Poop Cruise: The Carnival Triumph Disaster That Stranded Thousands Without Toilets

Poop Cruise: The Carnival Triumph Disaster That Stranded Thousands Without Toilets

Kyle Risi: [00:00:00] Adam, more than 4,000 people stuck on a cruise ship and not a single functioning toilet on board.

Adam Cox: Oh God.

Kyle Risi: Literal sewage was seeping through the walls and sloshing within the carpet beneath them. The crew then start going from cabin to cabin, handing out these red square biohazard bags for people to start pooping in. They are literally six inches by six inches square.

Adam Cox: How can you aim into a bag that size? You can't.

Kyle Risi: And for dinner you could choose from a lovingly assembled onion sandwich or a roll in a ketchup packet.

Adam Cox: What the hell is happening on this cruise ship?

Kyle Risi: [00:01:00] welcome to the Compendium and Assembly of Fascinating Things, a weekly leave variety podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social gathering.

Adam Cox: We explore stories from the darker corners of true crime, the hidden gems of history, and the jaw dropping deeds of extraordinary people.

Kyle Risi: I am Kyle Reese, your ring master for this week's episode.

Adam Cox: And I'm Adam Cox, the angry customer shouting in the audience this week.

Kyle Risi: A heckler.

Adam Cox: A heckler. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: What are your jabs that you're gonna be throwing out today? Um, you suck Boo. Just the classics. You're not my mother. I had sex with your mom.

Adam Cox: Yeah, just, yeah. The classics.

Kyle Risi: And before we dive in, just a quick heads up to all of our lovely freaks out there. Remember that signing up to our Patreon as a free member will get you early access to next week's episode an entire seven days before anyone else. And as always, it is always completely free of charge.

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Adam Cox: Oh, yeah, the key chain.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. The one that's always dangling there, By your crotch. Yeah. Why do we say that every week?

Adam Cox: Because it is just, it's crass. It's, but our listeners love having that dangling near their crotch. Do they, I don't know. Have we had

Kyle Risi: any feedback from anyone going, do you know what? I go out at night and this is [00:03:00] a total man magnet for me because there's nothing more than men love seeing one than a pair of balls hanging down.

Adam Cox: No one's told us to stop, so until they do,

Kyle Risi: please just stop.

And yeah, depending on the tier that you choose, we've got exclusive merch to send your away. it's absolutely free. And again, it's the beautifully machine lathed, exclusive compendium key chain. So we can always be dangling there by your crutch.

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All right. That's enough of the housekeeping. It's time to dive into today's story because Adam, today on the compendium, we are diving into an assembly of floating [00:04:00] biohazard dramas. Dun dun.

Adam Cox: What is going on here then? So people are out at sea and some kind of pollution, some kind of oil spill.

Kyle Risi: Adam, it goes without saying. They're based on a number of episodes that we have done on the compendium that the ocean is a very dangerous place. It is. We've got rogue waves, we've got pirates, we've got icebergs, we've got sharks. Hell, we even have a submersible submarine made out of carbon fiber.

Do you remember that episode?

Adam Cox: It was literally last week,

Kyle Risi: so it might surprise you to hear that in 2023, over 30 million people willingly chose to go on a cruise, okay?

And after researching this episode, I can't imagine anything more horrific than being stuck in the middle of the ocean with literally thousands of potential serial killers.

Adam Cox: Does, has that actually happened? Have people been on a cruise where there's a murderer at risk or

Kyle Risi: people have been on cruises where they have been murdered? And the [00:05:00] thing is though, you gotta think, you can't escape from that cruise ship. So as tensions rise, if something bad happens, you are on a cruise ship with a lot of frustrated, potentially violent people.

I can't imagine anything worse than being on a cruise ship. I

Adam Cox: mean, i, it's not for me, I don't think. Maybe when I hit 60, I'll love it. But, but what

Kyle Risi: is it about people that love cruise ships? I don't get it. I guess people love dining at the

Adam Cox: captain's table.

Kyle Risi: Um, there's 4,000 people on these damn ships. The captain's going to eat with every single one of them.

Adam Cox: He, he gets around, sorry. So fat, um. Yeah, I get the idea or the appeal whereby, you're visiting a load of different islands and overnight you're traveling to different countries or whatever it might be, and you stop off for the day and get off and go see it.

Mm. So I get it, but I just, it's not for me. 'cause I wanna experience the culture at night.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. That's it. And that's one of the biggest problems with the cruise ship industry is that a lot of the immunities and the restaurants and stuff, even when you arrive in those cities, they're all owned or controlled by the cruise ship industry.

So these economies that [00:06:00] you're visiting get very, very little. Mm-hmm. From the people visiting them. It's a real problem. And the thing is though, PR firms governing cruise ships must be doing something right because overall , cruise ships are often marketed as safe, relaxing getaways.

But recent data reveal some very concerning trends regarding serious crimes and incidents. The seas

between 2015 and 2023, sexual assaults was the most reported crime on a cruise ship. With over 450 cases being reported.

Violent crimes and physical assaults in such close proximity to all their free booze is just widely reported.

And the chance of being robbed in your cabin or being broken into is just another routine form that passengers have to fill in. As the admin worker just rolls their eyes at you, it's oh yeah, you've been broken into again, it's just so commonplace. Really? Hmm.

Adam Cox: I did not know this. I thought they were supposed to be like luxury cruises.

Kyle Risi: Well, you would think, wouldn't you? Mm. It depends. It could be marketers, electric crew, but you don't know who you're gonna get as a passenger. Right? [00:07:00] True.

When it comes to more serious crimes like murder, they are rare, but they are not unheard of. In 2018, Tamara Tucker was murdered by her boyfriend, Eric Newman abort a carnival elation. Cruise ship after a heated argument. Apparently Eric strangled Tamara before tipping her body over the balcony, so it's pretty dark.

Adam Cox: Wow. Although, I don't think that's the cruise's fault in terms of that probably could have happened anywhere if it's like a violent relationship.

Kyle Risi: What I'm saying is that these things can happen on cruise ships. Sure. And you could very easily be involved in that in some way that anger and aggression could have been taken out on you.

Adam Cox: Sorry. I was, I had it in my mind that it's like a mystery serial killer that's just let loose on the cruise ship. And so you don't know if you are at risk,

Kyle Risi: oh, you're speculating about what this episode's about?

Adam Cox: Yes.

Kyle Risi: We're gonna get to that. Okay. I wanna paint a picture of just like. How you should not be going on cruise ships.

Adam Cox: Okay. '

Kyle Risi: cause Shirley McGill, she was also killed by her partner Robert McGill, on the carnival relation during a five night cruise to Mexico. Apparently he beat her to a pulp before strangling [00:08:00] her in her cabin. But then there's also the case of Amy Lynn Bradley. She was traveling with a family on a Royal Caribbean cruise.

And Adam, she just, vanished 30 minutes after last being seen. It speculated that Amy was kidnapped, she was held captive and then smuggled off the ship when it finally docked in its destination and was then sold into human trafficking.

Wow. Mm-hmm. And we dunno where she is to this day.

She literally just disappeared off that ship within a 30 minute window. Her father was the last person to see her on her own balcony.

Adam Cox: How does that even happen? Because you feel like, I dunno, there's nowhere to escape easily, and you must be able to find all the hiding places or whatever. Yeah. In a, on a cruise.

Kyle Risi: But the trouble is like if you've got like a window of two hours to try and find her and then a docks in the next stop, soon as they get off the ship, that is it. But then also, what do you do? Do you stay on the ship hoping that maybe she's on there? Or do you stay on land hoping that she's been taken off the ship? What do you do in that [00:09:00] situation?

Adam Cox: You have no idea.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. But also let's not forget that the cruise industry is rife with tax evasion, exploitation of workers, vast amounts of pollution, all while robbing small communities, drive resources and tour money.

And just to add to this already long list of reasons to never get on a cruise ship today, I'm gonna tell you about one specific incident. That will make you reconsider ever getting onto a cruise ship ever again.

Adam Cox: Well, I haven't even thought about getting on one, but this is probably gonna just,

Kyle Risi: it's gonna solidify that.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Adam, picture this. It is February the seventh, 2013. Uhhuh. You're picturing that day. Yeah. It's cold. Yeah. No, you're in the Caribbean.

Adam Cox: Oh, okay. It's hot.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. You've just boughted a $420 million Carnival Triumph cruise ship from Galveston, Texas.

Adam Cox: Am I wearing a hat?

Kyle Risi: You are wearing whatever you wanna wear.

