DEJA VU: Veronica Arriaga, of Texas, celebrates her arrival at a New Orleans hotel yesterday, while fellow travelers sit stranded again after their bus broke down (top left). (
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One more indignity greeted a group of exhausted passengers after they were finally let off the crippled Carnival Triumph cruise ship — their bus broke down.
One of the buses taking the vacationers from a Mobile, Ala., cruise terminal to hotels in New Orleans early yesterday stalled out on Interstate 10 halfway through the two-hour trip.
“It comes to a stop in the middle of the highway. We have to pull over to the side. It’s dark. All the lights on the bus go out,” passenger Clark Jones told WTMJ-TV.
Another bus was sent in to bring them to New Orleans, Carnival said.
They were among the 3,000-plus passengers bused to New Orleans to catch flights home or to the ship’s home port in Galveston, Texas.
Also yesterday, a Texas woman filed a lawsuit against Carnival — the first of an expected blizzard against the ship’s owners.
Cassie Terry, 25, of Brazoria County, sued in Miami federal court.
“Plaintiff was forced to subsist for days in a floating toilet, a floating Petri dish, a floating hell,” according to the lawsuit, obtained by ABCNews.com.
Meanwhile, six investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were in Mobile to determine what had ignited the engine-room fire that left the Mexico-bound ship with overflowing toilets and shortages of hot food for four days.
Passengers said they bonded over the ordeal.
Joseph Alvarez said about 45 gathered on the lower deck for Bible study.
“It was awesome,” he said. “It lifted up our souls and gave us hope that we would get back.”
Brandi Dorsett, of Sweeny, Texas, said people coped with the shortages.
“People were bartering. Can I have your cereal for this? Can I have your drink for that?” she said. “We had one lady, she was begging for cigarettes for diapers. There were no diapers on the boat. There was no formula on the boat.”
Carnival CEO Gerry Cahill apologized on the ship’s public-address system as people disembarked Thursday night.
“I appreciate the patience of our guests and their ability to cope with the situation. And I’d like to reiterate the apology I made earlier. I know the conditions on board were very poor,” he said.