Imagine a scenario where the unthinkable happens at sea: a megaship carrying thousands of people is on fire. Is evacuating the entire ship possible? Is the industry fully prepared for this eventuality?
By Aaron Saunders
This is a scenario that the passenger shipping industry in general, and the cruise segment in particular, should be thinking about all the time, especially now that ships are getting so much bigger and carrying so many more people.
It’s late at night, midway through one of dozens of routine trips to the Caribbean. The crew aboard one of the newest and largest ships in the world have settled into a regular rhythm of service, as have the passengers into their routines. Most have turned in for the night, blissfully unaware of what is about to happen. A few die-hard souls continue to drink in the bars and lounges, party in the disco, and gamble in the casino.
In a random cabin, one of the thousands of guests on board awakens and smells smoke. They phone Guest Relations, but the line rings busy. So they enter the passenger corridor and pull the fire alarm.
On the bridge, the officer of the watch receives the manual call point notification at the same time that the fire control panel starts to light up. Smoke and heat detectors are going off on the aft deck 12. The captain is awakened and arrives on the bridge; he orders the vessel to reduce speed. Ventilation is shut down; fire doors swing closed. Crew Alerts are made: “Bravo, Bravo, Bravo.”
An assessment party is sent: the blaze is out of control. The alert for assembly stations is sounded. The fire continues to burn. The ship is listing now, first two degrees, then five, because of the volume of water being pumped into the fire. People are trapped by closed fire doors they do not realise they can open. Panic starts to spread as smoke fills the corridors. At the other end of the ship, 1,100 feet away from the fire, there is apathy: what’s all the fuss about?
With the fire out of control, the captain makes the call to abandon ship. Lifeboats are lowered to the embarkation deck.
It is 2:23 a.m. Eight thousand passengers and crew now must be evacuated from a gigantic ship that is on fire and listing.
Nightmare scenario
Though fictitious, the scenario described above is not so improbable. It’s no secret that fire is the most dangerous risk to life at sea, even in modern times.
In 2006, Princess Cruises’ Star Princess caught fire off the coast of Jamaica at 3 a.m. while on a routine Caribbean cruise. The cause would eventually be determined to be a lit cigarette that ignited flammable materials on a passenger cabin balcony. A routine patrol smelled smoke but didn’t notice the fire. Passengers were the first to activate manual call alarms, and by that time the officers on the bridge also saw the fire from the port wing. Though the response was swift, thorough, and efficient from all concerned, the fire still burned through over 150 cabins on decks 9 to 12 and damaged another 100 cabins. One person died, and thirteen suffered smoke inhalation.
Another example took place in 1980, when Holland America’s Prinsendam burned and sank after an out-of-control engine room fire disabled her in the Gulf of Alaska. Everyone was evacuated into the lifeboats, and all 520 passengers and crew survived. Given the rugged geography and the ship’s distance from land, it is remarkable that all survived.
Today’s modern megaships dwarf the passenger counts of those vessels. Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas holds 7,600 passengers at maximum occupancy, and 2,350 crew. That’s 9,950 souls that need to be evacuated in an emergency: a full 19 times the capacity of Prinsendam back in 1980.
Accidents of these kinds would require much bigger rescue and containment capability, and the potential scale of disasters could be unimaginable. The question is whether an emergency evacuation of a ship of this size is at all possible, even under the most ideal conditions.
As the industry welcomes more new-to-cruise passengers, vessels increase in size, and crew shortages require the employment of new and less-experienced personnel, the stage could be set for a perfect storm of “what-ifs”: a nightmare scenario of bad luck and poor choices.
Modern perspective
Much like with the sinking of the Titanic over a century ago, rules and regulations have not caught up with the size and capacity of today’s megaships. With vessels that can now carry the entire population of a small city, with room to spare, a significant maritime accident on one of these vessels would not just be catastrophic for those involved, it would mark a cataclysmic turning point for the cruise industry, an unthinkable public relations nightmare as large as these ships themselves.
