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People Fall Off Cruise Ships with Alarming Regularity

59 points by gscott 8y ago

subfay 8y ago
Tedious post beating around the bush (suicide). Typical HN post about the bright side of life.
- atomical 8y ago
  How many accounts have you created?
  - dexen 8y ago
    Meta: please avoid snarky replies. If you feel the OP is misplaced, downvote or perhaps even flag if it is egregious. FWIW, I've found the suicide interpretation quite interesting and eye-opening: a thought of a woman, silently hiding her suffering, perhaps for several years, finally pushers herself over the edge after spending last night with dear friends. And much more fitting the sad story than the dry, calculating "whose money and responsibilities?" tone of the article.
    - atomical 8y ago
      No thanks.
      - dang 8y ago
        Posting uncivil and unsubstantive comments will get you banned here, so could you please stop doing that? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        atomical 8y ago
        If you're going to ban my account I would like all my comments deleted.
Rapzid 8y ago
> few are aware that their personal safety is in the hands of one of the world’s most globalized, legally complex, and opaque industries I'm just having a really hard time following the moral logic here.. To me it's like saying your life is in the hands of the fed when you go into a national park. You get blasted on a bottle of tequila, climb Half Dome and fall, but your life was in the hands of the fed? Most people I know would be cognizant that if you get super drunk on a cruise, site on the railing, and then fall from the railing with nobody around you may not be heard from again.. And ignoring the falling off the boat bit... Just _being_ on a boat in the middle of the ocean? Your not aware that your safety is pretty much in the hands of the cruise operator?
- EliRivers 8y ago
  Continuing the theme, are you also aware that on many cruises, sexually assaulting another passenger will be met by asking you to leave at the next port? That's a specific example related to me by a chap I know; an ex-copper who now heads security on a cruise ship operating out of Southampton in the UK. I forget which nation the ship's flag is, but basically any and all crimes committed on board are met with a shrug and a suggestion to offload the offending passenger at the next stop. Actions that would lead to lengthy custodial sentences if committed in the passenger's own home are basically without consequence; he's had to deal with theft, assault, sexual assault, people getting drunk and smacking around their spouse and children. Flag state doesn't want to know. On merchant vessels that just have a small crew and no passengers (i.e. almost all of them), it's even more lawless. In a U.S. national park, there is law. There is someone tasked with enforcing that law. At sea, at the level of individual interactions, not so much.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    It's usually the law of the ship's flag country that applies when in intl. waters. Given that most ships are registered in smaller countries with lax tax laws, it's not surprising there is more trouble prosecuting those than just declaring the passenger "Persona Non Grata" (and the unplanned stop is usually costly to the passenger) Not to say that if the crime is larger there is a greater chance of prosecution and/or other litigation.
ekianjo 8y ago
I was expecting some kind of stats and charts when I see "alarming Regularity". Nothing of the sort. Totally overblown headline compared the amount of accidents. Would you make a headline for "People Die in Car Crashes with Alarming Regularity" ? probably not, even though the problem it way more important and endemic.
- jopsen 8y ago
  > Since 2000, 284 people have fallen off cruise ships .... an average of about 1.5 people per month From the article.. but yeah, with 30 million people traveling on cruise ships it's hard to tell if this is worse than regular traffic. (Wouldn't surprise me, if cruise ships are skechy)
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    1 in 10,000 people in the US die each year in a car accident. So it would require 3,000 deaths per year to approach cars. It actually works out reasonable as an estimate: if you spend 1-2 hours in a car each day, that’s 4-8% of your year; a week on a cruise ship would be 2% of a year. So we’re within an order of magnitude on exposure to each. So with 30 people per year dying to falling off boats, it’s much, much less dangerous than cars.
    - zilian 8y ago
      Have you read the article ? It s interesting and is actually about how few f#cks are given by those companies. And in your car, you are 100% liable and not in international waters
    - danso 8y ago
      What’s the number of people who travel in cars or are near traffic on a daily basis, versus the number of people who are on a cruise ship on a daily basis?
- aga98mtl 8y ago
  I suspect a large amount these MOB incidents are suicide. Alcohol abuse and and suicidal thought are linked. ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872355/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872355/ ) The lady in the article drank a lot and chose to sit on the railing of a private balcony alone. Drunk people manage to die in shallow water with an alarming regularity. I wonder if it is even possible to save a drunk MOB in a calm sea. Stopping a cruise ship and getting a rescue boat ready to action must take a couple of minutes. Maybe a a drone could do it.
aaron695 8y ago
