Five people were injured, one of them seriously, during a routine training exercise on the Bermuda-registered Carnival Cruises’ vessel ‘MV Arcadia’, in Ponta Delgada, Azores, on Saturday.
According to media reports, the lifeboat broke from its cabling and fell from its davits into the sea. At the time of the accident, there reportedly were five crew members in the lifeboat, one of whom needed hospitalization.
In response, UK’s maritime union RMT has written to safety regulators and the cruise ship industry body demanding urgent action over life-boat safety. In a letter to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, as well as in similar letters to Carnival Cruises and the Cruise Line Industry Association (CLIA), RMT demanded a tighter regulatory regime and improved maintenance, to ensure both crew and passenger safety.
In the letter, the union expressed serious concerns over the risks and dangers facing maritime workers involved in life boat drills.
“It is almost as if the safety and testing regime for life boats under the present system has become the most dangerous part of a maritime workers time at sea, and that just cannot be right,” the statement reads.
Similar cases involving life boat drills have been reported several times in the past. As a result, Cruise Line International Association (CLIA) announced a safety rule by MLO prohibiting cruise lines from raising or lowering lifeboats with crew members aboard. However, this is often ignored.
“The incident on Saturday on the Carnival Cruise ship Arcadia in the Azores should serve as a wake-up call to entire cruise industry that we need improvements and changes to the regulatory and maintenance regime and we need them now. RMT will fight with every tool at our disposal to ensure that safety of both crew and passengers is the absolute top priority the length and breadth of the industry,” said RMT General Secretary Mick Cash.
