from the bin, and requires that the scoop is hung up, not left in the ice.

Um, no. They will wait if the itinerary allows for the delay. The promise in the ticket contract is that they will pay for all accommodations to get you to the next port and back to the ship.

The cabin recirculation system will generally not provide a lot of heat, as there is only a small electric resistance heater. The fresh air system requires them to switch the set point to a higher temperature, and switch from chilled water to steam heat. If if is going to be only a day or two of low temperatures, they may not want to open up the steam heat system (can provide a lot of noise from water hammer as the system warms up), just to shut it off again, but they can likely raise the setpoint on the fresh air handler for your block of cabins, so that it just doesn't cool off the incoming air (stops the chilled water from cooling the air).

As I said, the likelihood that Heald asked the right question, or understood the technical answer is up for question.

It's from "cathead", which are timbers projecting out sideways from the bow of the ship, used to support lateral rigging for the bowsprit. The sailors would climb out on the cathead, until they were over the water, then sit with their feet on one side of the cathead, and their arse on the other, and do their business directly into the sea. Over time, cathead was shortened to "going to the "head".

This is not quite accurate. While the cabins are modular, and are installed as a unit, they go in in order, through a hole cut in the hull at each deck. So, the furthest cabin from the hole goes in first, and unless you take them out the same order, or cut another hole at the cabin, you can't just pull a cabin out.

Okay, opened this thread twice, so I can scroll through posts and answer them as I see them. I will stand by my statements that there are two AC systems in each cabin, one that merely recirculates the cabin air, and which is turned off when the balcony door is open. The other is the fresh air supply system, that brings cooled air from outside, and which supplies AC to whole banks of cabins, and which will affect the cooling of all the cabins in the bank, if a door is left open. I will not say definitively that this applies to ships, like Carnival's, that I have not been on, but I will say that this has been the standard technology for ships built from 1990, at least, onwards. And, there are not that many of those still around. While I won't say that Heald is wrong, I will say that he very well may not have asked the right question to get the right answer. As I say, yes, the AC for your cabin, which is very similar to a window AC unit in your house in that it merely recirculates the air in the cabin while cooling it, does shut off when the balcony door is open. However, if you open the balcony door, and then hold a tissue up to the air vent, you will see that (typically to one side of the vent or the other) there is still air flow. This is the second system, and they run the ducting parallel and use one vent. This system supplies all the cabins on one deck, between fire doors, so maybe 30-40 cabins. See the linked post above which describes the overpressure that this system builds. This has been true for cabins since the '90's, this is not something new. However, even something that is "plug and play" has to "plug" into something, whether it is water, sewage, electricity, or HVAC. Once the cabin is installed, the HVAC ducting is run from the central systems to it (both the fresh air supply system, and the bathroom exhaust system.

While the crew may not look forward to the weekly drill, they realize this is what keeps their skills sharp. As you say, they are smart people and know that repetition has been shown to be the best training possible, regardless of how smart the participants are. Also, it is known that regardless of how much training a person has, until a real emergency happens, you don't know whether that person will respond to the emergency or not (run into the fire or away). The crew know that muscle memory is what is needed to improve the odds that the proper response will be produced, without conscious thought. As noted before, firefighters are not stupid, and they train almost daily. What is insulting to the crew is when passengers, who the crew are training to save, have no respect for them or what they are trying to do, and don't accept any responsibility for helping the crew to accomplish this.