> He asked me, as a journalist covering the travel industry, to imagine what would happen if, every month, one to two people died on an airplane for a predictable operational reason, such as sustaining a traumatic head injury during turbulence due to failure to wear a seatbelt. It’s a scenario I find impossible to imagine, after years of flight-safety demonstrations, seatbelt checks, and back-of-the-seat cards. "At least one person a month dies of a blood clot on the lungs on arrival at Heathrow Airport, say doctors." ? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1109406.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1109406.stm
danielvf 8y ago
I’ll never forget the day we pulled into port after a week crossing the ocean, and the cruise ship started unloading dead bodies, one after the other, into ambulance after ambulance. It turns out that this was normal. Outside the the party cruse lines / routes, the median age of a cruise ship passenger is “old”. When you have several thousand old people in one place for a week, statistically, one or more tend to die of natural causes. Once we learn to look for it, we saw the unloading all the time.
- NikolaeVarius 8y ago
  15 seconds of trying to verify this sort of claim has come up with this site https://www.cruiseshipdeaths.com/ https://www.cruiseshipdeaths.com/ This is going to be an interesting Saturday morning.
  - akudha 8y ago
    Jeez, that is morbid. There is a website (or an app) for everything
johan_larson 8y ago
I think the author is stretching to make a point. I mean, the case she opens with is a drunk woman who climbed a railing to sit on it. Guess what? She fell off into the water. If she had gone out on the water in a dinghy as drunk as she was, and had turtled the boat and drowned, no one would pity her.
- cranjice 8y ago
  At the same time if you get drunk, visit the roof of the empire state building and lean over the edge guess what? You’ll find you cant fall thanks to a tall safety fence. Sure, your own residential roof is a different story, as is a dinghy. The difference to me is the expectation of protection from obvious hazards in public and commercial spaces. In addition to monitoring (a last ditch effort imo) it seems relatively trivial to install nets or fencing to prevent falls off cruise ships. Why that isn't alreay mandated given the statistics provided is beyond me.
  - johan_larson 8y ago
    I agree it makes sense to install safety devices to protect against carelessness and inattention. But cruise ships already have that, with waist-high railings around all outdoor public areas. Going further, with horizontal netting or 6 foot fencing, would be trying to protect passengers against injury even in the case of outright thrill-seeking or tomfoolery. I'm guessing the cruise lines resist that partly out of cost considerations and partly because they don't want the ships to start looking like prisons. Passengers aren't going to like it if they bought a luxurious getaway and they find themselves in a cage.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    It's not a safety fence, it's a suicide fence. That's not a big problem for cruise ships because the bodies just hit the ocean.
- astura 8y ago
  She was a passenger, she wasn't drunk boating (which is illegal). If someone sober took her out on a dingy and just left her there after she fell overboard, people would be pretty outraged.
sigfubar 8y ago
I’ve gone on almost two dozen cruises stretching back a decade and a half. Getting drunk and falling overboard aren’t things that normal people have to worry about. Truth be told, cruise ships are remarkably safe, are run by professional ship masters with multiple decades of experience, and staffed by bridge officers whose careers exist entirely outside of the cost-cutting corporate world of cruise ship operators. You have to remember that the ship master’s career track and profession are thousands of years old. Their training carries the weight of countless generations of professionals who came before the current one. With that out of the way, my opinion - which is considered politically incorrect in the US - is that someone who is unable to moderate their drinking and stay aware of their surroundings doesn’t deserve the place they’re occupying in the world. To me this is a sign that the person doesn’t value their life, so they’re welcome to leave at the earliest opportunity. Lastly, I know from experience that getting grievously drunk on a cruise ship isn’t a trivial matter. Bars pour drinks in small increments even for passengers who have some variant of the “unlimited drinking package”. It takes real effort to get into a stupor bad enough to ignore the dangers of railings and falls into the ocean from 12 deck.
- Thriptic 8y ago
  Additionally, focusing in on the cruise ship response time isn't really logical. Sure, it could be faster than 15 hours to catch an accidental fall (which it sounds like basically doesn't happen), but in the cited example of a black out drunk person falling overboard or someone committing suicide, the response time could be < 5 minutes and it would still be too late. Someone that drunk isn't going to have the faculties to be able to swim or float, and people looking to die don't want to swim or float.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
coldcode 8y ago
Regularity can mean once every 10,000 years. In this case it's 1 or 2 a month. Not alarming. People love to use statistics in an alarmist way.
subfay 8y ago
FYI my prior post was censored by HN, they flagged it as 'flagged' already after two downvotes. Before you get fully flagged you usually have got much more downvotes. Would lile to get a comment from HN on this. So, we are not allowed to criticize YC or HN and the tendency of some (or many users) to post/upvote stories about depression/suicide? The post: Tedious post beating around the bush (suicide). Typical HN post about the bright side of life.
