By Michael Pearson and Ed Payne
(CNN) — It’s almost, but not quite, over for the 4,229 passengers and crew stuck on a filthy cruise ship stricken by an engine room fire four days ago.
The Carnival Triumph was inching toward port in Mobile, Alabama, on Thursday afternoon at less than 1 mph, and then a tow line linking it to one of three tugboats broke.
It was unclear how long it would take to replace the tow line, said Lanie Morgenstern, a spokeswoman for Carnival Cruise Lines.
Before the break, passengers on ship were thrilled to be nearing port.
“I don’t know how much more we could have took,” passenger Larry Poret told CNN via cell phone. Poret was aboard with his 12-year-old daughter, Rebekah, who said the ordeal has been “really, really difficult.”
Thanks to CNN cameras aboard a helicopter circling the crippled ship, Rebekah’s mother, Mary Poret, was able to see her daughter for the first time in six days.
“It’s excellent, I’m very happy,” Mary Poret said.
“I’m so excited to see her and she’s so excited to see me,” Rebekah told CNN. “I can’t wait to get back.”
“We see land right now,” she said.
“Yay! It’s just going to get bigger,” Mary Poret answered.
The relief was immense, especially in light of the frightening call Poret received from her daughter about 30 hours after the fire.
“She was hysterical, crying hysterically. She was scared. She don’t know what was going to happen next,” Mary Poret said. “And what broke my heart the very most was her saying, ‘Mommy, I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again,’ and that’s really hard to hear from your 12-year-old daughter.”
A pilot ship raced toward the Triumph as it neared Mobile Bay. Officials have given various predictions on when the ship will dock, with the window covering from 7 p.m. to midnight (8 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET).
Helicopters hovered overhead, possibly delivering more supplies to the 3,143 passengers and 1,086 crew members trapped on the ship since the fire Sunday off the coast of Mexico left the vessel listing to the side and drifting in Gulf of Mexico currents.
Larry Poret confirmed reports of dire conditions aboard the ship, saying urine and feces streamed in the halls and down walls after toilet facilities failed, soaking the mattress of a friend of his who was sleeping in a hallway.
Emergency power failures caused section doors to slam shut, panicking some passengers who had no idea what was happening.
“We definitely are not adequately informed,” Poret said.
Because the Triumph is under tow and moving so slowly, it will take seven to 10 hours for the ship to travel up the channel to the port where passengers will be able to get off, Carnival Vice President of Revenue and Planning Terry Thornton told reporters.
Once the ship ties up at the dock, it will take up to three hours to get everyone off, he said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, Coast Guard members and a Carnival team were expected to board the ship before it arrived in port to help speed efforts to get passengers off as quickly as possible, he said.
Boredom and stress
Poret said toilets on the ship worked on and off, but were too inconsistent to trust.
He said waste tipped out of some commodes and sloshed across floors as the ship listed to the side.
“It runs down the walls from one floor to the next. It’s running out of somebody’s bathroom out into the hallway all the way across,” he said.
Waste soiled the mattress of one of his friends as they slept outside their rooms in the hallway, he said.
Long lines for food and frequent delays were constantly aggravating, he said.
“Here we are looking for hope that, hey it’s 6 o’clock, it’s going to get better,” he said. “And 6 o’clock comes and goes and all of a sudden an announcement at 8, ‘Hey, we’re running behind schedule.’ Well, no joke.”
The incident aboard the ship scared Poret’s daughter and a friend taking the cruise with her, Poret said.
“As soon as you get them calmed down, the electric goes out and doors start slamming shot,” he said.
During less stressful times, passengers passed the hours playing cards, walking the deck and going to see what was happening on other areas of the ship, Poret said.
Passengers set up charging stations to help their fellow passengers juice up cell phones and other devices, he said.
Poret and his daughter said they just wanted to sleep through the ordeal.
“When we wake up I ask myself and my dad, ‘Can I go back to sleep again, because I want another day to pass so bad,” Rebekah said.
A ‘floating petri dish’
Jorge Rodriguez, a doctor of internal medicine, said the sordid conditions on board make the Triumph a “floating petri dish.”
“So far, there hasn’t been an outbreak of anything, but … it’s in the Gulf. It’s warm,” he said. “You don’t have sanitary conditions, so hopefully they’ll get back to shore … before anything breaks out.”
