Falls overboard a nightmare for cruise ships, passengers
The Carnival Valor had been at sea for only a day when calls came over the loudspeaker asking a certain passenger to please report to customer service.
The man, a 28-year-old American citizen, had been reported missing by his family that morning.
It was Thanksgiving, and the Valor, a 3,756-passenger cruise ship that had left New Orleans the day before, was heading toward Cozumel, Mexico.
The passenger, according to the Coast Guard, turned out to be James Grimes, 28, who had been traveling with his parents and siblings on the five-day cruise. His family had last seen him the night before, around 11 p.m.
At 8:10 p.m., more than nine hours after his family reported him missing, a passing tanker spotted the man near the mouth of the Mississippi River and alerted the Coast Guard.
Rescuers found Grimes struggling in the water, waving frantically and trying to keep his head above the surface.
When the helicopter crew lifted him out, he was in shock, had mild hypothermia and was extremely dehydrated, said Lt. Seth Gross, who managed the search and rescue operation for the Coast Guard. But he was alive and in stable condition.
Grimes, whose family described him as an exceptional swimmer, had treaded in 65- to 70-degree water for hours, withstanding rain, 20-knot winds and three- to five-foot waves in the Gulf of Mexico, where sharks are common, Coast Guard officials said.
“This case is certainly extraordinary,” Gross said. “The survival instinct, the will to survive is just crazy.”
Just how often does this happen?
Falling from a ship into a vast sea might be a cruise passenger’s worst nightmare. While the chances of going overboard are exceedingly remote, according to statistics from the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), the outcome is usually tragic.
In 2019, 25 people fell overboard, and just nine of them were rescued, according to CLIA.
Alcohol is a factor in at least 11% of falls from cruise ships, which often offer all-inclusive drink packages that encourage drinking onboard, said Ross Klein, a professor of social work at Memorial University of Newfoundland, who researches cruise safety.
So how do ships prevent people from going overboard?
By law, railings have to be 42 inches tall, Klein said. There were efforts to make the railings taller by about another foot, he said, after Congress began considering legislation to tighten security on ships in 2005. But in 2010, when Congress passed the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act, the railing height requirements were set at the current standard, he said.
The railing height is designed to keep passengers along ship promenades, said Brian Salerno, the senior vice president for Maritime
policy at CLIA.
“The vast majority of cases are either reckless behavior or some form of intentional act,” Salerno said. “People don’t just inadvertently fall over the side of a ship.”
Bartenders on cruises are also trained to watch for excessive drinking, said Robert Kritzman, a partner at Clyde & Co., an international law firm in Miami, who advises cruise companies.
Carnival Corp. said the “only way to go overboard is to purposefully climb up and over the safety barriers.”
When crew members learn that a person has gone overboard, they immediately inform the Coast Guard, stop the ship and turn it around. Often, smaller, fast boats are deployed from the ship to search for the person, Kritzman said.
Gross said that after the Coast Guard learned about the missing passenger, it launched a 45-foot patrol boat, a helicopter and a tracker plane to search for him. The Coast Guard set up a search area of more than 7,000 square nautical miles, roughly the size of Massachusetts, he said, and immediately alerted any mariners around the Gulf of Mexico to look for the man.