- danielvf 8y ago
  Your previous post wasn’t very helpful. You were speaking negatively of both the article and the site without making an actual argument about either. Unsubstantive negativity and dismissals are nether educational for everyone reading, nor encourage a good community. Disagreeing is usually fine, but you do need to do it the right way, per Monty Python. “An argument’s not the same as contradiction... An argument is a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition.” “No it isn’t!” Note also that posts from new accounts can be marked as flagged by users, not just downvoted.
  - subfay 8y ago
    I disagree and tbh, your tone is not better. The things I pointed out in my first post are not that off. But I don't want to discuss these ridiculous cruises further, I find this topic and the article, yes I have to admit, super boring and on something like HN so off-topic. We all know why this cruise article was posted here (read on). Re HN and depression, suicide and related topics. Just check HN's search and you will see what I mean. Compared to any other forum HN has a quite large share of such posts. This annoys me, HN is full of great people, great topics, content at the cutting edge. This stuff is not why I drop by. Hence my aggression against this article posted here. Btw, till now I got four downvotes for my second comment in it has not been flagged yet. This is why I assumed earlier that HN or some of their mods helped. We know why this might have happened and we know that this should not happen. Happy to hear now your, hopefully more balanced, view.
mc32 8y ago
Couldn’t ships put up “jumper” nets around most parts of the ships to catch these accidental overboardings? Would it do more harm than good (i.e. invite people to jump and test, or simply make people more complacent and careless?)
- pdimitar 8y ago
  I am wondering the same. Is it really so hugely expensive to add nets? Or would it hamper the functionality of the ship in some way? Compromise buoyancy? Can somebody with more knowledge chime in?
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    I don't know. What if you need to abandon ship?
  - stephen_g 8y ago
    I don’t think there’s any technical reason they couldn’t - often on military ships around helipads the barriers around it are netted and fold down when it’s operational so you don’t fall off. Bit cruise ships are huge. For fall nets to be really effective, you’d probably have to have one under every level you could fall from. Some of these things are dozens of storeys tall - if you just had one around the bottom, it would have to stick out and be absolutely massive. Either way, the cost would be phenomenal. If they really wanted to make it completely safe they’d just make the balustrades taller than average head height and with no gaps a person could fit through, or put mesh screening all around or glass or something. But that would probably be ugly and would diminish the view people are paying for. So they’ve made the trade off.
- bjelkeman-again 8y ago
  I think it would make people think about risks and start feeling unsafe. Bad for business, so that wouldn’t be implemented.
- analog31 8y ago
  Indeed, in a similar vein, it's impossible to open the windows more than just a crack in college dormitories any more.
boulos 8y ago
This quote: > Last year, almost 27 (26.7) million people took a cruise holiday, and there were nine overboard incidents involving passengers. This equates to about one incident per seven million passengers,” seemed like "Huh, weird math error" but then I realized that they likely meant what they said, and consider someone a "passenger" per trip. So, this implies that of the people who take cruises, they take about two per year on average. Interesting stat if correct!
- cardiffspaceman 8y ago
  I took two cruises each year 2017 and 2018, and I'm not retired. I also flew somewhere on vacation those years, more times. The stats mean, some people have leisure time.
- Casseres 8y ago
  I bet the median is one per year though. Out of everyone I know who goes on cruises, they just go once a year. I imagine there are quite a few people that go multiple times a year that would pull the average away from the median. Cruises are often cheaper than retirement homes and provide better service assuming the passenger does not have a serious ailment.
beginningguava 8y ago
seems like the problem could be solved fairly cheaply with machine learning. Just have cameras covering common areas for falls and have a model that identifies human like objects and then shoot off a signal to a human to verify, then if it's actually a person who fell over board send someone in a jetski or something to retrieve them Also remind's me of patrice O'neal's rock coat joke 13 minutes in(NSFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-4k2SOD1P8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-4k2SOD1P8
ken 8y ago
> minimum railing heights of one meter (39 inches) I'm surprised by how low this is. For comparison, the OSHA requirement is 42 inches -- for sober professionals on stable ground. At the cruise ship minimum, I'd need to wear fall protection to work on that deck. I found an article [1] about a law proposing 42 inch rails for cruise ships, and apparently that was already part of USCG inspections as of 2015, but it's not clear what level of enforcement there is. [1]: http://www.professionalmariner.com/May-2015/Coast-Guard-proposes-new-rule-on-cruise-ship-security/ http://www.professionalmariner.com/May-2015/Coast-Guard-prop...
Pica_soO 8y ago
To fire a life-jacket with thermal insulation towards a person sized thermal spot going overboard should be standard procedure.