You're definitely wearing shorts. You're a short kind of guy and a big hat, like the hat that, uh, you know, the one, I haven't even said it yet, the hat that, uh, Rachel wears in Friends Uhhuh and Chandler's, like, um, I, I [00:10:00] recognize that hat. I was taken on board that hat They did experiments on me. I can't have kids. Yeah. So that hat,

Adam Cox: okay. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: This is one of the finest cruise ships on the ocean. It's got steady the art restaurants, world-class entertainment immunities to rival a five star resort all spread across 274 meters of deck space rising 13 decks into the sky.

It's huge.

It's a literal, towering luxury hotel resort, and you are there to have the time of your life. Are you picturing it?

Adam Cox: I'm thinking of the music now.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. One music plane daddy dancing. It's gonna be even better than that.

After two days of smooth sailing across the Gulf of Mexico, you finally arrive in the beautiful city of Cozumel in Mexico where you spend the day shopping, you're sipping pina coladas on the beach.

Of course, you are not thinking about the crippling third world poverty right outside the resort. It doesn't even cross your mind.

Adam Cox: Nope. I'm just thinking about my coconut, uh, bra banging together. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. You're [00:11:00] ready to make out. Yeah. Around 6:00 PM you get back onto the boat. You hit the buffet, you stuff your face with as much food that you can barely breathe.

Adam Cox: I like, all you can eat oysters and shrimp.

Kyle Risi: Oh god. Oysters.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: No oysters at a buffet. No. Thank you.

Adam Cox: Hang on a second.

Kyle Risi: I know you've done this. I know why you say this, but I do not. I will not do it again. When we were in Australia, they had a buffet full of oysters and we were like, yeah, let's get like six.

And we were on a boat. And we were on a boat. But what's gonna happen on this boat is not what happened on our boat in Australia because Adam, after you finish the buffet mm-hmm. the night, you're still young.

This cruise isn't filled with pensioners looking for a swing as weekend. Oh no. Because most of the passengers on the ship are 30 and 40 year olds. Right. So you decide to check out the cruiser's entertainment by heading up to the Lido deck where the DJ is playing num style 129 times in a row. And, but you don't care. You don't mind.

I would say find another record, but it really dates [00:12:00] when this story is happening. Mm-hmm. 2013 peak. That was the song of the summer.

So after a few more cocktails, you hit the buffet one last time because I, I know that's what you'll do. And then you stumble back to your room to finally get into bed for some well deserved rest before hitting that buffet again in the morning.

But as you finally drift off, your sleep is interrupted by the sound of an announcement filling every single corridor across this gargantuan ship

Adam Cox: what's he saying?

Kyle Risi: Alpha Team.

Adam Cox: Alpha team.

Kyle Risi: Alpha Team is code for fire. Oh, this sound blasts through the entire ship At 5:27 AM Just 15 minutes earlier, the ship's engineer heard an alarm going off in the engine room, and to his horror, he sees the diesel generator was spraying fuel all over the place.

If he didn't act now, the entire ship would go up into flames.

But in [00:13:00] order to do that, Adam, he needed to make his way to the other side of the engine room to shut off the generator manually.

The only problem was the engine room was flooded with fuel up to his ankles, so any wrong move, and he would literally be burnt to a crisp,

so the engineer carefully starts making his way across to the control panel. Boom. The fuel ignites, and the engine room is completely incinerated. How that quick mm-hmm. It's fuel for God's sake. Yeah. Yeah. By some miracle, the engineer is completely fine. He makes it out in time.

Mm-hmm. But now there was a massif fire in the engine room. That is when the alpha team message started blaring out across the entire ship.

Smoke starts filling up the lower decks. Thick clouds begin spewing out of the ship's tail, and of course, people are unsurprisingly freaking the fuck out at this point.

Adam Cox: Yeah. The first thing I think of is oh God, this is like the Titanic.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. Many of them start pulling on their life jackets. They start gathering near the lifeboats.

The last thing the captain wants at this point is a massive widespread panic. So [00:14:00] immediately he jumps onto the intercom with the following announcements.

Adam Cox: again, I have no idea what you're saying.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. That is the absolute point here. Oh. Basically he's saying that everything is under control and there's no need to panic, but nobody can understand what the hell he's saying through that thick Italian accent.

All he does is remind people of what happened onboard the carnival cruise ship just the previous year when the Costa Concordia struck rocks off the Italian coast of Tuscany resulting in 32 deaths.

Jeez.

So the announcement has done the opposite of what it was intended to do, and now everyone is freaking the fuck out.

Adam Cox: Well, yeah.

Kyle Risi: Finally realizing of course, the fear that the Captain's accent has instilled in the hearts of every single passenger cruise director, Jen decides to have a crack, she reassures everyone that this situation was.

Under control. Everything was being handled and everything was gonna be [00:15:00] okay. Here's her announcement.

Adam Cox: i'd be like, okay, but you've just said about, Alpha team. Mm-hmm. And. The fire is still blazing at this point. Yeah. And there's been like a siren going off or whatever and she's just going, yeah, just go have yourself some coffee, have some more oysters.

Kyle Risi: It's fine at six in the morning.

No thanks.

Adam Cox: There will be someone that will be doing that.

Kyle Risi: Yuck. This does calm people down to an extent, but at least they won't down bulldozing towards the lifeboats. Right. That's the important thing. But things were pretty far from Okay. The fire was still raging in the engine room. As I said, the crew behind the scene are doing everything they can to just put this fire out.

Eventually, the ship's CO2 cooling systems activates, which obviously quickly puts out the fire. Great.

The feeling was that an absolute crisis had just been averted.

Adam Cox: Okay, that's good.

Kyle Risi: That wasn't until one engineer came back with terrible news.

[00:16:00] The fire had completely destroyed the engine. The triumph was now stuck in the middle of the Gulf with no power. 4,229 people were now stranded with no air conditioning, no power, which meant that there was no hot food, there was no refrigeration, there was no music, there was no TV on board.

Oh my word. But even worse, Adam, something unbelievably unimaginable had just happened that was about to change the lives of all 4,200 passengers and crew onboard the carnival Triumph forever.

There were no working toilets.

Adam Cox: Not even one,

Kyle Risi: not even one toilet onboard.

And the reason for that is because the. Plumbing is essentially electric. It's one of those kind of vacuum kind of plumbing systems that you might see on an apple or on a train where it sucks everything out. Yeah. Without that working, there's no toilets on board.

Adam Cox: Oh, and I've just said oysters for breakfast.

Kyle Risi: Yes. So today on the compendium, I'm gonna be telling you about the Carnival [00:17:00] Triumph Cruise Ship. A story that has solidified its spot in history, becoming known as. The poop cruise from hell.

Adam Cox: Oh God. Is this gonna be like family guy when they start like throwing up and it's just like everywhere?

Kyle Risi: Yes. Because it's like really contagious, right?

Yeah. Adam, this story is worse than a fight. It's even worse than a kidnapping at this point. And I stand by that because at least if you're kidnapped, you're taken off that ship.

Today I am gonna tell you about the grueling story of how 4,200 passengers and crew on board ended up stranded at sea, spending six days with no lights, no water, nothing to eat, and nothing to entertain them.

But even worse, no fucking toilets.

Oh god. 4,200 passengers were forced to crap in plastic bags that started piling up all over the ship.

Oh my God. They've got doggy bags, Uhhuh. On top of that literal sewage is seeping through the walls and sloshing within the carpets beneath them.

Let's just say Adam, that it just does not [00:18:00] take very long for shit to literally hit the fan. This is the story of the 2013 Poop Crews from hell.

Adam Cox: Oh God, this is gonna be gross.

Filler: I'm so excited about this episode. Right? You

Adam Cox: ready to get into it? I think so. I feel dirty already.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, I feel dirty as well.

So, Adam, sum up, there's 4,200 pastures and crew on board Stranded on Carnival Triumph.

Like I said, it's a state-of-the-art ship, but the fire has knocked out all the power and even worse the plumbing systems.

Help is on its way, but it is gonna take some time. There was still running water on the ship, but it's ice cold.

So without heating, the only option is to take a cold shower. There was still one generator running on the ship, but it was only capable of just running all the emergency lighting.

So at best the ship is just really dimly lit in order for you to be able to find the emergency exits and the staircases and doorways, et cetera, without air conditioning, the triumph is now exposed to the full force of the Caribbean sun temperatures on [00:19:00] board start, of course soaring If you were unlucky enough to have booked an interior cabin without windows, your experience was about to get way worse.

