Despite overflowing toilets and "human waste all over the floor," passengers are being forbidden from leaving a Carnival cruise ship docked in port at St. Maarten—just a month after another Carnival cruise ship was disabled and left to float for days in the Gulf of Mexico as passengers filled it with excrement and built makeshift shanty towns on deck.
The Carnival Dream, CNN reports, has not quite achieved the shit levels of the Triumph, but the fact that the ship's officers are preventing passengers from disembarking surely counts for something in the great tallying of Horrific Cruise Ordure Incidents:
Several passengers aboard the Dream have contacted CNN, telling stories of power outages and overflowing toilets, all while docked in port at Philipsburg, St. Maarten, in the eastern Caribbean.
"We are not allowed off of the boat despite the fact that we have no way to use the restrooms on board," Jonathan Evans of Reidsville, North Carolina, said in an e-mail early Thursday. "The cruise director is giving passengers very limited information and tons of empty promises. What was supposed to take a hour has turned into 7-plus hours."
The Dream was meant to leave St. Maarten at 5 p.m. yesterday, but generator problems are preventing it from taking off, and also passengers from flushing the toilets:
Gregg Stark, who is traveling with his wife and two young children, told CNN, "There's human waste all over the floor in some of the bathrooms and they're overflowing — and in the state rooms. The elevators have not been working. They've been turning them on and off, on and off."
In February, the Carnival Triumph was crippled by an engine fire and spent four days in the Gulf of Mexico before being towed to Alabama. Earlier this week, more than 100 Royal Caribbean passengers were struck with a gastrointestinal virus.
[CNN, image, of Triumph, via AP]