Rules and regulations call for there to be enough lifesaving devices on board for every passenger and crew, and every cruise ship complies in this regard, owing to regulations brought forth in 1912 in response to the sinking of the Titanic. They are continually being revised and adjusted to this day.
Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) requirements, the principal governing regulation for all seagoing passenger ships, mandate that ships be outfitted with fire-retardant materials, fire doors, watertight doors, and enough lifesaving equipment for all – be it boats or inflatable rafts stored in canisters on deck.
But as ships get bigger still, simply having enough life-saving devices on board may not be sufficient protection when things go awry. Today’s digital muster drills, while convenient, barely teach passengers anything about how a ship is evacuated, or where their designated lifeboat is. Most guests are three or four cocktails deep by the time this takes place on embarkation day; few yet know their way around the ship. Fewer still have any understanding of where the lifejackets are (the location varies from vessel to vessel), and where their actual lifeboat is. Most first-timers would be hard-pressed to simply name their ship. The industry is still a long way from an acceptable safety standard for megaships.
And with cruise lines needing to recruit crews at an ever-increasing pace, chances are that the crew don’t know the way around their ship either. Experienced hands are retiring from life at sea; new recruits sometimes jump ship at the very next port of call.
Marine accidents are never the result of one overriding event; they are the product of several small poor decisions, compromises, and lapses of judgement over days, months, and even years that line up to produce an accident. The Titanic hit an iceberg because crew misplaced binoculars, shuffled senior officers before departure, ignored ice warnings, and made course corrections that lined the ship up with that iceberg, however unwittingly.
The same held true for Costa Concordia, which was taken off course to perform a “sail-by” in violation of company policy and the approved voyage track. It had been done before, safely. That night in January 2012 would be different: 32 people would be dead by sunrise, and a multi-million-dollar vessel would remain partially submerged off the island of Giglio for years – a half-sunken reminder of hubris and poor choices.
From the 2003 boiler explosion aboard the legendary Norway to the 1998 laundry room fire aboard Carnival Ecstasy and the near foundering of Viking Sky off the coast of Norway, these close calls show that accidents in the cruise industry fall into the category of rare but not impossible.
With cruise ships getting bigger, and passenger and crew awareness declining, it raises the question: just because a ship has lifesaving equipment for 10,000 people, does that mean it’s possible to get them all off in time?
One industry is required to determine just that.
Airline model
Aviation is the one industry that relies on real-life evacuation tests. Before being certified, aircraft are required to undergo stringent safety certification by regulatory bodies like the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) or the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). These agencies mandate that every aircraft, including the gargantuan Airbus A380, must be able to be fully evacuated in 90 seconds, even with half of the available emergency exits inoperative.
What’s more, these agencies don’t just take the aircraft manufacturers’ word for it. Observers from all relevant agencies must be present as full-scale evacuation drills, with a full complement of “passengers” and “crew” abandoning the aircraft, take place.
The simulations can be intense. Per the FAA, “A full-scale demonstration is a simulated emergency evacuation in which a full complement of passengers deplane through half of the required emergency exits, under dark-of-night conditions. A trained crew directs the evacuation, and the passengers are required to meet certain age/gender specifications. In order for manufacturers to pass the full-scale demonstrations, all passengers and crew must evacuate the aircraft and be on the ground in 90 seconds or less.”
This duration was selected by aviation agencies as the maximum length of time that could be allowed before an on-board fire would potentially flash-over, as happened aboard an Air Canada flight from Dallas to Montreal in 1983. On that occasion, an in-cabin lavatory fire flashed-over upon landing in Cincinnati, killing 23 and injuring 16 of the 46 passengers and crew aboard the McDonnell Douglas DC-9.
Airplane manufacturers do not like these drills, citing the potential for injuries while conducting them. In its own report, the FAA noted that “serious injuries do occur, and a serious injury was sustained during the MD-11 evacuation certification demonstration on October 26, 1991”.
