
People Fall Off Cruise Ships with Alarming Regularity - gscott
https://qz.com/1443797/why-do-people-keep-falling-off-cruise-ships-because-people-keep-stepping-onto-them/
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danielvf
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
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
Jeez, that is morbid. There is a website (or an app) for everything

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ekianjo
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
> 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
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
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

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ken
> 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-
prop...](http://www.professionalmariner.com/May-2015/Coast-Guard-proposes-new-
rule-on-cruise-ship-security/)

------
Rapzid
> 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?

~~~
Waterluvian
The irony, in my opinion, is that the modern world has become so safe that
people have come to expect safety. If you get hurt or die young, something
must be wrong. A safety measure must be missing or someone has wronged you.
The "default state of being" is seen as living a long happy life and anything
short of that is an error state.

But in reality the cosmos doesn't owe you a thing.

~~~
siruncledrew
> "Why do people still die as a result of them, despite the fact that
> technology exists to detect falls? And, after a person is swallowed by the
> ocean, what power do their loved ones have to find out what happened, hold
> any guilty parties responsible, or demand reform?"

This line about safety encapsulates that point. There's so much safety and
rules all around us that people come to _expect_ safety _provided_ for them,
so there is less emphasis on maintaining one's own personal safety. This is a
problem in itself that people decide they could let their guard down because
someone else will take care of them. There's no 100% guarantee behind that,
and the randomness of the cosmos ensures it won't always happen.

There's less "free will" and more "supervised will". Of course not everything
can be totally free, but if people want to preserve a notion of independence
and self-autonomy, then the thinking surrounding personal safety, awareness,
and responsibility should change.

Like in the quote from the article above, the immediate reaction (from the
author's POV) is to blame someone/something else. Sometimes, the reality is
that nothing could be done. Welcome to world: there's pitfalls, and obstacles,
and things that are not safe. People fall out of hotel balconies, off of train
platforms, into manholes, off of bridges, into rivers, etc. There's an
infinite number of ways to die that not all of them could be safeguarded or
fenced off. That's the inherent risk of being alive that every living creature
deals with.

Overall, this article is basically creating a problem out of a non-problem,
and the real story is that someone was served/drank too much alcohol at a bar.
The article says: "Since 2000, 284 people have fallen off cruise ships..."
followed by "Most of the nearly 30 million passengers who travel on a cruise
each year...". Therefore, this means 1.3 people/mo fall off cruise ships...
out of 2 500 000 passengers/mo. So there is a significantly greater chance of
being struck by lightning (at 1:700 000 odds) than falling off a cruise ship
each year [1].

[1] [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/flash-
facts...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/flash-facts-about-
lightning/)

~~~
JetSpiegel
> This is a problem in itself that people decide they could let their guard
> down because someone else will take care of them.

I understand your point, but this is a cruise ship, letting your guard down
and being taken care of is the whole point.

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johan_larson
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
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.

~~~
SamReidHughes
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.

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sigfubar
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
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.

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mc32
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
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?

~~~
stephen_g
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.

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boulos
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!

~~~
Casseres
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.

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coldcode
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.

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aaron695
> 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)

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beginningguava
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)

