Florida cruise ship damaged by fire again
Next voyage isn’t likely to be impacted
PORT CANAVERAL, Fla. – A fire in the exhaust funnel of the Carnival Freedom over the weekend disrupted a cruise of the ship, based in Port Canaveral, Florida, for the second time in less than two years.
Carnival said there are no reports of injuries to passengers. Two firefighting crew members were treated for minor smoke inhalation.
Carnival said the fire, which was confined to the funnel area, is not expected to affect the ship’s next scheduled sailing out of Port Canaveral on Monday.
In a statement provided to FLORIDA TODAY, Carnival said that, at about 3:15 p.m. Saturday, the Carnival Freedom reported a fire on the port side of the ship’s exhaust funnel. The ship was 20 miles off Eleuthera Island, Bahamas, heading to Freeport, Bahamas, after a canceled call to the Carnival private island of Princess Cay due to adverse weather.
“The ship’s fire response team was quickly activated, and the ship’s captain also turned the vessel towards the heavy rain in the area to maximize the efforts to put out the flames,” the statement said. “Eyewitnesses reported the possibility of a lightning strike, and that is being investigated, but cannot yet be confirmed.”
By 5:20 p.m. Saturday, the fire was extinguished.
Carnival said the ship’s captain made multiple announcements to passengers and crew, and advised all but essential safety personnel to stay away from balconies and open decks.
The port-side portion of the funnel had fallen onto Deck 10, and the firefighting response put out any flames.
The U.S. Coast Guard has been notified of the fire, and Carnival activated its incident response team to support the ship’s crew.
Carnival said there are no operational issues with the ship’s systems, and the ship, which was on a fournight cruise, was visiting Freeport on Sunday.
A cruise ship funnel generally serves as a smokestack to lift emissions above the deck, thus away from passengers and crew.
On Saturday evening, “Carnival Freedom guests enjoyed the Elegant Night dinner as planned, and, with the exception of the open decks, all areas of the ship are fully functioning,” Carnival said in its statement.
Carnival said it does not expect any impact to the next Carnival Freedom voyage, which departed from Port Canaveral on Monday afternoon on a five-night Eastern Caribbean cruise. That cruise has port-of-call stops scheduled at Amber Cove in the Dominican Republic and at Grand Turk Island in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
In May 2022, a fire broke out in the funnel area of the Carnival Freedom while it was docked in Grand Turk. Carnival then canceled three scheduled sailings of the Carnival Freedom out of Port Canaveral because of the need to repair the ship’s fire damage at a shipyard in Grand Bahama.
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. – Chevron has agreed to pay a record-setting $13 million to two California agencies in the wake of investigations by The Palm Springs Desert Sun and ProPublica of dozens of oil spills, and of lax enforcement by the state’s oil and gas division. But the March 20 announcement masks ongoing issues.
At least one of Chevron’s spills is still running 21 years after it began in a Kern County, California, oilfield, although a state spokesman said it has been reduced by 98% “from its peak.” The amount spilled from the site, dubbed GS-5, is larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster.
Chevron earned at least $11.6 million off GS-5 in just three years, The Desert Sun and ProPublica found, by trucking out raw, sticky crude from the gushing, burbling site, known as a “surface expression,” to be refined and sold. In fact, rather than stopping potentially deadly surface expressions, oil companies have routinely “contained” them with netting or pieces of metal, and used more than 100 of them as unpermitted oil production sites in Kern and Santa Barbara counties.
Last week’s announcement said the settlement “creates a framework for managing the spills with State oversight,” and “Chevron agrees to continue monitoring the site with Department of Conservation oversight.” No specific sites were named.
In follow-up emails and a phone call, state spokesmen said the fines cover the first phase of the Cymric spill, a huge surface expression that California Gov. Gavin Newsom toured