59 points by gscott 8y ago

subfay 8y ago

Tedious post beating around the bush (suicide). Typical HN post about the bright side of life.

atomical 8y ago
How many accounts have you created?
- dexen 8y ago
  Meta: please avoid snarky replies. If you feel the OP is misplaced, downvote or perhaps even flag if it is egregious. FWIW, I've found the suicide interpretation quite interesting and eye-opening: a thought of a woman, silently hiding her suffering, perhaps for several years, finally pushers herself over the edge after spending last night with dear friends. And much more fitting the sad story than the dry, calculating "whose money and responsibilities?" tone of the article.
  - atomical 8y ago
    No thanks.
    - dang 8y ago
      Posting uncivil and unsubstantive comments will get you banned here, so could you please stop doing that? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - atomical 8y ago
        If you're going to ban my account I would like all my comments deleted.

Rapzid 8y ago

> few are aware that their personal safety is in the hands of one of the world’s most globalized, legally complex, and opaque industries I'm just having a really hard time following the moral logic here.. To me it's like saying your life is in the hands of the fed when you go into a national park. You get blasted on a bottle of tequila, climb Half Dome and fall, but your life was in the hands of the fed? Most people I know would be cognizant that if you get super drunk on a cruise, site on the railing, and then fall from the railing with nobody around you may not be heard from again.. And ignoring the falling off the boat bit... Just _being_ on a boat in the middle of the ocean? Your not aware that your safety is pretty much in the hands of the cruise operator?

