Valentina Azzia vividly remembers the moment her son nearly drowned in a pool while on Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas.
Now, as reported by Florida’s WPLG Local 10 News, she has filed a lawsuit demanding that cruise lines provide lifeguards at children’s pools.
“Really in a matter of seconds we realized that our son wasn’t there anymore and we started looking for him,” Azzia said. “He was at the bottom of the pool.”
A labyrinthine maze of maritime rules, fragmented oversight and a patchwork quilt of nations that do business with cruise lines make it tough for consumers to assess the health and safety record of the ship they’re about to board.
Want to know about a ship’s cleanliness record? Food safety? Virus outbreaks? It’s difficult to find, partly because there is no one entity or country that regulates the industry with its fleet of ships that are like floating mini-cities.
In the case of Carnival Cruise Lines, according to the Associate Press, the owner of the Carnival Triumph that spent days in the Gulf of Mexico disabled by an engine fire, the company is incorporated in Panama, its offices are based in Miami, and its ships fly under the Bahamian flag — a combination that is not unusual in the cruise line industry.
California Injury Lawyers Blog