Adam Cox: Oh God. Like I imagine it just being unbearable. Mm-hmm. Because you've got, even in the shade, I imagine is not very nice.

Kyle Risi: and you have no fucking entertainment. You've got no internet, you've got no music. Nothing.

Adam Cox: I'm more worried about not being able to go to the toilet and like having good food and like running water and everything.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, for sure.

Adam Cox: Entertainment. I'm sure they can put on a show.

Kyle Risi: I could put it on a show myself. Yeah. I can get you to put on a show for me. Hey Adam, dance.

Adam Cox: Exactly. I'm sure they can sort that out, but it's the

Kyle Risi: fundamentals,

Adam Cox: right?

Yeah. But good thing it's not sinking, so you know, that's a check. They're not drowning, but they've just gotta now wait at sea until someone rescues them. Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: That's it. And like I said, on top of this, no power, no entertainment, not even wifi. It's all completely out. If you did have signal, it's spotty at best.

So people are like literally walking around with their phones in the air, trying to get a message to shore to let people know that they're gonna be okay. If you were lucky, the message [00:20:00] was go through, if not. You would literally just keep trying before your battery drained. Because once that happened, that was it, There's no power.

Some passengers, however, they did manage to find a handful of power sockets that were still working, but these were just completely kind of swarmed with like power strips and extension cables, and kept secret from a lot of the other passengers.

But it created this kind of massive pile of twisted wires. A bit like the rat King. Do you know when all those rats get their tails entwined?

Adam Cox: Imagine someone like, guarding it and almost like selling it or something like that. Bribes and say I will give you some wet wipes need for gimme some electric, man. I just need some electric.

Kyle Risi: So, of course no power onboard or meant that there was no refrigeration, right? So very quickly the realization sets in that it's gonna be almost impossible to feed 4,200 passengers and crew.

It was only a few hours after losing power that food was already starting to spoil, especially in this heat, right? seafood and salads, they were the first to go then with nothing to cook with the rest of the perishables soon followed after that. So your meats and your eggs and your [00:21:00] cheeses and things like that.

Adam Cox: So by day three, you're just gonna be on like corn flakes.

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. so, Breakfast was kind of okay that first morning, right? But as lunch came around, the assortment of buffet foods that passengers were already used to had just been depleted down to a selection of cold cuts and cucumber sandwiches. That was all that was left. Of course, passengers immediately start panicking,

people start grabbing anything that they could and just start hoarding all of this food in their cabins.

It's not long before the passengers left with no food, start panicking for obviously a different reason. 'cause they have literally nothing, right?

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: They realize that all the cabins are fitted with mini bars containing unopened cans of drink and chocolate bars and everything like that. Once they consumed all of their food in their rooms, they start literally raiding other people's rooms looking for anything that they can get their hands on. And honestly, if I were in that situation and all that was being offered was just cold cuts and cucumber sandwiches, I would literally fight to the death for a sinkers bar at this stage.

Like, I know it's only been a few hours, it's, but I would 100% rage a room.

Adam Cox: We've barely got to lunch and people are doing this. Yeah. Just calm down. I'm, [00:22:00] uh, why are the people, the crew not rationing the food and say yeah, you only allowed two cucumber sandwiches.

Kyle Risi: Oh, it's gonna get to the rationing. Of course, at this point, they didn't realize people are gonna act like absolute animals. But I mean, to be fair, I'm, I'm not a great person. At the best of times, I would be one of those people hoarding the food and I would be raiding your room. Yeah. 100%.

Adam Cox: That's just okay. I'm interested to see where it goes.

Kyle Risi: And then of course there's a toilet situation. Mm-hmm. Of course, the sewage system is offline. It meant that across the ship with 4,200 passengers, there was not a single functioning toilet on board.

But at this stage, people don't know this. Oh no. Again, at this point. It's Sunday morning, so by 9:00 AM an influx of people had already used the toilets, as many of us already do.

Of course, at this time in the morning, right? Mm-hmm. What nobody realizes is that without the power, the sewage system just doesn't work.

Like I said, it's that kind of sort of vacuum system that you get on airplanes. It just needs power to function. So with every poop and peep the pipes, just start backing up higher and higher, [00:23:00] and just think about that for a second.

This is Sunday morning, the night before. We're Saturday night onboard a carnival cruise ship. Oh no. People are on their holidays, Adam, literally drinking as much as they could stomach. They're eating as much food as they can, literally stuff in their mouths. You were one of those people just five minutes ago.

Adam Cox: I know, I did. You feel proud of yourself?

I didn't realize I wasn't gonna a toilet. So let me get this straight. So with the toilets then you've just gone done your business, you've flushed, but it hasn't flushed or, but it could go down. But what you're saying, I think it

Kyle Risi: goes down, but it's backing up in the pipes.

Adam Cox: So people just think, oh, well that's working. It's fine. Mm-hmm. But that's gonna, I know where that's heading, isn't it? Yeah.

Kyle Risi: And remember this wasn't your nan and granddad crews relaxing, right? These are 30 to 40 something year olds all out there to have a fricking good time. Also, they just left Mexico.

And if there is something, I know for sure about Mexican water, it does not agree with the Western digestive system.

So when the early poopers are having their [00:24:00] morning poop, I think it's safe to assume that there's a lot of diarrhea going on. Oh god, people also probably throwing up as well, right?

The amount of alcohol that people drink on these kind of cruise ships, especially on a Saturday night. So you can imagine that people were vomiting.

By mid-morning because of gravity or the poop and peep. From the upper decks was now collecting the pipes and the lower decks causing most of the cabin toilets to start overflowing with raw human.

Adam Cox: So if you're on the top deck, you might be all right. Yes.

Kyle Risi: God. And where do most people most commonly keep their luggage when you're on holiday? Uh, on the floor. A lot of people live outside of their suitcase. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. On the freaking floor, Adam. So carnage starts and shoeing all over the ship.

People are freaking out because obviously these toilets and are overflowing. The crew have to somehow stop people from using the toilets.

What are they gonna do, Adam?

Adam Cox: Uh, can you do overboard into a bucket and tip it out? Yeah. Can you imagine? [00:25:00] Just imagine just lining up and there're just people just like throwing this.

That's the only thing you can do, right? Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Let's bring our old mate back in Gin, right? Uhhuh. She comes in onto the intercom with a little message. Mm-hmm. Here it is.

Adam Cox: that's a lot to. Take in

Kyle Risi: process. First of all, what do you think of her tone?

Adam Cox: Well, just a little problem. It's just a little [00:26:00] problem.

Kyle Risi: Love her. Yeah. She's just so classically a holiday rep, right? That tone of voice. Here's what we're gonna do guys. Okay. You are all going to shit in bags

Adam Cox: and she's probably drunk. Or as soon as she's finished that announcement, she is swinging some vodka. I'm like, God.

Kyle Risi: So the cru start going cabin to cabin, handing out these little red square biohazard bags for everybody to pooping uhhuh. And of course, it's suggested that everyone should peep in the showers, right? Or into the sinks.

So a bunch of people who are early poopers, they've already pooped in the toilets and they've tried to flush them.

Mm-hmm. Assuming that you are a late pooper like me, I'd have to go in one of those, bio red packs and how big are they?

Six inches by six inches. So, so. If you have diarrhea, target practice is essential at this point.

Adam Cox: Yeah. It's like aim carefully.

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because these bags are just six inches by six inches, do you know what? I'd probably actually be okay in this situation because when we were in Australia, I went 11 days without a poop. So I'm flying high. Bitch, I can keep it in you, [00:27:00] however you would've died.

Adam Cox: I don't understand i'm trying to think what, six inches by six inches is, That probably would accommodate most poop. Mm-hmm. But if you've got diarrhea or like you've been drinking the night before.

Yeah. And then you've gotta go stick it in the corridor in a metal bin. Exactly. In a place that has no air conditioning. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Now when it comes to the size of the bags, I estimated this based on a trailer that I watched when they were doing the documentary on this. Mm-hmm. but in some pictures I've seen quite, uh, slightly bigger bags as well. So they could be really small, they could be really big.

Adam Cox: And how do you do that? I'm just trying to imagine if it is a small opening. How do you yeah. It's gonna get messy. Mm-hmm. Um, do they have these bags just on standby for this type of scenario? Because where do they get all these bags from?

I think

Kyle Risi: that they might be like, for some reason red sanitary bags that women might get in hotels. I think. But they're red normally. They're white. They must be used for something, I don't know. But yeah, they've got these on hand. And I don't think it's specifically for this intention. It must been for just a general in intention.

I was gonna say, is there a backup plan? If this ever happens? [00:28:00] Maybe it'd be awful. If this is the backup plan, what are you gonna do if the toilets break? Oh, we've got these biohazard bags. Yeah. Just open up their cabinet. Open 'em up. Just stacks and stacks them.

That's for these situations. How often do you have to use them? More often than you think.

Adam Cox: And there's like 4,000 people on board. Yeah. And most people go, let's say once a day. Mm-hmm. On average

Kyle Risi: me one every 11 days. Yeah. Because we've already established.

Adam Cox: Yeah. That just makes me think, is there enough bags?

It's horrifying.

Kyle Risi: Okay.

So by this point, the overflowing sewage is now being baked by the heat trapped in the ship's interior. Right. The smell of raw human sewage. Throughout the ship just becomes completely inescapable.

To make matters worse, it is winter in the Caribbean and as well as it's still being hot, the seas are also incredibly choppy.

Ordinarily, the ship stabilization system would counteract the waves and you would be quite steady on the ocean, but with no power, the ship starts listing from side to side. So every time the ship [00:29:00] leans left or right, pissy and poopy water starts lapping out of the toilets.

And there is this footage of guests filming the sewerage, just slop from one side of their cabin to the other as the ship just tilts Adam. It's disgusting, and all their belongings on the floor. It's rank,

Adam Cox: so they're standing in other people's feces and urine. Mm-hmm. And they're filming it thinking, so it's gonna be great.

Why are they get, get out of their cabin.

Kyle Risi: You also see footage of pissy water just sloping down the staircase. So,

Adam Cox: oh,

Kyle Risi: sewage is everywhere. It is seeping into the carpets. It's then going through the floors, and then it will go down through the ceilings and the walls into kind of the lower decks as well.

It is awful. All the lower deck people can do is just scrambled to the upper decks. But while they do that, the trading sewage with them just squelching under their feet into the upper decks as well. By midday, the entire ship just stinks of literal shit. It just gets worse hour [00:30:00] by hour that they're stuck on that ship.

Adam Cox: I mean, do you know, sometimes in Norwich mm-hmm. There's at times of the year where the farmers, they put, manure on their fields and the whole city just stinks. It does. Yeah. And I think, God, that's gross. I'd hate to be like that. Close to a field and do that. Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: I really like that smell.

Adam Cox: Okay. That's weird.

Kyle Risi: I think it's, 'cause I grew up in Africa, so I'm used to it.

Adam Cox: You might like the poop cruise then.

Kyle Risi: I would not like the poop cruise. There's one smell I can't handle on that. It's like human feces.

Adam Cox: Yeah. This is what I mean, like that's bad enough. Mm-hmm. I cannot imagine this, but there's something

Kyle Risi: nice and earthy about horse manure. I quite like that smell, but human poop. No. And you can always tell a human poo from an animal poo 100% of the time.

Adam Cox: Well, it's usually quite big in comparison to most animals.

Kyle Risi: I've seen some pretty big animal. I had old stations growing up and their poops were monstrous and it's still, I could go, that's a dog poop.

Adam Cox: That's, um, it's a weird trick for talent. I don't know. That's a weird talent.

Kyle Risi: What's your talent, Kyle? What are you bringing to the table? I can tell a human poop from a dog poop. It's like that chick from American Horror Story who can look at a [00:31:00] food and go, I know how many calories. And there was a superpower.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: But yeah, like every step you take literally is squelching under your feet. I am proud to be a non crock wearer at this stage because, you know, 2013 was peak crock wearing activity time.

Adam Cox: Well now is kind of quite peak, but yeah,

Kyle Risi: I think it, yes, even bigger now, but then I think it was quite a big thing.

Adam Cox: Any kind of flip flop or open toe sandal. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: So guests say that the heat and the smell would literally choke you to the point that your eyes would burn. They described it as being in a porta potty at a festival in like the middle of summer.

And I can completely relate to that. I think you can too. Especially that relief when you leave the porta potty and the fresh air just hits you in the face.

Mm. So, oh God, yes. Yeah, because you're holding your breath the whole way through all your mouth breathing, and at

Adam Cox: least in a porta potty there, is that like a kind of a chemical that kind of least subdues some of the smell? Mm-hmm. Here there's not gonna have that. No.

Kyle Risi: So the thing is though, unlike a porta potty, nobody can escape. If you were lucky enough to be on the upper decks for those [00:32:00] passengers, life was not as bad since of course, A, you're further away from the backed up sewage. Thanks to gravity, but also B, because some of them had windows so they could just open up the windows and just let fresh air go through the corridors.

Adam Cox: If I'm gonna be raiding anyone, it's gonna be them.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, exactly.

Adam Cox: Fuckers think they're

Kyle Risi: first class, they think that they're entitled to escape the stench. I'll show 'em, I'll go and shit in their room that I'll teach 'em and then take the wallet.

Yeah. I'm not a great person on this cruise. No.

So by the end of the first day, the lower deck, it becomes so unbearable that there was no way that a passenger could stay in their room for more than a few minutes without gagging. And I guess that's just the thought of some gross, overweight Taurus poop just sloshing in your toilet cabin. I just don't think I'd like that.

You're probably painting a picture of who's poop it is.

Adam Cox: I mean, do you know what, at this point it's probably like multiple people's. Just swimming around your ankles.

Kyle Risi: It's 100% other people's, but I can't help but fantasize about whose poop it is.

Fantasize. Yeah. Yes, yes.

Okay.

[00:33:00] So passengers, what they start to do is they start hauling their mattresses upstairs to the sun deck. They're gonna basically set up camp. They basically string up a bunch of sheets and blankets into literal forts on the actual sun deck, on the Lido deck, where the swimming pool is. And when you see images of this, it literally looks like a, a favela or like a shanty town in some kind of war torn country or something like that.

It's, it's pretty, cool. But when you consider what's happening across the ship, I would 100% prefer this.

Adam Cox: So they're doing this, they're kinda making a makeshift room, are they? Mm-hmm. On where the, just to get away from the smell. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Kyle Risi: There is a catch. 'Cause every night their temperatures, they plummet down to four degrees Celsius. God. So it's almost freezing and it's not like people have packed much in the way of warm clothing. Right? Remember, they've literally just left Mexico, so people are just wearing shorts in their t-shirt.

Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: But again, for me, this is still the preferable option, right? way better than sleeping in a literal Dutch oven off stinky poop from some kind of morbidly OB guy, but to keep warm passengers, [00:34:00] basically they wear the bath rows provided in each cabin, but because most of the luggage that they brought with them was now piss and poop stained. That's literally all they wore for most of the time there. That's all they had.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: It's just a wonderful detail about the story because in the aftermath of all of this, once this was all over, carnival had to scramble to work out what kind of compensation that they would offer passengers. And one of the things they do is allow passengers to keep their bath ropes.

I'm like, bitch, please, you were never gonna keep them anyway.

Adam Cox: Yeah, you were gonna chuck them out that's not compensation. No. You can keep the slippers as well. Um, the towels and that touch poop as yours

Kyle Risi: and they dress it up as like this gesture of goodwill. You keep the bathrobe,

Adam Cox: oh God, that's just, they wear white

Kyle Risi: by day two. Now, food is of course, dangerously low. All the food and drink across the ship is of course being raided and robbed from most of the cabins. And the food that people did get hold of was just hoarded by the few.

So the ship starts rationing the food to make sure that [00:35:00] everyone gets at least something right. Passengers have to wait in line sometimes for hours. Adam, now I want you to put yourself in their shoes for a second, you get to the front of the queue. Mm-hmm. What are you going for?

Adam Cox: Um, so what, what have you got? What are the options for me?

Kyle Risi: So Adam, you can choose from a lovingly assembled onion sandwich. Or a bread roll and a ketchup packet.

Adam Cox: Oh God. This feels like fire festival.

Kyle Risi: It does, doesn't it?

Adam Cox: Lovingly assembled. That's a nice spin on that.

But an onion sandwich. Is it? Oh, it's not cooked. It's raw, isn't it?

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.

Adam Cox: Why did they think that was? Is that the only ingredient they can put in a sandwich? I

Kyle Risi: think so. I think that's all they had.

Adam Cox: Mean this, this is day two or day three. Mm-hmm. What's it gonna be like on day four and five? So what you gonna go for?

You have to pick something. Probably the onion sandwich. 'cause at least there'll be some kind of flavor with that.

Kyle Risi: But ketchup packet. Yeah, I, I think I'll go for the onion sandwich as well, for sure. But also bottle water that was now being rationed as well. One bottle per room per night. So very little water.

Mm-hmm. [00:36:00] Luckily, by the afternoon of day two, the carnival legend finally arrives at the triumph to drop off some much needed food supplies. Ah, good.

Good thing too, because literally another six hours in passengers would be starting to eat each other. But of course with no power, no refrigeration or even an oven, none of it could be cooked.

So it was still just a minor uptick from onion sandwiches, but at least people were not gonna starve. Essentially it was things like crisps and pepper armies and things like that. So still things that didn't require much preparation. Mm-hmm.

There were two more ships scheduled to drop off. At some point during the next six days. So they're not going to starve Adam. That is probably the most important thing, I guess.

Adam Cox: No, to be fair, you don't wanna be like serving something that's gonna upset people's stomachs. Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: More than it already is. Yeah. It's

Adam Cox: gonna be very plain and beige food.

Kyle Risi: So some people do start requiring medical attention. In particular, one woman was expecting to dock in Galveston the previous day on schedule. Right. And then from there she needed to rush off for a dialysis [00:37:00] appointment.

So the Coast Guard had to transport her to another cruise ship just so that she can get to the hospital.

Adam Cox: So if they can transfer her 'cause they're not transferred more people, or at least done it in some sort of bus system or whatever.

Kyle Risi: Well, it turns out that it's not easy putting a board between two boats and having everyone walk across, remember it is winter and also the sea is dangerously rough. The stabilizers on the ships are not working.

So Carnival would rather have 4,000 pissed off people than risk having one dead one.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: So how does she get off then? I think the Coast Guard helicopters took her, I'm not sure. Mm-hmm. but also remember those other ships, they're full, right? So there's no way they could accommodate another 4,000 passengers, especially ones that are literally deep in peep and poop on the lower decks. Mm. Would you want them on your ship?

Adam Cox: I'd be like, um, nah. I'm sorry for your situation, but

Kyle Risi: yeah, I'm gonna go off for a pina colada and I'm gonna forget everything that's happening on that ship.

Good luck guys. Just like you were doing. At the resort in Mexico, when you are not thinking about all the pain and suffering happening outside the resort, exact same thing.

Adam Cox: Why are you putting [00:38:00] this on me?

Kyle Risi: So the message is firmly sunk in not to use any of the cabin toilets, these red poop bags. Of course, they're now starting to pile up in all the hallways as instructed, let's just be real here for a second. We have met people, we know how gross they can be. Those bags were supposed to be sealed when they were filled.

Remember, there's six by six inches. Mm-hmm. According to one source. how do you judge how many poops can fit in a bag? This is my first question.

Adam Cox: Well, I guess you can't because you don't know necessarily

Kyle Risi: when to stop, when to, when, when to cinch that thing off.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And how, how long are you gonna be there?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. So,

Adam Cox: so you don't know. How much you can fill. So you might go like, oh, that's it, and then you go to seal the bag and you're like, well I can't do that anymore. Yeah. So how would you do that? Do you put it in another bag? Are you gonna take it out? Are you gonna go in and lift out your poop and put it in another bag?

Filler: This is

Kyle Risi: so right.

Adam Cox: I've God, people are probably switched off by now.

Kyle Risi: Basically, it's a lot of poop.

Plus there's no one enforcing this as well, so you know that there's gonna be a percentage of bags that aren't [00:39:00] properly sealed at all. Especially if you've got like kids and you're having to do a lot and like you've got a family of 12 people that you gotta organize their poops so you know that there's a percentage of bags that aren't properly sealed or even aimed into with laser precision.

Adam Cox: Can you imagine? You are in a new relationship. Mm-hmm. This is your first holiday together. Yeah. It's been a couple of months. You're like, let's go on a cruise around Mexico. It'd be great.

Kyle Risi: It's a relationship maker or it's a relationship breaker.

Adam Cox: I just imagine these people are like, oh, I'll hold, like holding, holding out this bag. Yeah. For people to, in,

Kyle Risi: I guess when you're early on in a relationship, the rule is just don't poop in front of your partner at all. You kind of develop a knack for just holding it in. Farts, poops everything. Mm-hmm. I think you used to do that. Mm-hmm. But you would spend like a whole week when we were first together where you wouldn't poop and I don't know why.

Because you would get onto the train and then you would send me a photo of it. I would, I would not. You were like, I had the biggest poop. I would not look at this. I'm like, you could have just pooped to my house.

Adam Cox: I would never send you a picture.

Kyle Risi: You didn't send a [00:40:00] picture, but you certainly told me about it.

Adam Cox: what, what were we talking about?

Kyle Risi: So basically the point is there's all these poop bags that are piling up in the hallways where you just know that people aren't sealing them properly. There's definite seepage going on. At some point on day two, for those sleeping on the top deck, it starts to rain torrentially.

Adam Cox: So those that made a makeshift for or room mm-hmm are getting soaked.

Kyle Risi: So now they have no choice but to go back down to their shit and piss soaked cabins.

But even worse than that, if they wanted somewhere to sleep, they had to haul their soaking wet mattresses back down to their cabins. Except the hallways, remember. And the stairwells are now laden with buckets and buckets of poop where people are sawing their red bags

Adam Cox: and it's probably getting knocked over. Mm-hmm. And, oh, no,

Kyle Risi: not sealed properly. The carpets are still wet with piss and poop. People have soaking wet mattresses and it's now been dragged through all of this piss and poop.

It's just wonderful.

I love it.

Adam Cox: I wonder, at what point do you just stop caring and go there's no point trying to get clean. I wonder if you just get used to it in a way, [00:41:00] like you smelled that smell for the last 72 hours, maybe it doesn't get any worse. 100%.

Kyle Risi: I think there comes a point where you're just like, I have no concern for my dignity anymore. This is happening and sorry Mr. Pastor, I know you're standing in front of me, but I'm, I'm pooing right now. I was gonna say, and you may maintain that contact with him.

Adam Cox: Do people just get, do you know what, I'm just gonna go here. It does not matter

Kyle Risi: exactly. It does not matter. Oh.

So at this point, the triumphant announced that they had arranged for a series of tub boats to be sent from the nearest port in Progresso, Mexico. The plan was to tow the ship back to shore in Mexico and then fly all the passengers back to Galveston in Texas.

But people are now getting sick. They're also, they're not eating properly. They're severely dehydrated at this point. And the ones that are eating, they're just eating warm, spoiled food, which just makes them poop even more.

Oh God. So it's just a self perpetuating kind of situation.

On top of this, nobody's sleeping. So on day three, I. The crew do manage [00:42:00] to fix one of the ship's generators, right? which allows them 'em to restore some of the ship's basic functions, including a total of five toilets.

Adam Cox: Five toilets. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Kyle Risi: And as you can imagine, it's still not enough for 4,200 passengers and crew on board, right? No. And honestly, at this stage, like we just said, the damage is done, man, at this point, I'm shitting in my pants. I don't give a shit. There's no protecting our dignity at this point. I, I am a changed person from here on out for the rest of my life.

Adam Cox: Oh, and this is only day three? Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. So to lift everyone's spirits and to obviously try to prevent a literal mutiny here, the ship decides on a brilliant idea. They're gonna give away a lot of Rebos

Adam Cox: that that's not a good idea. It really is not a good idea.

Kyle Risi: They open up and establish a bar on the Lido deck and with nothing on the ship to do, everyone takes advantage. So very quickly, due to the lack of food, it takes less than an hour for people to [00:43:00] realize how tremendously stupid this idea is.

Fights start breaking out all over the ship. Uhhuh people are throwing furniture overboard and into the pool. Mm-hmm. People are openly peeing and vomiting inside the pool. Oh God, Adam. It is rowdy.

And on top of this, the ship has another blackout and obviously the generator breaks. Again, people are now having full on panic attacks at the idea of being dragged back into the nightmare that they've been living for the last two days.

Like that generator coming back online was that one bit of glimmer of hope, uh, that these people needed in that moment, and it was taken away.

At one point the crew had to literally deal with a situation where a guy was threatening to throw himself off board. So it's hectic,

Adam Cox: literally is like, I can't do this anymore.

That's it. I'd rather take my chances with the sea.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. So the bar isn't even open for two hours before they just shut that thing down. No more alcohol was served for the entire rest of the trip.

Adam Cox: It just didn't make sense. People are dehydrated as it is. Mm-hmm. That's not gonna help.