Aviation authorities have resisted computer-simulated tests as well, preferring the hard data from these live demonstrations – which have also benefited the design of evacuation slides as tests are carried out. “Computer modelling is not recognized by the FAA as an allowable method of demonstrating evacuation capability of airplanes,” states the FAA. “Although it is generally accepted by industry that computer modelling will have a role in evacuation certification in the future, more traditional methods will continue to be used until the models are validated.”
Evacuating an Airbus A380 in 90 seconds is no easy feat – but data proves it can be done.
Inadequate effort
Has a full-scale evacuation drill ever been contemplated or carried out on a cruise ship comparable to that done by the airline industry? The answer is no, and the token effort so far made by the passenger shipping sector is grossly inadequate and bordering on negligent, especially in respect to bigger ships and larger passenger and crew numbers.
CruiseTimes spoke with numerous industry insiders, and none could recall a full-scale drill being carried out on any cruise ship. Most modern examples are of established incidents, like that of Costa Concordia, or near-miss situations where guests are mustered at emergency stations but not evacuated, as with Royal Caribbean’s Grandeur of the Seas in 2013, when a fire broke out in the aft mooring deck in the middle of the night.
Even with the relatively small 2,400-passenger count aboard Grandeur of the Seas, the Marine Accident Investigation Report identified a significant bottleneck in the evacuation of the vessel, which turned out not to be necessary: “At 03:06 hrs the lifeboats were ordered to be lowered to the embarkation deck. Some problems were encountered with the electronic passenger mustering system and personnel had to revert to hard copies. This delayed the tally of passengers and crew alike and it was a considerable time before all crew and passengers were finally accounted for.”
The report went on to say: “There is no doubt that this was a major fire and a major incident exposing a large number of people to a serious possible hazard. However, firefighting and passenger management during the incident was effective and professional with no reported personal serious injuries.”
Some basic evacuation studies have been done in the past. In 2012, Edwin Richard Galea and colleagues wrote a report, titled “An Evacuation Validation Data Set for Large Passenger Ships”, based on a real-world study undertaken on a crossing of the Color Line ferry SuperSpeed 1 as part of the EU’s Project SAFEGUARD. With 1,349 passengers on board, the study focused on the time taken between the sounding of the general emergency alarm and the completion of mustering at individual muster stations. It found that computer simulation models under-predicted passenger assembly times by as much as 28 per cent.
In repeat simulations, hypothetical cruise ship passenger evacuations run by the software were capped at just 3,001 passengers for the International Maritime Organization’s night-time scenario, and 2,501 during the daytime scenario. Tests were also done aboard an unnamed Royal Caribbean vessel in 2009 and 2010, carrying 2,500 passengers and 842 crew, sailing between Harwich, UK, and St Petersburg, Russia. Tests were announced in advance and focused strictly on the time between the sounding of the general emergency alarm and arrival at the individual muster stations.
The report said that some data was irregular due to passenger behaviour. Some participants stopped to talk on the way to their muster stations or wandered around at first.
While valuable, these simulations don’t take into account behaviours such as the above, or the more disturbing trend seen aboard Costa Concordia and the sinking of the Korean passenger ferry Sewol in 2014. In both cases, the crew were unprepared for or misinformed about the seriousness of the threat to life and vessel; instead, they urged passengers to go back to their cabins, resulting in serious losses of lives.
Port resources
The question of whether ports of call are ready to accept potential mass casualties from a seaborne disaster must be asked as well. Plenty of accidents have happened while ships are moored in port, such as the burning of the Great Lakes passenger steamer Noronic in Toronto in 1949, the boiler explosion of the SS Norway at PortMiami in 2003, and the famed burning and grounding of the Morro Castle off New Jersey in 1934.
