Royal Caribbean to Debut New Safety Drill Concept

Independence of the Seas in Southampton photo by Dave Jones

Royal Caribbean Group is replacing the safety drill with Muster 2.0, an entirely new approach to delivering safety information to guests, the company announced.

The new program reimagines a process originally designed for large groups of people into a faster, more personal approach that encourages higher levels of safety.

With Muster 2.0, the key elements of the safety drill – including reviewing what to expect and where to go in case of an emergency, and instructions on how to properly use a life jacket – will be accessible to guests on an individual basis instead of a group approach that has been followed historically.

eMuster will be used to help provide the information to guests via their mobile devices and interactive stateroom TVs.

Travellers will be able to review the information at their own time prior to setting sail, eliminating the need for the traditional large group assemblies, the company said.

The new approach also enables everyone on board to maintain better spacing as guests move about the ship, and it allows guests to enjoy more of their vacation with no interruption.

After reviewing safety information individually, guests will complete the drill by visiting their assigned assembly station, where a crew member will verify that all steps have been completed and answer questions. Each of the steps will need to be completed prior to the ship's departure, as required by international maritime law.

"The health and safety of our guests and crew are our number one priority, and the development of this new muster process is an elegant solution to an outdated, unpopular process," said Richard Fain, chairman and CEO, Royal Caribbean Group. "The fact that this will also save guests time and allow the ship to operate without pause means that we can increase health, safety and guest satisfaction simultaneously."

"Muster 2.0 represents a natural extension of our mission to improve our guests' vacation experiences by removing points of friction," said Jay Schneider, Royal Caribbean Group's senior vice president of digital. "In this instance, what's most convenient for our guests is also the safest option in light of needing to reimagine social spaces in the wake of COVID-19."

This marks the first dramatic change to the safety drill process in a decade since Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas moved the life jackets from guest staterooms to the muster stations, which improved the evacuation process and has been widely followed throughout the industry.

More than a year in the making, Muster 2.0 is also an initiative that will be part of the comprehensive set of protocols and procedures Royal Caribbean Group is developing along with the Healthy Sail Panel that was recently assembled in collaboration with Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings.

"This new process represents the kind of innovation that the Healthy Sail Panel is focusing on as part of its mission to enhance the health and safety of cruising," said former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, co-chair of the Healthy Sail Panel. "It shows that we can accomplish a lot if we try to think outside the box on safety."

"I'd like to extend my congratulations to Royal Caribbean Group on this innovative milestone. It's exactly what our industry needs during these unprecedented times and we appreciate the generous offer to participate in this innovation," said Frank Del Rio, President and CEO, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. "In this industry, we all work cooperatively to enhance health and safety, and this is an example of that."

Cruise lines agree to mandatory safety drills before departure

By Donna Tunney

Cruise lines worldwide agreed on a new emergency-drill policy requiring mandatory muster for embarking passengers prior to departure from port.

CLIA, the European Cruise Council and the Passenger Shipping Association put forward the new policy with the support of their member cruise lines.

The new policy takes effect immediately.

According to a CLIA statement, on rare occasions when passengers arrive after the muster has been completed, they will be promptly provided with individual or group safety briefings that meet the requirements for musters applicable under the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea.

The formal policy is designed to help ensure that any mandatory musters or briefings are conducted for the benefit of all newly embarked passengers at the earliest practical opportunity.

The change in policy follows the Jan. 13 Costa Concordia accident in Italy, where 16 died and 16 more are missing.

The cruise industry announced in Jan. 27 that it would undertake a Cruise Industry Operational Safety Review, including a “comprehensive assessment of the critical human factors and operational aspects of maritime safety.”

Concordia: Search for missing officially called off

Concordia: Search for missing officially called off

Italian officials have permanently called off the search for bodies aboard Costa Concordia - the conditions inside have became too dangerous for the divers.

"We have definitively stopped the underwater search inside the ship," a spokesman for the fire brigade on the island of Giglio was quoted as saying by AFP.

A total of 17 bodies have been recovered, and 15 people remain missing.

The captain, Francesco Schettino, remains under house arrest facing charges of manslaughter and abandoning ship.

Captain not solely to blame, says prosecutor

1. Captain not solely to blame, says prosecutor

   According to today's Telegraph, the chief prosecutor in charge of the inquiry has implored investigators to look beyond the behaviour of the captain to the role played by the liner's owners, Costa Cruises.
   
   His comments were published as salvage experts began the difficult task of removing around 2,400 tonnes of fuel from the vessel.
   
   
   
   Beniamino Deidda, the prosecutor, said in an interview carried by several Italian newspapers today: "For the moment, attention is generally concentrated on the responsibility of the captain, who showed himself to be tragically inadequate. But who chooses the captain?"
   
   He said investigators needed to avert their gaze to the decisions taken by "the employer; that is to say, the ship's owner".
   
   Deidda, who has spent a large part of his career dealing with health and safety cases, said numerous other issues needed to be addressed.
   
   He specifically mentioned "lifeboats that did not come down, crew who did not know what to do [and] scant preparation in crisis management".
   
   He added that it was "absurd" that in at least one instance, recorded on video after the Costa Concordia was holed, a member of the crew should have told passengers to return to their cabins.
   
   Schettino has also maintained that his employers have a shared responsibility for what happened. Among the questions the inquiry is seeking to answer is why more than an hour elapsed between impact and the order to abandon ship.
   
   Questioned by prosecutors last week, the captain said that he was in frequent contact with a representative of the company during that period.
   
   Schettino and his first officer are the sole formal suspects in the inquiry, which is looking at whether to bring charges of manslaughter and the illegal abandoning of a ship.
   
   On Monday, islanders reported seeing a large fuel slick in the waters off Giglio, which are protected as a marine nature reserve. The fuel, however, is thought by the authorities to have come from the initial impact with a cluster of rocks just south of the port of Giglio.
   
   The official co-ordinating operations on the island said on Monday there was still no evidence that fuel had leaked from the Costa Concordia's tanks.

Costa Concordia disaster: Evacuating a cruise ship

The Costa Serena cruise ship (background) passed the wreck of its sister ship, the Costa Concordia, on Wednesday

The sister ship of the Costa Concordia, the Costa Serena, has been making its first cruise since the tragedy off the coast of Tuscany. The BBC's Tom Burridge went on board to see at first hand the emergency drill, which passengers on the Costa Concordia say did not happen before the ship hit rocks.Continue reading the main story

Cruise disaster

• 'I never saw the captain'
• What next for ship?
• How safe are cruise ships?
• How crash happened

We had been in our cabin a matter of minutes when the announcement sounded. First in Italian, then in seven other languages. The last two were Russian and Japanese.

In short, we were told that the emergency drill on board the ship would start soon.

And no sooner had the voice in Japanese gone quiet than we heard several short beeps, signalling that the emergency exercise had begun. The ship had not even left port.

Life jackets

The BBC had made a formal request to Costa Cruises for us to travel, as journalists, to film the ship's safety procedures on board.

That request was denied, so my colleague Daniela and I were posing as tourists instead.

Tom Burridge arrives on the Costa Serena and attends a safety drill

We had to take the two credit card-sized emergency red drill cards on our bed, grab a life jacket each from the wardrobe in the cabin and head out into the long, seemingly never-ending corridor.

Other passengers had already emerged from their cabins. An elderly Italian couple struggled slowly down the stair well.

Members of the Costa Serena's crew guided Daniela and me down the stairs behind our fellow Italian passengers.

Metres later we were at a meeting point with hundreds of other passengers, all wearing their bright orange life jackets.

Soon we were ushered into lines of four. Men were placed at the back, with women at the front of each row.

'No difference'

An elderly man from Corsica stood beside me. I asked him how many times he had been on a cruise.

"Eight," he responded. "Twice on the Costa Concordia."

I did not have to prompt him for the conversation to move on to the Serena's sister ship, that lay capsized a short distance away down the Italian coast.

"Was there a drill both times you were on board the Concordia?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied. "But this doesn't make a difference.

"Look at the number of people. If there was an emergency, everyone would panic and getting down to the life rafts would take a long time."

Our fellow, more experienced, cruise passenger was not worried, nor was anyone that we spoke to while on board.

The general feeling was that the tragedy of the Costa Concordia was a one-off. Most people believed it was easily explained by "human error".

Boxed in

We had boarded the Costa Serena in Savona but some people had started the cruise on the previous day at Civitavecchia, the same starting-point as the Costa Concordia.

During the emergency drill, Daniela had spoken to an Italian lady.

She said that, as on the Concordia, there had been no drill on the first day of this cruise.

However the ship was still conforming to the regulations of the International Maritime Organisation, that there must be an emergency drill within the first 24 hours of a cruise.

After we heard some safety instructions, again in several different languages, we started to file out of the corridor and back into the carpeted corridors, back into the heart of the ship.

It was at this point that you got a sense of the sheer number of people on board. And when so many people need to move in the same direction, they dawdle slowly as a crowd, boxed in by the insufficient space.

Of course the drill was over and everyone was joking and looking forward to a two-week cruise that lay ahead.

But in a real emergency, like the nightmare that unfolded on the Costa Concordia, there would have been panic and it is easy to see how chaos would naturally ensue.

Sheer size

We only spent a day aboard the Costa Serena. We left the cruise early, in Barcelona, before it headed on to Casablanca, in Morocco.

Everyone said it was identical to the Costa Concordia and in Italy they call them gemelas, or twins.

When it sits in port, you cannot fail to notice it.

But when you are walking the long corridors, or standing on the top deck, way above the sea, its size feels more real.

What I mean is that it takes a while to learn your way around this floating entertainment zone of restaurants, bars, swimming pools and lifts.

And when I wandered up to the deck at night, it was easy to imagine how frightened the passengers on board the Costa Concordia would have been when the boat first hit ground and then started to tip over in the dark.

Inside, passengers must have been tossed around as water poured in.

Before we joined the cruise, the Costa Serena had sailed past its sunken sister.

A member of the Serena's crew told us of his sadness at seeing their sister ship lying on its side in the water.

The cruise industry has many very loyal customers that we met on board.

They are people who keep coming back for the same experience on these supersized boats.

But it is impossible to think that the sinking of the Costa Concordia will not lead to some changes to the culture of safety on board.