Cruise passengers describe ship 'tipping'

GALVESTON —  With stories describing what could have been a scene from the movie “The Poseidon Adventure,” passengers of the cruise ship Grand Princess disembarked in Galveston on Saturday morning.

They described a wild ride and said the ship nearly tipped during an emergency turnaround last week.

“We just thought we were going overboard,” said Woney Peters, a resident of Lava Hot Springs, Idaho. “The boat just started tipping and tipping and tipping.”

Peters, who is a cruise-ship veteran and active sailor, said he had never seen anything like it before.

Two hours after the 2,600-passenger Grand Princess left the Port of Galveston on Feb. 4, a passenger suffered a heart attack and required urgent medical attention onshore.

Several passengers and crew aboard the Princess Cruises ship were injured when the vessel took a sharp turn to port.

A company spokesman said the passenger was transferred to a waiting Coast Guard cutter and all other injuries onboard were minor.

But the Coast Guard confirmed that, in addition to the woman who had suffered the heart attack, a member of the crew was also taken off the ship on a stretcher. The injured crewman was believed to be a cook.

“We were somewhat surprised because we responded thinking there was only one person and we get there and they hand us two stretchers,” said Petty Officer Andrew Kendrick of the Houston-Galveston U.S. Coast Guard station.

On Monday, Princess Cruises spokeswoman Karen Tetherow described the incident as resulting in “minor injuries to several passengers and crew and some breakage of items onboard, including glassware and china.”

Tetherow was unavailable for comment Saturday. Attempts to page her proved unsuccessful.

Peters and other passengers described a more frightful scene. Peters said that water from the ship’s pools sloshed out and into the dining area as well as some of the staterooms.

“I was looking over the side to see what was going on, thought maybe the captain was making a course change to avoid hitting something and we just kept going over and over,” he said. “At one point I looked up and couldn’t find my wife. I thought at first she may have gone overboard.”

Actually, Laurie Peters had made her way to the high side of the listing ship.

“I thought I was going to need my life jacket,” she said. “It was like a disaster movie scene. That sure was a memorable trip.”

Memorable “doesn’t even begin to describe” the experience, said Steve Stuckey of Hawkins.

“Worst thing I’ve ever seen happen,” Stuckey shouted as he left Cruise Ship Terminal 2 at the Port of Galveston.

“There were a lot of people hurt, and they didn’t even bother to check on most of them,” said Stuckey. “They told us nothing about what was going on until the next day, didn’t offer us any explanation about why this happened.”

Though Stuckey said he would likely never board the ship again, his wife, Marilyn, wasn’t so sure.

“I’d probably go back next year,” she said. “I’m not so sure it could have been avoided.”

Ron Harris of Loco, Okla. was also taking things in stride.

“I saw glass and stuff breaking, but that was about it,” said Harris, whose sister-in-law suffered a minor eye injury during the sharp turn. “There wasn’t much to it.”

Others said the experience was frightening.

Diane Lee was in her room watching CNN with her legs propped up on a table when the ship suddenly tipped. Then her world went haywire.

“All of a sudden the table took off toward the wall because of the angle of the room,” said Lee, a 60-year-old Lihue, Hawaii, resident. “I tried to put my foot down for some stability, and then I was flying through the air about 13 feet and landed up against the wooden frame of the queen-size bed.”

Lee, who had taken six other cruises with her husband, Steve, said she had never encountered anything as unsettling as this. Though the ship was tilted for only about a minute, she said it would take a lifetime for her to be able to forget what happened.

“Even though he was injured, the cabin steward helped me up onto the sofa and got some ice for my leg.”

When she received medical attention Sunday morning at 11 a.m., she said the crewmembers were giving a bottle of champagne to those being treated, but nothing was said about any other compensation.

Steve Lee, who was in a shopping area during the incident, said he hung onto a hand railing and saw shelves emptying out onto the floor in nearby shops as the ship tilted.

He said when he and his wife called the infirmary, they were told not to come unless his wife had more serious injuries.

Steve Lee said the doctors informed him that many passengers in their rooms were injured because they were struck by TV sets falling from shelves.

“We have been on enough cruise ships to know that if there is an emergency they would sound the horn or make an announcement,” he said. “There was no warning. People were scared to death.”

Lee asked for copies of the medical records for his wife but was told it was company policy that they would have to write to the cruise line after the trip to obtain them.

The tipping incident wasn’t the only complaint passengers had as they disembarked.

Peters, the Idaho resident who was traveling with his wife and six friends, said the cruise changed itinerary at the last minute and skipped the Cayman Islands.

Because of high winds from the north, the Grand Princess was delayed in returning to port Saturday. Scheduled to dock around 6:30 a.m., the ship actually did not make it to port until after 8 a.m., causing Peters and his group to miss their flight back to Idaho.

Still, Peters wasn’t sure he wouldn’t sail again.

“I don’t know about taking this ship again, because most of the time Princess takes real good care of us,” he said. “But I’d have to think hard about it.”

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Daily News reporter Greg Barr contributed to this report.