An in-port or off-shore accident involving vessels carrying around 10,000 people poses a risk of overwhelming local resources, including hospitals, hotels, and even dining venues.
CruiseTimes spoke with Nikolaos Chartoudis, fire colonel and commander of Heraklion Port Fire Authority in Greece, asking him for his thoughts on how ports like Heraklion might cope in the event of a major passenger vessel disaster.
“The port’s design prioritises normal commercial and passenger operations, not mass evacuation scenarios,” said Chartoudis. “Emergency vehicle access, crowd control areas, temporary medical facilities, and helicopter landing zones all require pre-planning and potentially significant modifications to existing port layouts. The narrow streets of Heraklion’s historic centre, while charming for tourists, could become bottlenecks for emergency vehicles during a crisis.” Chartoudis said that a large-scale evacuation would quickly overwhelm emergency facilities on the island.
“The Heraklion University Hospital is located about eight kilometres from the port and is the largest hospital unit in Crete and one of the largest public hospitals in the country, providing healthcare across a wide range of clinical specialties in a 750-bed Medical Centre,” said Chartoudis. “Although significant, this capacity would be quickly overwhelmed in a mass casualty scenario involving thousands of passengers. Even combining private and public health facilities would give us a total capacity that would struggle to handle such an influx of patients from the incident. Emergency medical systems are designed with specific overflow ratios in mind, typically planning for a 20–30 per cent increase in normal operations during disasters. A cruise ship emergency could potentially require a 60–70 per cent increase in capacity. In a hypothetical scenario where even 10 per cent of a ship of 8,000 people require immediate medical attention, a conservative estimate for many disaster scenarios, this would mean 800 victims arriving at the same time. This number alone exceeds the capacity of Heraklion hospitals, considering that many beds would already be occupied by existing patients.”
The Heraklion scenario highlights the limited capacity even for a relatively large passenger port and destination to handle maritime disasters. With cruise lines exploring increasingly remote ports of call or relying on private outer islands in the Bahamas, for example, the location where a vessel might experience a disaster could make the difference between life and death, and the port resource issue becomes a more pressing concern.
Different regulations
Of course, ships are designed to be a sort of lifeboat in and of themselves. Evacuating a cruise ship, like evacuating an A380 aircraft, is a decision that poses its own inherent risks. Lowering lifeboats filled with passengers in the middle of the night, away from land, is a last-resort effort that no one really wants to undertake.
Big ships are here to stay; that’s obvious. Passengers want them, and the economies of scale make them attractive to cruise lines and shipbuilders alike. But with vessels that push the 10,000-passenger mark – not counting the crew – evacuating them just may not be possible in an extreme emergency.
Accidents happen as part of an unfortunate chain of events. Maybe it’s time to break that chain. Perhaps different regulations need to be applied to vessels carrying more than a certain number of passengers, in the same way that twin-engine jet airplanes have to be rated for the so-called Extended-range Twin-engine Operations (ETOPS) performance to fly over oceans unaided. Maybe the key to these large vessels is simply not to sail them so far from land, where large rescue craft are always on hand. A ship in distress in the shipping lanes of the Caribbean presents a different scenario from a large ship stranded mid-Atlantic.
A recent example highlights the problem. On 3 June 2025, Morning Midas, a 46,800-gross-ton PCTC (pure car and truck carrier), caught fire about 260 miles southwest of Adak, Alaska. It took six days for the first firefighting tug to arrive and a further six days for the second one to get there; the ship was left adrift in the meantime, and the fire continued to burn. If this was a passenger vessel, the scale of disaster would be unimaginable.
Megaships are technological wonders. These marvels of engineering are delivering more features, guest satisfaction, and buzz than ever before. They certainly meet the expectations of most modern-day mass-market cruise tastes.
An accident aboard one of these ships would be more akin to the Hindenburg than to the Titanic. It would be an event so shocking that it could shake the confidence of the travelling public and forever change the cruise industry as we know it.