EliRivers 8y ago
Continuing the theme, are you also aware that on many cruises, sexually assaulting another passenger will be met by asking you to leave at the next port? That's a specific example related to me by a chap I know; an ex-copper who now heads security on a cruise ship operating out of Southampton in the UK. I forget which nation the ship's flag is, but basically any and all crimes committed on board are met with a shrug and a suggestion to offload the offending passenger at the next stop. Actions that would lead to lengthy custodial sentences if committed in the passenger's own home are basically without consequence; he's had to deal with theft, assault, sexual assault, people getting drunk and smacking around their spouse and children. Flag state doesn't want to know. On merchant vessels that just have a small crew and no passengers (i.e. almost all of them), it's even more lawless. In a U.S. national park, there is law. There is someone tasked with enforcing that law. At sea, at the level of individual interactions, not so much.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  It's usually the law of the ship's flag country that applies when in intl. waters. Given that most ships are registered in smaller countries with lax tax laws, it's not surprising there is more trouble prosecuting those than just declaring the passenger "Persona Non Grata" (and the unplanned stop is usually costly to the passenger) Not to say that if the crime is larger there is a greater chance of prosecution and/or other litigation.

ekianjo 8y ago

I was expecting some kind of stats and charts when I see "alarming Regularity". Nothing of the sort. Totally overblown headline compared the amount of accidents. Would you make a headline for "People Die in Car Crashes with Alarming Regularity" ? probably not, even though the problem it way more important and endemic.

jopsen 8y ago
> Since 2000, 284 people have fallen off cruise ships .... an average of about 1.5 people per month From the article.. but yeah, with 30 million people traveling on cruise ships it's hard to tell if this is worse than regular traffic. (Wouldn't surprise me, if cruise ships are skechy)
- FakeComments 8y ago
  1 in 10,000 people in the US die each year in a car accident. So it would require 3,000 deaths per year to approach cars. It actually works out reasonable as an estimate: if you spend 1-2 hours in a car each day, that’s 4-8% of your year; a week on a cruise ship would be 2% of a year. So we’re within an order of magnitude on exposure to each. So with 30 people per year dying to falling off boats, it’s much, much less dangerous than cars.
  - zilian 8y ago
    Have you read the article ? It s interesting and is actually about how few f#cks are given by those companies. And in your car, you are 100% liable and not in international waters
  - danso 8y ago
    What’s the number of people who travel in cars or are near traffic on a daily basis, versus the number of people who are on a cruise ship on a daily basis?
aga98mtl 8y ago
I suspect a large amount these MOB incidents are suicide. Alcohol abuse and and suicidal thought are linked. ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872355/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872355/ ) The lady in the article drank a lot and chose to sit on the railing of a private balcony alone. Drunk people manage to die in shallow water with an alarming regularity. I wonder if it is even possible to save a drunk MOB in a calm sea. Stopping a cruise ship and getting a rescue boat ready to action must take a couple of minutes. Maybe a a drone could do it.

aaron695 8y ago

> He asked me, as a journalist covering the travel industry, to imagine what would happen if, every month, one to two people died on an airplane for a predictable operational reason, such as sustaining a traumatic head injury during turbulence due to failure to wear a seatbelt. It’s a scenario I find impossible to imagine, after years of flight-safety demonstrations, seatbelt checks, and back-of-the-seat cards. "At least one person a month dies of a blood clot on the lungs on arrival at Heathrow Airport, say doctors." ? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1109406.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1109406.stm

danielvf 8y ago

I’ll never forget the day we pulled into port after a week crossing the ocean, and the cruise ship started unloading dead bodies, one after the other, into ambulance after ambulance. It turns out that this was normal. Outside the the party cruse lines / routes, the median age of a cruise ship passenger is “old”. When you have several thousand old people in one place for a week, statistically, one or more tend to die of natural causes. Once we learn to look for it, we saw the unloading all the time.