Raw sewage is a major health risk, Rodriguez said, but respiratory infections could also spread quickly. Spoiling food could unleash E. coli bacteria, salmonella and other types of food poisoning.
“People on that cruise need to be careful for the next day to couple of weeks,” he said. “They may have contracted something that’s just sort of festering under the surface and won’t come to full-blown infectious status for the next couple of weeks.”
Carnival promises an army of about 200 employees will take care of its passengers once they clear customs.
Passengers can board buses to Galveston, Texas, where the cruise originated, or to nearby Houston, or spend the night in a hotel in New Orleans.
Carnival said it has reserved and arranged approximately 100 motor coaches, more than 1,500 New Orleans hotel rooms, multiple charter flights from New Orleans to Houston on Friday and transportation from Houston to the Port of Galveston so that guests may retrieve their cars if they drove to the port.
Carnival officials had initially planned to tow the ship to a Mexican port, but after Gulf currents pushed it further north before tugboats could take control, and considering that 900 of the passengers do not have passports, the company decided to take the Triumph to Mobile, instead.
Compensation for travelers
Thornton said conditions had improved on the ship, which he said is in “excellent shape” and would be “fully provisioned” by the time it reaches port.
The cruise line said it would give each passenger $500, a free flight home, a full refund for their trip and for most expenses on board, as well as a credit for another cruise.
Brent Nutt, whose wife, Bethany, is on the ship, said it’s not worth it.
“First of all, we only paid $350 for her to go on this cruise. Her safety and her well-being are worth a whole lot more than $350,” he said.
And the free stuff?
“I promise you, none of my family members that are on there will probably ever, ever take another cruise,” he said.
The Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board launched an investigation into the cause of the engine room fire. Because the Carnival Triumph is a Bahamian-flagged vessel, the Bahamas Maritime Authority is the primary investigative agency.
Passenger rights
Travelers have few options for compensation in these cases, other than what the cruise line is already offering, according to travel expert Jason Clampet of Skift.com, a travel website.
“The passengers on the ship aren’t going to have a great deal of recourse when they get home,” he said. Travel “insurance really doesn’t cover this sort of thing. Their trip wasn’t interrupted and they aren’t incurring extra expenses … so they can’t be compensated that way.”
Still, there’s no denying that the fire and resulting bad PR will hurt Carnival.
“It’s a terrible sight, thinking of people trapped on a ship with limited food and filthy conditions, so I think people will think twice about taking a cruise,” Clampet said.
The tension grows
Nerves are frayed on board, where passengers have waited in food lines for as long as four hours, said Nick Ware, whose mother is on the ship with her boyfriend. Ware said arguments are breaking out after people at the front of lines grab as many provisions as they can.
“The person in the front of the line is allowed to take however much he wants, so people see the person in front of them taking too much, (and) they start to get concerned they’re not going to get any,” Ware said.
People at the rear of the line ended up with buns and condiments — no burger patties, he said.
Meanwhile, on shore, Kim McKerreghan waited at the Port of Mobile, worried about her 10-year-old daughter and her ex-husband.
Her daughter called her in a panic Sunday after the fire broke out.
McKerreghan said the call was absolutely “gut-wrenching.”
“Momma, please just come get me, just come get me. It’s so hot. I don’t want to be here, Momma. Come get me, please,” the scared daughter told her, McKerreghan said. “Your heart stops, your stomach knots up and you just want to fall to the ground.”
Bad luck before
The fire is at least the second problem for the ship since late January, when it had an issue with its propulsion system, according to a notice posted on the website of Carnival senior cruise director John Heald.
And it’s not the first fire to disable one of the cruise line’s ships.
In 2010, the Carnival cruise ship Splendor lost power after an engine room fire, leaving it drifting off the Pacific coast of Mexico. The USS Ronald Reagan ferried 60,000 pounds of supplies for the ship’s passengers and crew as the ship was towed to San Diego.
After this ill-fated cruise, the Triumph won’t host vacationing passengers until at least mid-April. Carnival has canceled a dozen voyages scheduled between February 21 and April 13. That makes a total of 14 scratched trips. The cruise line already had eliminated voyages slated for February 11 and February 16.
CNN’s Rich Phillips, Tom Watkins, Chandler Friedman, Victor Blackwell, Tristan Smith, Joe Sutton, Mike Ahlers, Dave Alsup, Sandra Endo, Chuck Johnston, Esprit Smith, Greg Botelho, Katia Hetter and Marnie Hunter contributed to this report.
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