Kyle Risi: And it's gonna make you more [00:44:00] dehydrated. You're right.

Adam Cox: Who I just, they just thought, oh, this will stop people from. I dunno. Like you say, live people's spirits. But I was like, no, no.

Kyle Risi: I think what it was is that they thought that the generator online would start to return some functionality, the toilets and stuff. But yeah. Broke down again, I, I think maybe it came back online a little while later, but at this point, they were like, no more alcohol. That's it. Not taking the risk. Mm-hmm.

So eventually our good old mate, Jen, she comes back on the intercom with the following announcement.

Adam Cox: she still seems quite chirpy that Jen. I

Filler: know she's

Adam Cox: brilliant. There's some like music going on in the background, but just, I dunno, probably like. Disguise all the like pooping sounds and like bummer. These are

Kyle Risi: passengers recording this on their phones. Uhhuh. That's what, and so the music's playing in the background. Yeah. So they obviously had some music, maybe people had Bluetooth speakers, I don't know. [00:45:00] Mm-hmm. So the tugboats are massively delayed at this point because the ship has now drifted over a hundred miles from where they initially broke down.

So these tugboats are going to be way off schedule in arriving at the poop ship, basically. And I feel so bad for the crew, Adam, like the stuff that they probably had to deal with. I just cannot imagine like having to deal with angry, stinky guests, but also, you know, they were picking up people's poop.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Like these people deserve a, not just a, a raise. They deserve not just a bonus, they deserve, I don't know, a medal

Kyle Risi: They do, but also, at this stage as a passenger, and like I said, I'm not a good person on this cruise, at this stage for me, I've accepted that I'm living in a dystopian nightmare.

I'm literally, for the moment that a crew member comes to collect my poop, I'm like, yeah, yeah, Gary, pick it up. Pick up my poop.

Filler: Look at me when you do it. Poor Gary.

Kyle Risi: So the crew really did have it rough, right? Remember, most of their quarters were situated on the lower [00:46:00] decks. Oh, no. So they had the full brunt of the poop and the peep situation.

Adam Cox: I imagine just opening the door to their rooms and it's just like mm-hmm. It's like almost waist deep.

Kyle Risi: Yuck. And all the gas and the heat. Ooh. It's not clear whether or not they're allowed to sleep in tent city. I hope that they would've been allowed to, but if they weren't, they were literally sleeping in sewerage.

Mm-hmm. Don't get me wrong. The passengers really do praise the crew, especially Jen. Right. She's incredible.

By day three though, the tugboats, they do finally arrive. They rig up the ship and they start to kind of tug the boat back to land because the ship had drifted so far away from Mexico at this point.

It meant that they went out equidistant between Mexico and the USA, but not Galveston, Texas. Instead, the Coast Guard decided they're now going to tow the Triumph all the way back to Mobile Alabama.

Adam Cox: Okay.

Kyle Risi: Which is 550 miles from Galveston. Obviously at this point, CNN, they are covering as they always do.

Mm-hmm. They're covering the story [00:47:00] 24 7. They are the network of the 2013 poop cruise from hell.

They keep reporting that the Carnival have not yet given an official statements on any of this. It's not until Carnival's owner is spotted at a Miami Heats game, which is a basketball game that eventually on Wednesday, the 13th of February, the CEOs finally forced to step forward and make a public statement.

He says, I think it's very important that I apologize to our guests and their families that have been affected by this very difficult situation.

Filler: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: They announced that the Triumph will now be arriving in Mobile, Alabama on the 14th of February. So Valentine's Day, very romantic. Imagine, imagine waking up and making love on that day.

Adam Cox: Um, not if you're on the boat. Maybe you would, I don't know.

Kyle Risi: You might be into that. You might, you might just, if you

Adam Cox: accepted the full blo the situation, you might discover something that you didn't deep and dark inside of you.

Kyle Risi: And the reason why they were so reluctant to say anything was because they were hoping that this story would just breeze past because Carnival. Still had [00:48:00] every intention of getting triumph docked in Galveston and turned around to pick up the next round of passengers.

Adam Cox: No. Yeah. They need to like just burn that ship.

Kyle Risi: Yes, that's what I said. Light a match. But it's only now after the owner was spotted obviously out having a jolly that they finally cancel all the cruisers to at least mid-April.

And they offer everyone a refund, but it's also because they realize that the conditions on board, 'cause they're now finally looking into it 'cause they're forced to, that they realize just how bad it is. It's way worse than anyone on board was physically telling them.

it's going to, at minimum take two months to cleanse the ship from top to bottom before anyone can be welcomed on the board.

Adam Cox: I feel like you just need to start again.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. I guess it, like you said, just light a match, right? Yeah.

Adam Cox: once the people are off, of course.

Kyle Risi: you probably wouldn't even need to light a curtain, right?

You just need to strike the match like that. Flammable the Exactly. So it's not great for Carnival Adam. Mm. It's not great.

So, it's not until after the story starts gaining national coverage that carnivals start to at least try to [00:49:00] make people's lives more comfortable on board.

They weren't really trying. They send a Coast Guard helicopter to deliver a much needed generator. So I dunno why they're just gonna do that. Initially,

Adam Cox: I figured like they just couldn't do it. But you're now saying actually there's a whole heap of stuff they could have done.

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Adam Cox: Sounds like it to me, doesn't it? Like clean clothes?

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. Probably cost, right? It's probably all down to cost. Mm. Probably also not truly understanding how just dire everything was. I do think that there was probably a management problem here, which indicates the toxicity of the organization. If they're too scared to speak to management to say, listen, this is the situation we're in, because there might have been enough in fear of getting in trouble, or it could be the PR issue as well, because they're still reeling from the incident that happened with Coco Concordia just a year before where those 32 people died.

So PR for them is really important at this moment.

Adam Cox: I can understand the PR thing, right or wrong. But I can't imagine anyone on that ship going like, oh, don't worry, we've got it all under control.

And I know Jen seems quite calm. She probably did, but she is probably high or something like that in order just to get through a [00:50:00] Valium just high off the fumes probably.

Kyle Risi: This is great. But basically they send the helicopter, and this is essentially how easy this entire thing could have been avoided because on Wednesday that generator restores enough power to get power running for one elevator as well as a large majority of the toilets.

Adam Cox: So why did they not do that? 24 hours

Kyle Risi: exactly.

So on Thursday the 14th of February, the Triumph was on its final approach to the main dock in Mobile Alabama. But of course that would be too easy, right?

Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: So fate decides that it's going to snap one of the tethers hauling the ship. And so this results in a significant delay. They now won't be arriving until later that evening, so well after sunset. So it's just another blow for the morale on board.

throughout the day on Thursday, the crew begins scrambling. To scrub all the outer decks, which to the media who are like flying over on helicopters and stuff. They see this, it just screams like a coverup to them because Carnival know that the media will [00:51:00] be waiting for them when they dock.

Mm-hmm.

Filler: So

Kyle Risi: they don't want it to look like it was hell on board. They wanted to kinda like it. Everything's fine here. It's all part of that PR spin that they're going to try and attempt to spin here.

Adam Cox: Yeah. But I can just imagine like the whole ship's like just covered in stains down the side. It's like, I don't know, how can you cover this up?

Kyle Risi: They also, Adam start serving way better food and people are like, where the hell did all this food come from?

Adam Cox: Is that because it's been shipped in? Or, helicoptered in?

Kyle Risi: No, they had been holding on to the food until the last day so the passengers wouldn't roll up to the dock. Looking like a pack of wild animals.

Adam Cox: Really? Did they actually say that or were they just holding some back in order for like, rationing, but yeah, listen,

Kyle Risi: exactly. I think the reality was is like, hey, we dunno how long we're gonna be in this situation. Let us, haul some food back. And then finally they're on the final stretch. They're like, okay, great. We don't need to hold this food back. Let's get it out. We're getting to the end of the cruise. Let's just get it all out.

that's what realistically sounds like happened to me. But a lot of people are like, yeah, they kept all this food back so they [00:52:00] could spoil us in the last day. So the last meal we have, was it like a Yeah. Positive note? Yeah.

Adam Cox: I don't think there's any way to end on a positive note after this, but yeah, if they could have just like shipped more food in mm-hmm. Yes. You could still ration, but they could still have eight. Okay,

Kyle Risi: sure. And I guess they didn't have a generator at the time, so they couldn't cook anything. They probably had some of the food, but then a lot of it spoiled as well, so who knows. True. Fair enough.