NikolaeVarius 8y ago
15 seconds of trying to verify this sort of claim has come up with this site https://www.cruiseshipdeaths.com/ https://www.cruiseshipdeaths.com/ This is going to be an interesting Saturday morning.
- akudha 8y ago
  Jeez, that is morbid. There is a website (or an app) for everything

johan_larson 8y ago

I think the author is stretching to make a point. I mean, the case she opens with is a drunk woman who climbed a railing to sit on it. Guess what? She fell off into the water. If she had gone out on the water in a dinghy as drunk as she was, and had turtled the boat and drowned, no one would pity her.

cranjice 8y ago
At the same time if you get drunk, visit the roof of the empire state building and lean over the edge guess what? You’ll find you cant fall thanks to a tall safety fence. Sure, your own residential roof is a different story, as is a dinghy. The difference to me is the expectation of protection from obvious hazards in public and commercial spaces. In addition to monitoring (a last ditch effort imo) it seems relatively trivial to install nets or fencing to prevent falls off cruise ships. Why that isn't alreay mandated given the statistics provided is beyond me.
- johan_larson 8y ago
  I agree it makes sense to install safety devices to protect against carelessness and inattention. But cruise ships already have that, with waist-high railings around all outdoor public areas. Going further, with horizontal netting or 6 foot fencing, would be trying to protect passengers against injury even in the case of outright thrill-seeking or tomfoolery. I'm guessing the cruise lines resist that partly out of cost considerations and partly because they don't want the ships to start looking like prisons. Passengers aren't going to like it if they bought a luxurious getaway and they find themselves in a cage.
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  It's not a safety fence, it's a suicide fence. That's not a big problem for cruise ships because the bodies just hit the ocean.
astura 8y ago
She was a passenger, she wasn't drunk boating (which is illegal). If someone sober took her out on a dingy and just left her there after she fell overboard, people would be pretty outraged.

sigfubar 8y ago

I’ve gone on almost two dozen cruises stretching back a decade and a half. Getting drunk and falling overboard aren’t things that normal people have to worry about. Truth be told, cruise ships are remarkably safe, are run by professional ship masters with multiple decades of experience, and staffed by bridge officers whose careers exist entirely outside of the cost-cutting corporate world of cruise ship operators. You have to remember that the ship master’s career track and profession are thousands of years old. Their training carries the weight of countless generations of professionals who came before the current one. With that out of the way, my opinion - which is considered politically incorrect in the US - is that someone who is unable to moderate their drinking and stay aware of their surroundings doesn’t deserve the place they’re occupying in the world. To me this is a sign that the person doesn’t value their life, so they’re welcome to leave at the earliest opportunity. Lastly, I know from experience that getting grievously drunk on a cruise ship isn’t a trivial matter. Bars pour drinks in small increments even for passengers who have some variant of the “unlimited drinking package”. It takes real effort to get into a stupor bad enough to ignore the dangers of railings and falls into the ocean from 12 deck.

Thriptic 8y ago
Additionally, focusing in on the cruise ship response time isn't really logical. Sure, it could be faster than 15 hours to catch an accidental fall (which it sounds like basically doesn't happen), but in the cited example of a black out drunk person falling overboard or someone committing suicide, the response time could be < 5 minutes and it would still be too late. Someone that drunk isn't going to have the faculties to be able to swim or float, and people looking to die don't want to swim or float.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

coldcode 8y ago

Regularity can mean once every 10,000 years. In this case it's 1 or 2 a month. Not alarming. People love to use statistics in an alarmist way.

subfay 8y ago

FYI my prior post was censored by HN, they flagged it as 'flagged' already after two downvotes. Before you get fully flagged you usually have got much more downvotes. Would lile to get a comment from HN on this. So, we are not allowed to criticize YC or HN and the tendency of some (or many users) to post/upvote stories about depression/suicide? The post: Tedious post beating around the bush (suicide). Typical HN post about the bright side of life.

danielvf 8y ago
Your previous post wasn’t very helpful. You were speaking negatively of both the article and the site without making an actual argument about either. Unsubstantive negativity and dismissals are nether educational for everyone reading, nor encourage a good community. Disagreeing is usually fine, but you do need to do it the right way, per Monty Python. “An argument’s not the same as contradiction... An argument is a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition.” “No it isn’t!” Note also that posts from new accounts can be marked as flagged by users, not just downvoted.
- subfay 8y ago
  I disagree and tbh, your tone is not better. The things I pointed out in my first post are not that off. But I don't want to discuss these ridiculous cruises further, I find this topic and the article, yes I have to admit, super boring and on something like HN so off-topic. We all know why this cruise article was posted here (read on). Re HN and depression, suicide and related topics. Just check HN's search and you will see what I mean. Compared to any other forum HN has a quite large share of such posts. This annoys me, HN is full of great people, great topics, content at the cutting edge. This stuff is not why I drop by. Hence my aggression against this article posted here. Btw, till now I got four downvotes for my second comment in it has not been flagged yet. This is why I assumed earlier that HN or some of their mods helped. We know why this might have happened and we know that this should not happen. Happy to hear now your, hopefully more balanced, view.

