28-year-old fell overboard: How 'easy' is it to fall off a cruise ship?
Created: 08/12/2022, 09:00
By: Franziska Kaindl
A man falls off a cruise ship and floats in the sea for hours.
The 28-year-old no longer knows how that happened.
Is it really that easy to disembark?
Recently, a 28-year-old Alabama man made headlines after floating in the Gulf of Mexico for nearly 20 hours after falling off a cruise ship.
Miraculously, he survived the open sea odyssey relatively unscathed before being fished out of the water by a Coast Guard helicopter.
According to his own statements, the man was slightly drunk, but cannot remember how he fell into the sea.
Which begs the question: How easy is it to accidentally fall overboard on a cruise ship?
Cruise passengers generally do not accidentally fall off the ship
The 28-year-old American is the 11th person to fall overboard on a cruise this year, according to data from Ross Klein, a professor of maritime studies at the University of Canada in Newfoundland.
In general, people don't just fall off a ship that easily.
"I think the word 'fall' is a misnomer," Klein told the online portal
Condé Nast Traveler a few years ago
.
"Some may jump -- there is a proportion of cases known to be suicide -- and some may be thrown or thrown overboard." Michael McGarry of the International Cruise Line Association CLIA adds that such incidents are "almost always the unfortunate result of intentional or reckless acts”.
Alcohol consumption is the most common reason for reckless behavior - although in many cases the circumstances are not known because witnesses and evidence are missing.
According to experts, cruise passengers don't just fall over a railing.
© Imago
By law, the ship's rail must be about three feet high, as expert Ross Klein
told the
New York Times .
Brian Salerno, also from CLIA, told the newspaper that this rule was put in place specifically for passenger safety.
However , Klein pleaded with the online portal
Bild.de
for a new standard – in his opinion, the railing should be at least 52 inches, i.e. 132 centimeters high: “Such a regulation was already under discussion a good ten years ago, but it wasn’t implemented.”
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Falling overboard: how often does that happen on cruises?
The probability of falling off a ship is very small.
In 2019, before the corona pandemic, a total of 25 people disembarked, according to data from a 2020 CLIA report.
That's a tiny 0.000001 percent compared to the 13.7 million passengers who took a cruise in the US alone this year.
According to the report, of a total of 212 cases that have been counted since 2009, only 48 have been saved.