So finally, before 9:30 PM on Thursday, February the 14th, the try finally docks in Mobile, Alabama after an extra five days trapped onboard without power.

So they were stuck in there for five days. Five days longer than they were expecting to. There is footage of passengers on the aec literally shouting and cheering with joy. They must be so relieved. Poor people.

Adam Cox: Were they met by like a crowd and like press and all sorts?

Kyle Risi: Oh yes. The press were all over this about an hour later, 10:30 PM the try and finally docks and they start letting passengers off.

It literally takes hours. And that's mostly because there was only one elevator working on the ship. Most of the passengers have to use the stairs 'cause they obviously have a lot of heavy luggage. [00:53:00] Let's not forget the stairwells or also where they were storing all the buckets and buckets of literal poop.

Adam Cox: I dunno what belongings I'd wanna take with me, to be honest. Yeah. Totally. I'd be like, wallet keys. Bye. Yeah, passport. Yeah. I'm outta here.

I imagine all the crowd just being really excited, like, yeah, you're here, you're safe. And then they're walking off the ship and then they go, oh God, what is that?

Kyle Risi: It's like when PBA gets to the watering hole and he has a little fart and all the animals just go boom.

Adam Cox: Yeah,

Kyle Risi: So from the dock, as people are coming off, a few passengers do need to be taken to the hospital. Thankfully no one dies though. That was just basically mostly dehydrated and tired. A few people were still sick from like Mexico belly or, triumph cruise ship belly, basically.

As passengers are leaving, CNN, of course, is out in full force with camera crews desperate to interview anyone who would talk to them. And people talked. They were literally queuing up to get on the news and tell the world exactly what happened on the poop cruise.

And I should mention that [00:54:00] people did say that the media was overs sensationalizing their reporting of this.

It was overblown and the situation wasn't actually as bad as some people made it out to be. But honestly, there was a huge contrast between the different accounts. So it made me wonder, those people that were like I was all overblown. They were on the fucking upper decks

Adam Cox: probably.

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Adam Cox: They probably didn't get the same level of exposure.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. One guy says, I saw a few people crying, but honestly, without the dirtiness, it wasn't that bad. I'm like, excuse me. Like people crying on a cruise ship is a pretty bad sign that

Adam Cox: something's not right. And setting up a whole new room on the deck.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, exactly. Oh, the shanty town? Yeah. Oh, it's not that bad.

Of course no one does that. No one wants to drag their mattress all the way up. So it depends who you are basically. He also says it was just like camping on a cruise ship, and it's but I guess at the same time, it depends who you are, right? And what your expectations are.

No one books a luxury cruise voyage and expect to camp out, right?

Adam Cox: No. You go camping for that.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. You go camping for [00:55:00] that. So I get the tears. One woman screamed.

Adam Cox: Was screamed.

Kyle Risi: She goes, it was a mix of survivor and Lord of the Flies. And just for reference, if you haven't read Lord of the Flies, it's horrific.

Like in chapter 11, Ralph and Piggy, they go back up to negotiate to get Piggy's glasses back while someone deliberately rolls a rock down the mountainside, it smashes into piggy and kills him instantly.

Adam Cox: Yeah. That's pretty horrific.

Kyle Risi: So she's likening it to Lord of the Flies.

Wow. So that's pretty bad to be. And the fact that she screamed, it was just the cherry on the top. Oh, the humanity. Yes. Just wow.

And remember the Triumph was supposed to dock in Galveston a week earlier, right? Of course, nobody was prepared to end the cruise in Alabama. So Carnival gave the passengers two options.

Option one is they could take a seven hour bus ride back to Galveston that night. Mm-hmm. After everything you've just been through. Or you could take a two hour bus ride [00:56:00] to New Orleans, stay in a hotel that Carnival would've booked for you, and then fly you back to Galveston the next day.

I'll do that exactly.

Assuming that most people would take Option two, carnival Book, 1,500 rooms and send a bunch of people off to New Orleans, because that's like the safe assumption to make, right? Because all you wanna do at this point is just have a shower. Yeah.

And I do imagine the scene from a movie where something really traumatic happens to you and you have to get into the shower and you're wailing and you're crying, and then you slowly slide down the shower wall and you crumple into a ball like sobbing.

Yeah, that's me at this point. Just scrubbing your skin with bleach.

Filler: Get it off me.

Adam Cox: I just want some food that's not contaminated.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. You want a good meal, right? But also, think of the alternative, right? Having to sit on a bus for another seven hours after five days in the poop cruise. But also unshared and everyone else on that bus is also unshared as well.

Adam Cox: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: No, thank you. So for some, that was their only option. And on their way, one of the buses breaks down again, [00:57:00] leaving everyone stranded again. So outta habit, they just immediately start shitting into bags.

Adam Cox: No, you're making that up. That bit I made up. But yeah,

Kyle Risi: one of the buses break down and like, I would be so mad, I'd be like, I really missed the cruise.

Let's just shit Another bus

the next day, Carnival's, CEO, Gary Car Hill, he holds a news conference and again, he apologizes on behalf of Carnival and he thanks the passengers for their patience and their corporation.

And he announces that there would be a compensation package. Which would entail you to a full refund for your cruise.

Great. Mm-hmm. Uh, credit towards a future carnival cruise.

Adam Cox: Nope.

Kyle Risi: And 500 pounds worth of cash.

Adam Cox: I'll take the cash. Yeah. I'm not going back on one of your ships.

Kyle Risi: Interestingly though, like loads of people were like, the 500 quid wouldn't even cover the miss work that they just endured. 'cause remember, their vacation time had ended, right?

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: It was supposed to end five days ago. Yeah. Then the carnival make a special statement, and I love that it's dressed up as a special statement.

They announce their passengers can keep the complimental robes from the ship. [00:58:00] That's funny, because this is announced after everyone's disembarked.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Who, who is keeping that? Unless that's the only clean item of clothing you have. Exactly. You are not taking that.

Kyle Risi: So my question is, did anyone contact them and say, can I have my compliment rope please? Or did anyone turn around and go, I'm just gonna go back onto the ship and click my robe.

Adam Cox: Yeah, if it's after as well. Yeah. That's so dumb.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, so dumb.

Adam Cox: Unless Jen's there on the way out handing them out. Thanks. See you again soon. And they're just random people's robes.

Kyle Risi: This one's fine. This one's still got a lot of use in it. Take this one.

Adam Cox: Like Jen, get yourself off that ship. Yeah. You've done enough. You've been sniffing

Kyle Risi: too many poop fumes. Good old Jen. But yeah, let's be real. Hey, no one's taking those robes. What they want basically is to forget that they had spent an entire week inside a porter body. They needed counseling.

Yeah. That's about 500. Yeah. Oh no.

So as you'd expect a multi-agency investigation into poop cruise began almost immediately. [00:59:00] The Bahamas Marine Time Authority took the lead on this since, of course, that's where the ship was registered,

right? they were also joined by the US Coast Guard and the National Transport Safety Board, and it doesn't take them long to find the cause of the fire, which turned out to be a leaking fuel line from one of the engines that ended up igniting on the engine's hot surface. Mm-hmm.

It's also then discovered that Carnival's own maintenance records showed that the fuel leak was reported more than a year ago.

Oh. And nothing was done about it.

Adam Cox: Okay, so this is not just like a freak accident. Mm-hmm. This is just Yeah. Bad maintenance.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. In fact, there'd been nine prior instances of fuel tanks on the Triumph leaking over the previous two years. So when Triumph departed from Galveston, they knew all of these problems.

Adam Cox: Yeah. They should have done more compensation. Really?

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.

Adam Cox: That's bad. So is anyone taking them to court or anything?

Kyle Risi: Oh yes. Oh yes. But there's a, obviously there's gonna be a surprise there, isn't there? Uhhuh? We'll get to it. [01:00:00] Okay.

So it's just a PR nightmare for them right. They're still trying to recover from the fallout of the cost of Concordia. So this just adds to that. It's just compounding for them to make things even worse. While the ship was docked in Alabama waiting for repairs, strong winds cause the ship to break free. It drifts across the shipyard, crashes into another ship causing the death of a dock worker.

Oh, no.

So Adam, naturally, it's not long before the lawsuits start getting filed, right? Mm-hmm. 27 passengers file charges for things like discomfort. Discomfort, yeah. And only 27. Yeah. Not many, is it? No. Uh, medical expenses.

Mm-hmm. Uh, mental and emotional distress. I dunno why I'm laughing. That's terrible. Yeah. Mental, mental and emotional distress.

