The Prinsendam fire kindles concern about safety at sea
"Every day is a day of joy aboard the M.S. Prinsendam. Six passenger decks are devoted to the luxurious vacation life you expect, with an ambience of intimacy and charm." So begins a lavish illustrated brochure touting the pleasures of cruising to Alaska and the Orient aboard the Holland America Line's gleaming 426-ft. Prinsendam. Notes the pamphlet: "Your Dutch officers are dedicated to making every moment memorable."
For 320 passengers and about 200 crew members, the final moments of the Prinsendam's latest cruise were all too memorable. As the ship steamed through the Gulf of Alaska on a scheduled month-long voyage from Vancouver to Singapore, fire broke out. All of the people aboard clambered into lifeboats and were rescued, but not before some of them were tossed about in lifeboats by stormy 25-ft. waves for as long as 13 hours. At week's end, eight days after the fire first broke out, the still burning hulk of the Prinsendam sank, leaving behind a lifeboat to mark its place and several unsettling questions about the safety of the 65 ships that take hundreds of thousands of Americans on luxury cruises each year.
Most disturbing of all is the fact that the Prinsendam, built in 1973 at a cost of $27 million, conformed to the safety standards of the 1974 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea. The ship also met all Dutch standards, which are stricter than the international regulations on some matters. Just last May the Prinsendam passed a U.S. Coast Guard safety inspection.
Exactly what went wrong aboard the Prinsendam is to be determined by a Dutch investigation. Preliminary accounts indicate that a fuel line may have broken, causing diesel oil to spurt on hot pipes and burst into flames. The fire knocked out the electrical system, shutting down the fire-fighting pumps. Crewmen sprayed carbon dioxide from handheld extinguishers, but could not keep the flames from spreading to other parts of the ship through an air shaft.
The ship's passengers were rousted out of their rooms and onto the open decks at 1:30 a.m., most of them wearing only bathrobes and slippers. Under the shimmering northern lights, they listened to rousing renditions by the ship's chorus of Oklahoma! and other Rodgers and Hammerstein hits. Suddenly, around 6 a.m. bells rang, and Captain Cornelius Wabeke ordered: "Abandon ship!" With few exceptions, passengers and crew members went in an orderly fashion to their assigned lifeboats, as they had done during a practice drill three days earlier.
By the time the lifeboats dropped into the sea, three Coast Guard cutters and the 1,000-ft. U.S. supertanker Williamsburgh were headed for the Prinsendam, which by now was listing and billowing smoke. Cold and soaked with sea spray, some passengers kept up their spirits by singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat and Show Me the Way to Go Home. Recalled John Courtney, 69, a retired college art professor: "A lot of people were seasick, but there was no hysteria." By 9:30 a.m., helicopters began hoisting people from the lifeboats in baskets and ferrying them to the rescue vessels. Only a handful of passengers suffered any ill effects from the cold. Said Master Sergeant E.L. Nardi, an Air Force medic: "Eight hours later, we would have lost half of them."