Coast guards prepare for dangerous cruise
In August, the Crystal Serenity, a 250-metre cruise ship that can pack in 1,000 passengers, will begin a 32-day journey through the long-mythologised Northwest Passage.
And coast guards are already preparing for the worst.
Warming temperatures and shrinking ice pack has opened up this notoriously treacherous region for shipping and large-scale cruise ships. The Norwest Passage is famous for being part of one of the most remote, least-mapped regions in the world.
Crystal Cruises is the first of the major cruise lines to attempt the passage, expecting to take 1,000 passengers and 600 crew through the dangerous waters which will see the ship pass dangerously out of reach of Canada’s search and rescue helicopters.
Richard Beneville, mayor of the coastal town of Nome, expressed his concern about the cruise’s projected route to The Guardian, “If something were to go wrong it would be very, very bad. Most cruise ships that get here have passenger manifests of 100, maybe 150. This is a very different ship.”
Communications in the Arctic region are challenging, with minimal roads, patchy phone reception and many of the towns along the Crystal Serenity’s route are tiny and ill-equipped to take care of a problem, should something go wrong.
“We all have to be very proactive in trying to game out what we do in an emergency situation,” Lt Commander Jason Boyle, the coast guard’s prevention officer for the Alaska region, told The Guardian in a telephone interview.
In addition to having to cater for potential emergencies, locals are afraid of oil spills, pollution and waste coming about as a result of any spike in shipping traffic.
From that perspective it may seem a little difficult to comprehend why Crystal is attempting such a potentially dangerous route, but as is often the case the numbers present a different story.
This year’s cruise has already sold out, with prices for the journey aboard the 14-deck luxury liner starting at $22,000 and rising to almost $120,000 for a deluxe stateroom.
To assuage the risk of this voyage, Coast Guards in Canada and the US are running a serious of worst-case scenario drills, to prepare for the event of a disaster.
U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Dan Abel said, "As a coast guardsman, I don't want a repeat of the Titanic… We need to make sure we think this through and get it done correctly.”
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