Adam Cox: I, I'm with you on all of these so far.

Kyle Risi: Uh, lost earnings. Yeah. Uh, lost vacation time and other out-of-pocket expenses caused by the poop cruise. Mm-hmm. Obviously.

In court, carnival argues that the ship had passed all the inspections and that it was in complete [01:01:00] compliance of the regulations.

The judge doesn't see this in this way, obviously, and he rules that Carnival was in fact liable for the fire. Based on the obvious maintenance records is a good judge. Yeah. But the judge did rule that Carnival had not, in fact breached the contract with their passengers. What does that mean? as Carnival lawyers diligently pointed out tickets did not explicitly promise safe voyage a seaworthy vessel adequate food or sanitary living conditions.

Adam Cox: I'm sorry, is that they need to specify that.

Kyle Risi: To me that's a given, isn't it?

Adam Cox: do we now need to check everything we book just to make sure, like this is gonna be a, I know they can't guarantee mm-hmm.

Everything,

Kyle Risi: but you would at least expect, am I gonna be safe? Yeah. Are you gonna do everything that you can to keep me safe? Yes. Absolutely. And gimme snacks.

Adam Cox: Yeah. So it feels like if Carnival doesn't do this, what other companies don't do this?

Kyle Risi: Exactly. Here we come back to the very beginning part of this [01:02:00] episode. Do not go to a cruise ship. They cannot guarantee all that stuff. And because of this carnival aren't required to pay a single penny of punitive damages out to these passengers.

So there it is guys. If you're planning on gonna cruise, it's not even guaranteed that you will get safe voyage or san living conditions.

However, at Goodwill Carnival do agree that three of the lawsuits, they'll be given $15,000 in compensation. But it's purely goodwill. And the other 24 remaining, they were awarded like in varying amounts of up to $3,000 on average, basically. So they do give something, but it's purely outta goodwill. They're not required to give out those punitive damages. Is that sickening?

Adam Cox: Yeah, but then I'm just trying to think that, there's gotta be like guaranteeing safety with within reason, right? Like you do all the maintenance check, you can't obviously, predict that there's gonna be like a natural disaster or something. I dunno, terrorist, like the worst extremes. Mm-hmm. But surely basic maintenance in the running of a vehicle or whatever. Yeah. That is what you're signing up for. Sure. And that's what [01:03:00] they should be held to.

Kyle Risi: I think so. 100%.

Adam Cox: So is the triumph still going? It is. They managed to clean it or rip it apart? Yeah, put into air freshener.

Kyle Risi: So the ship was repaired. Of course, they scrubbed every inch from top to bottom. It ends up taking four months rather than the two months.

And in June, 2013, triumph went straight back into service. Adam, my question is, who in their right mind would get onto that ship after four months knowing the horrors that happened on there?

Adam Cox: Yeah, because people would be like, oh, I'm going on a cruise. It's the triumph and then you're in your cabin. You'd be like, what happened here?

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Adam Cox: Like you've removed maybe a painting and behind it there's still like a stain and you're like, ah, they didn't get, they didn't get all the nooks and crannies.

Kyle Risi: Do you know like when you go into like a nice man house or something, you go, ah. If these walls could talk, and then you get onto the cruise ship and you do

Filler: say the exact same thing, and then the walls go, well, let me tell you what happened in February of 2013.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Ugh. Ugh.

Kyle Risi: [01:04:00] Rank but the thing is though. The Triumph name is now ruined. And I think Carnival also knew that because in 2019, carnival spends $200 million completely renovating and remodeling the entire ship. And then they give a brand new name. Obviously it's now called Carnival Sunrise.

Adam Cox: Okay. But people that go on, they would be like, but this used to be the Triumph. Yeah. The ones that you know, you know what happened here

Kyle Risi: and today the sunrise is still out there. Adam cruising all over the Caribbean as if nothing happened.

Adam Cox: They should have like a little museum where you can go and look around how it was, was touched it.

They haven't touched it, they haven't cleaned it or anything. Yeah. Just a little entertainment.

Kyle Risi: And Adam, that is a story of the carnival triumph, that poop cruise from hell.

Adam Cox: Yeah. That's definitely cemented that I don't want to go on a cruise. I had a friend who, he worked in travel and I think they were working on a cruise at the same time COVID happened.

And so they couldn't get off the ship. Oh really? But they were like stranded on there. And I think they ended up like they went to [01:05:00] university to study tribalism and get into it. And actually they no longer work in travel. Changed my mind. This ends careers.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, for sure. Your niece as well. She was desperate to get cruise ships. Well that was, don't send her this episode.

Adam Cox: That was one option. But yeah, she might think twice now.

This feels like it should be a comedy film or something. Oh, do you reckon it's, it's gotta be like dramatized.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Well, I have a surprise for you. On the 24th of June, Netflix are releasing what they call train wreck poop Cruise Uhhuh, a documentary about this entire saga and the trailer Adam is fucking epic. It's got the dramatic music, it's got the tension. It's showcases this entire saga from start to finish.

Do you want to hear it?

Adam Cox: Yes.

[01:06:00] [01:07:00] Amazing.

Kyle Risi: How incredible.

Adam Cox: I, I'm watching that.

Kyle Risi: I cannot wait. It is so dramatic. And that is literally what it was like. I only found out that this was coming out after I'd done the research for it. And then when I watched that trade, I was like. I'm proud of myself that I've embodied everything, all the chaos that was in that in the story.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I mean, interesting. I'd love to hear some of the people's personals stories. Yes. And, and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. What they actually witnessed and experience

Kyle Risi: someone's on their bachelorette party, for God's

Adam Cox: sake, that is like bridesmaids.

Kyle Risi: So I cannot wait for this. But also the biggest take home for me [01:08:00] is that the cruise industry's dirty secret is that regulations don't mean shit when it comes to protecting passengers, especially if your ship is registered or flagged in another country like The Bahamas, as is the case with the triumph.

And how often do you see these cruise ships with different flags on them, right? Mm-hmm. They're not governed by the UK or the United States or whatever, so they're not held to the same level of scrutiny as something that is registered under the FAA. Remember the ship took off knowing that those generators didn't work. If they were under proper scrutiny, would they have still done that? Would they have made sure that they didn't leave with two generators broken? Yeah. Probably not.

Adam Cox: But I just feel like that's, they're gonna be losing money. Like even from a, let's even forget the passengers.

And actually just being like a good business. Mm-hmm. From a corporate greed kind of point of view.

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Adam Cox: They're not gonna be able to use that ship for whatever, if it breaks down this, that and the other, and they know that they're probably gonna have to compensate something, it just doesn't make financial sense.

Kyle Risi: I think they're taking a gamble there. They're taking a gamble that is not gonna break down. But when it [01:09:00] does, it ends up costing a shit ton of money. So you've gotta balance, you've gotta think about it logically. When it does break, it's gonna end up costing you a shit ton with all the, not the lawsuits in this case.

'cause it sounds like they've gotta waste scot-free. But. It's gonna cost you something and like what? When you balance the scales afterwards, how much worth it was it to not do it? Yeah, you probably got away with maybe a hundred million, but was that enough?

Adam Cox: Yeah. That is a shit ton or a ton of shit.

Kyle Risi: A ton of shit. Well done.

But the thing is that's just crazy is like this shit took off knowing that the generators didn't work. It's like a plane taking off knowing it only has one engine working. That would never fly, right? Anywhere else.

Adam Cox: It wouldn't fly, right? It wouldn't fly. See what I did there? That was on purpose.

Kyle Risi: I intended that. I don't know if you did. So freaks. Have you guys been on a cruise? We want to know some of your horror stories. Tell us everything in every single gory details. Please. We beg you. I want to know. We'll read them out on the show. Yes. So Adam. Should we run the outro for this week?

Adam Cox: Let's do it.

Kyle Risi: And that [01:10:00] brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium and assembly of fascinating things. We hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did,

Adam Cox: today's episode sparked your curiosity, then please do us a favor and follow us on your favorite podcast app. It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people like you discover the show

Kyle Risi: and for our dedicated freaks out there, don't forget that next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon and is completely free to access.

Adam Cox: And if you want even more than join our certified freaks tier to unlock the entire archive, delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek at what's coming next. We'd love for you to be part of our growing community,

Kyle Risi: and don't forget we drop new episodes every Tuesday. And until then, remember next time you pack for a cruise, you might want to add some biohazard bags. Gross.

See you next time.

See you. [01:11:00]