No Celebration On This Cruise Passengers On Ship That Caught Fire Return To Spokane With Horror Stories

Several Spokane residents returned home Thursday night from a Caribbean cruise that turned ugly when a fire in the ship’s control room knocked out power.

“It was not a good scene,” said Mikell Sewell, a Spokane woman who was on the Carnival Cruise ship last weekend. “The engines died. People started running around in life jackets, only it was crew members.”

Sewell and her husband, Gary, boarded the ship Saturday. The next day, fire broke out in the control room and the Celebration drifted powerless near the Bahamas.

The Sewells and more than 1,700 other passengers endured overflowing toilets, rotting food and almost no running water until Tuesday when they were transferred to another ship, the Ecstasy.

The Ecstasy docked Thursday morning in Miami. From there, the Sewells and Wrays flew to Spokane, arriving in the evening.

Passengers on the ship will get refunds for the ruined cruise and will receive another Carnival cruise at no charge.

After arriving at Spokane International Airport, Mikell Sewell and Brenda Wray said they had attended a medical conference on the ship. Sewell works at Sacred Heart, Wray at Deaconess.

“We didn’t see the fire but we smelled the smoke,” Mikell Sewell said. “We went hours and hours in the dark without communication.”

Not knowing what was happening was the worst part of the crisis, she said.

To avoid the stench of sewage, the tropical heat and rooms without light, most passengers slept on the decks. “The food situation was very bad,” Sewell said.

Crew members and passengers were loaded into smaller, auxiliary ships and transported to the Ecstasy on Tuesday. High waves rocked the ships and the passengers weren’t given life jackets.

Getting off the Celebration was a relief.

“Had it gone on many more hours, there would have been riots,” Sewell said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo