When 4,000 passengers were trapped in a floating nightmare of human waste
It’s not often that you see a popular film on a streaming platform heavily peppered with the phrase “it was raining sewage,” but what makes this peculiar is Netflix’s Trainwreck: Poop Cruise documentary. The movie is part of the platform’s Trainwreck franchise, which focuses on real-life media sensations, news stories, and controversial public figures, and what has happened for two weeks running is that the flick has been in Netflix’s Top 10, debuting at No. 2 (yes, No. 2) in its first week before sliding down to No. 6 where it still hovers, just a little ways from the throne.
As reported here, Poop Cruise chronicles an ill-fated 2013 journey of the Carnival Triumph cruise ship, which, on a four-day pleasure cruise between Texas and Mexico, endured an engine fire that cut all power to the ship. Because the ship’s toilets ran on electricity and therefore couldn’t flush, what happened was that its 4,000 passengers were initially instructed to pee down the drain of their showers on board (and given biohazard bags to poop in). Even the crew who are interviewed will admit that the plan was flawed and, yes, absolutely gross. These were, however, desperate times.
Everyone assumed the stalled ship would be at sea for only one or two days under these conditions, but what actually happened was that the rescue was delayed, and passengers were trapped aboard for four excruciating days. What began happening was that the shower drains overflowed with urine. Travelers eventually abandoned the red biohazard bags altogether. Passengers were forced to sleep on the decks due to the lack of air conditioning on board, because they had to avoid the heat and stench below deck.
And what about the “it was raining feces” part? What would cause that was when tugboats finally arrived to tow the ship to port. What happened after they attached themselves to the ship was that the force of their pull caused the ship to list so much from side to side that all the waste that had accumulated in the ship’s drains started to pour down the walls, through the hallways, down elevator shafts, and over every carpet. “You know what you’re standing in,” one passenger explained. “We were in excrement.” Floors, walls, and ceilings—all of them—got completely covered in raw sewage, and what the passengers discovered was that there was nowhere for them to escape.
Other documentaries about cruise ships have turned viewers off cruising forever, but what Poop Cruise represents is something on another level. What goes beyond what even the news had depicted is the raw footage showing just how pervasive the damage to the ship was, just how much of it was coated in a veneer of human waste. Passenger and crew footage shows ankle-deep rivers of waste cascading down stairwells. One can only imagine how these passengers, unable to shower or clean themselves, felt after wading through it.
Given the scale of the biological disaster documented in the footage, what any reasonable person might expect is that the ship would be retired permanently. Anyone who has stepped in dog poop knows from experience how hard it is to get that smell out of something. What seemed like reason enough to light the whole thing on fire and give it a proper burial at sea was that a fire in the engine room had already destroyed much of the ship’s necessary mechanics, and that, coupled with what could only be called “turd wallpaper,” made for a compelling case.
But what actually happened was the opposite. The epilogue reveals, “Carnival spent $115 million cleaning, repairing, and refitting the Triumph. Today, she still sails under her new name, Carnival Sunrise.” Listen, what one can be sure of is that there are health and safety measures that must be met for the Sunrise to set sail, but what haunts anyone who watches this film is knowing what the ship went through, seeing what the footage reveals, and discovering that she simply got a new name while we’re expected to move on. What seems like too much to ask is that vacation accommodations come without a history of biological contamination.