mc32 8y ago

Couldn’t ships put up “jumper” nets around most parts of the ships to catch these accidental overboardings? Would it do more harm than good (i.e. invite people to jump and test, or simply make people more complacent and careless?)

pdimitar 8y ago
I am wondering the same. Is it really so hugely expensive to add nets? Or would it hamper the functionality of the ship in some way? Compromise buoyancy? Can somebody with more knowledge chime in?
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  I don't know. What if you need to abandon ship?
- stephen_g 8y ago
  I don’t think there’s any technical reason they couldn’t - often on military ships around helipads the barriers around it are netted and fold down when it’s operational so you don’t fall off. Bit cruise ships are huge. For fall nets to be really effective, you’d probably have to have one under every level you could fall from. Some of these things are dozens of storeys tall - if you just had one around the bottom, it would have to stick out and be absolutely massive. Either way, the cost would be phenomenal. If they really wanted to make it completely safe they’d just make the balustrades taller than average head height and with no gaps a person could fit through, or put mesh screening all around or glass or something. But that would probably be ugly and would diminish the view people are paying for. So they’ve made the trade off.
bjelkeman-again 8y ago
I think it would make people think about risks and start feeling unsafe. Bad for business, so that wouldn’t be implemented.
analog31 8y ago
Indeed, in a similar vein, it's impossible to open the windows more than just a crack in college dormitories any more.

boulos 8y ago

This quote: > Last year, almost 27 (26.7) million people took a cruise holiday, and there were nine overboard incidents involving passengers. This equates to about one incident per seven million passengers,” seemed like "Huh, weird math error" but then I realized that they likely meant what they said, and consider someone a "passenger" per trip. So, this implies that of the people who take cruises, they take about two per year on average. Interesting stat if correct!

cardiffspaceman 8y ago
I took two cruises each year 2017 and 2018, and I'm not retired. I also flew somewhere on vacation those years, more times. The stats mean, some people have leisure time.
Casseres 8y ago
I bet the median is one per year though. Out of everyone I know who goes on cruises, they just go once a year. I imagine there are quite a few people that go multiple times a year that would pull the average away from the median. Cruises are often cheaper than retirement homes and provide better service assuming the passenger does not have a serious ailment.

beginningguava 8y ago

seems like the problem could be solved fairly cheaply with machine learning. Just have cameras covering common areas for falls and have a model that identifies human like objects and then shoot off a signal to a human to verify, then if it's actually a person who fell over board send someone in a jetski or something to retrieve them Also remind's me of patrice O'neal's rock coat joke 13 minutes in(NSFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-4k2SOD1P8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-4k2SOD1P8

ken 8y ago

> minimum railing heights of one meter (39 inches) I'm surprised by how low this is. For comparison, the OSHA requirement is 42 inches -- for sober professionals on stable ground. At the cruise ship minimum, I'd need to wear fall protection to work on that deck. I found an article [1] about a law proposing 42 inch rails for cruise ships, and apparently that was already part of USCG inspections as of 2015, but it's not clear what level of enforcement there is. [1]: http://www.professionalmariner.com/May-2015/Coast-Guard-proposes-new-rule-on-cruise-ship-security/ http://www.professionalmariner.com/May-2015/Coast-Guard-prop...

Pica_soO 8y ago

To fire a life-jacket with thermal insulation towards a person sized thermal spot going overboard should be standard procedure.