Carnival Cruise Ships Helping Gulf Coast Residents Inch Towards Recovery
September 06, 2005
The Carnival Cruise ships Holiday, Ecstasy, and Sensation are now set to house thousands of displaced Hurricane Katrina evacuees from New Orleans and throughout the ravaged gulf coast region, despite some hesitation on the part of some of the evacuees themselves.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has chartered the three ships from Carnival Cruise Lines, the world's largest cruise ship company, to lodge evacuees for a period of up to six months.
Carnival Ecstasy and Sensation, each of which is capable of accommodating up to 2600 people, will welcome evacuees in Galveston, Texas, while Carnival Holiday, which can hold 1800 people, will return to its pre-Katrina home of Mobile, Alabama. Carnival Cruises began operating year-round cruises to the Western Caribbean last October from a new state-of-the-art downtown terminal built on the Mobile River.
This will be the first time FEMA has utilized cruise ships as make shift "floating shelters" in an effort to make things better for the evacuees that are continuing to live in crowded, less than desirable conditions, such as those in New Orleans' Superdome, and Houston's Astrodome.
"There will be people from Reliant Park, evacuees from New Orleans in real beds, with separate bathrooms, and a lot more activities to do," said a FEMA spokesperson.
According to Carnival Cruises, the Holiday is scheduled to dock in Mobile on Thursday after it returns from a cruise in the Caribbean, and will then be out of service to the public through March 4, 2006. The company said all cruise guests whose bookings had to be cancelled have been offered full refunds.
FEMA has said that the three ships will be used primarily for elderly victims and individuals with special needs and other health problems. Families will be a high second priority.
With all three ships set to go, some of the evacuees that would be housed aboard the vessels have actually expressed some reservations about the idea being moved to the ships. Many evacuees say they would rather stay with thousands of others and wait to find their missing family members than move to Galveston or Mobile to live on a cruise ship, even if the accommodations would be much more comfortable.
It is not clear at this point whether or not current plans will be dramatically affected, but FEMA has already leased the ships from Carnival Cruises, and officials believe that they will be able to find plenty of people that will be willing to call the cruise ships home for the time being.
FEMA contractors are currently surveying both Mobile and Galveston to work out the logistics of docking multiple cruise ships in both locations. With the exception of Carnival Cruises, no other cruise lines have committed any ships towards to recovery effort, but both Royal Caribbean International and Norwegian Cruise Line, which operate cruises out of the port of New Orleans for part of the year, have both been approached by FEMA with the idea.
