On Saturday, June 11, 2011, a 57 year old seriously ill passenger on Royal Caribbean’s Independence of the Seas was airlifted off the ship.  The woman was taken to Dorset County Hospital in the United Kingdom where she is said to be in stable condition. 

Rescue’s like this do not always take place.  One of our clients was a passenger on the Celebrity Summit and also became critically ill.  However, in the case of our client, the ship’s employees and physician chose to keep him onboard and did not call for a medical helicopter.

Celebrity Cruises pays its physicians minimally but provides that they receive a percentage of the payments made by the passengers through its billing system.  As a result of this, the onboard physician was provided with an incentive to keep the passenger onboard despite the lack of facilities, despite the fact that the onboard physician was overworked and overwhelmed and despite the fact that the passenger needed more sophisticated medical care on land, the cruise line provided the physician with an incentive to keep the passenger onboard in order to bill and receive compensation.  In fact in this case, the passenger was kept onboard when he should have been removed from the ship and flown to the nearest medical center and while onboard the cruise line, over a course of time, charged him almost $20,000 for medical care.

Celebrity Cruises’ Guest Services personnel and its doctor during the subject cruise refused to arrange for a medical evacuation of our client off of the ship, despite a direct request to do so, refused to speed up the ship despite a direct request to do so, refused to call in a specialist even from among its passengers, despite a direct request to make such a request,  and refused to allow our client’s wife who accompanied our client on the cruise to speak to the ship’s command including the captain to request among other things a medical evacuation in person, telling her that that was not possible and there were as many as 6 captains onboard the ship.     

Our client suffered colonic perforation, raging biventricular infection, sepsis, and he was required to undergo surgery in Puerto Rico and hospitalization in an ICU in Boston, Massachusetts, and to wear a colostomy bag from the date of his first surgery to the present date.

Primary Sources: http://www.cruiseshipnews.co.uk/20110612/cruise-passenger-airlifted-from-independence-of-the-seas/

The following is a description of a personal injury case we have filed.  This is a case involving a personal injury on the Carnival Splendor, a ship owned by Carnival Cruise Line.

Carnival Cruise Line owns and operates the cruise ship, Carnival Splendor. Carnival renovated the subject vessel and installed a “Splash Park,” a water park for children to play. The water park, however, was improperly designed, and the cruise line improperly manned and supervised the park. The park’s improper design includes, but is not limited to, the lack of space at the foot of the slide. There is a retaining wall or bulkhead within a few feet from the foot of the slide.

Further, the slide is a waterslide, and extremely slippery. This also increases the speed of children sliding down the slide. There is insufficient space for the child to safely get off the mat, because the slide shoots children down and onto the mat and directly into the wall. These conditions allowed children to run into each other as this prevents the first child from getting out of the line of travel in time to avoid collision with other children. There is no easy exit or walking path when children slide onto the mat at the base of the slide to avoid collision with other children. Further, the cruise line failed to provide supervision of the children on the slide and in the park to prevent one child from sliding into another. The supervision is especially important because of the slipperiness of the slide and because of the location of the retaining wall at the base of the slide.

As a result of these conditions and the negligence of the cruise line, and the failure to provide attendants and/or the failure to provide attendants in the water park, a child on the slide crashed into our client, after he was down the slide and on the mat at the base of the slide. The collision between the two children and the collision between our client and the wall caused our client to experience severe, debilitating, and permanent injuries.