Carnival Cruise Lines' Cruise to Nowhere
March 01, 2006
Well, for good or bad, Carnival Cruise Lines. cruise to nowhere is over. Not that it was what you could really call a pleasure cruise. Carnival Cruise Lines. ships that have housed Hurricane Katrina refugees will leave New Orleans on March 1, thereby culminating the six-month contract with Federal Emergency Management Agency. Many questions still remain; the only hope is that nothing like Katrina ever happens again.
FEMA said recently that Carnival Cruise Lines. ships had "completed their vital mission" and that the agency requested bids from other commercial shipping companies to provide emergency housing for the Katrina victims who are still homeless from March 1 and beyond.
The ships-Sensation, Ecstasy, and Holiday-will be refurbished and will reenter service by late March or early April.
The Carnival Cruise Lines. Sensation, which was docked in New Orleans, launches a Caribbean schedule from Port Canaveral, Florida, in spring. Since September 5th, 2005 Sensation.s 4- and 5-day Bahamas and Western Caribbean cruises were cancelled. On March 23rd, 2006, Sensation will resume its cruising, with its first sailing a 4-day cruise to the Bahamas, during which she will stop in Nassau and Freeport.
The Carnival Cruise Lines. Holiday, which initially housed several hundred Katrina victims in Mobile, Alabama, then sailed to Pascagoula, Mississippi, will return to Mobile on March 27th to operate year-round Mexico sailings. Calica/Playa del Carmen and Cozumel, Mexico-an island near the coast of Cancun, Mexico, that is on the mend from being ravaged by Hurricane Wilma-are the scheduled ports of call on Holiday.s sailings.
Carnival Cruise Lines. Ecstasy heads back to Galveston, Texas, after being docked in New Orleans, for year-round Mexico sailings on April 8. While Ecstasy was helping with the Katrina relief effort, her sister ship, Elation, was handling Ecstasy.s itineraries, which included 4- and 5-day cruises to the Western Caribbean.
Carnival chartered the ships back in September to FEMA for $192 million, plus $44 million in reimbursement for lost revenues. Although there was a lot of initial controversy surrounding the cruise ship deal, many now praise the contract as being a great relief to the thousands of workers and refugees who were able to use the ships as temporary housing.
In fact, the Government Accountability Office and the Homeland Security Dept. reported earlier this month that the use of cruise ships to house refugees was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal account of the government.s spending of Katrina disaster aid. Still, many congressmen feel that the deal was one more example of wasted spending.
Top House democrat Harry Waxman recently called for a further investigation. According to Waxman, Florida Governor Jeb Bush sent Michael Brown, the since-defunct FEMA director, an e-mail from Carnival Cruise Lines advertising that the cruise line.s ships be used for housing two days after the Aug. 29 storm. The deal was put into place within a day. Waxman wants to know why Carnival was awarded the contract so quickly without a more competitive contract bid.
Whatever any additional inquiry would find, it.s clear that Carnival Cruise Line did not make a lucrative profit; rather the cruise line was simply compensated for canceling the cruises of thousands of passengers.
