MOBILE, Ala. -
The torture on the Triumph is finally over. After five days of enduring gruesome conditions, 4,000 people finally got off the crippled cruise ship.
Now, we are hearing some horrific first-hand accounts from passengers who are relieved to finally be back on American soil and glad the nightmare is over.
The ship pulled into Mobile, Alabama, on Thursday night shortly after 9 p.m. CT. It seemed like forever for passengers as the 14-story cruise liner, the largest ever to dock in Mobile, inched its way into the port.
Passengers say they had to deal with overflowing toilets, food shortages, and foul odors from the resulting sewage problems.
The ill-fated ship lost power on Sunday after an engine room fire.
One passenger described the ordeal.
"We waited for hours. They kept coming on maybe every hour or so and saying, 'We're still waiting to get into the engine room, temperature is too hot,' and that would be all they would say. And then again another hour or so they would say the same thing over and over again. It was several hours before they finally told us, you know that they were able to get in and that, unfortunately, we were not going to be able to go anywhere under our own power."
The passenger added, "There were a lot of people that we heard that were... their cabins flooded, they were ankle-deep in sewage. It was a mess. It was a mess, and Monday and Tuesday were really, really bad. Everybody was, you know, using buckets to do what they had to do, and those poor crew members, they were coming in immediately after somebody would use the bathroom and clean it up by hand and then wait for the next person to come in. I mean, it was horrible."
There were buses and taxis waiting at the terminal to take passengers to Galveston, Texas, and New Orleans as they completed the final leg of a trip to Mexico that was nothing at all like the brochure described.
Others settled into local hotels to get a warm shower and a hot meal.
The crew is being credited with making a very bad situation as bearable as possible.
The head of Carnival Cruise Lines was on hand and apologized to the 3,000 passengers as they got off the vessel. But a number of them were vowing to never, ever take another cruise.
