Denis Poroy/Associated Press
The Carnival Splendor cruise ship was towed into San Diego Bay in 2010, after a fire destroyed its electrical systems.
It is becoming a familiar tale: When the cruise ship was towed into port, the endless hours for passengers of sleeping on deck and going without electricity or toilets were finally over.
“It was really hell,” said Bernice Spreckman, who is 77 and lives in Yonkers, N.Y. “I used my life jacket, which was flashing with a little light on it, to find a bathroom it was so dark.”
Ms. Spreckman was not among the 4,200 people aboard the Carnival Triumph who this month endured five days of sewage-soaked carpets and ketchup sandwiches. Her trial at sea came in 2010, on another ship run by Carnival Cruises, called the Splendor, which carried 4,500 passengers.
On both ships, fires broke out below decks, destroying the electrical systems and leaving them helpless. A preliminary Coast Guard inquiry into the Splendor found glaring deficiencies in its firefighting operations, including manuals that called for crew members to “pull” valves that were designed to turn.
But more than two years after the episode, the final report about what happened on the Splendor has yet to appear, a reflection of what critics say is a pattern of international regulatory roulette that governs cruise ship safety.
While the Splendor was based in the United States, the ship was legally registered in Panama, meaning the Panamanian Maritime Authority had the right to lead the investigation. But after the 2010 fire, Panamanian regulators chose to have the Coast Guard take over the inquiry. Then, officials in both countries apparently spent months trading drafts of their reports.
One official in Panama said the authority had completed its review of the Splendor report in October 2012. But a Coast Guard spokeswoman, Lisa Novak, said it still had not “finalized” the report. In the case of the Carnival Triumph, the regulatory scene will shift to the Bahamas, where that ship was registered.
In a recent letter to Coast Guard officials, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, said that cruise ships seemed to have two separate lives. Only during days near port are they closely monitored.
“Once they are beyond three nautical miles from shore, the world is theirs,” said the letter from Senator Rockefeller, who has headed recent inquiries into cruise ship safety.
Cruise industry officials point out that seaborne vacations are extremely safe and that some 20 million people go on cruises annually, with few problems. The most glaring exception to that record occurred last year when a vessel operated by a subsidiary of Carnival, the Costa Concordia, ran aground off the coast of Italy, resulting in 32 deaths.
In the Triumph’s case, the Coast Guard has said that the ship’s safety equipment failed to contain the blaze. And both the Triumph and the Splendor returned from their aborted voyages without serious injuries to passengers or crew.
But those successes also underscore what most travelers do not realize when they book cruises: nearly all ships lack backup systems to help them return to port should power fail because to install them would have cost operators more money.
The results are repeated episodes involving dead ships, with all the discomforts and potential dangers such situations can bring. In another case, in late 2012, the Costa Allegra cruise ship, a sister ship of the Concordia, lost power after a fire in the generator room and it had to be towed under guard from its location in the Indian Ocean.
In many ways, passengers aboard boats like the Triumph and Splendor were lucky because their ships were disabled in calm weather, when instead they could have been knocked out during storms, or when they were far out at sea or in pirate-infested waters, experts said.
“Anything that knocks a ship dead in the water is serious,” said Mark Gaouette, a safety expert and former Navy officer.
