This Fact About Netflix's Poop Cruise Still Haunts Me
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, its 4,000 passengers were initially instructed to pee down the drain of their showers on-board (and given biohazard bags to poop in). As even the crew who are interviewed will admit, the plan was flawed and, yes, absolutely gross. But these were desperate times.
Everyone assumed the stalled ship would be at sea for only one or two days under these conditions, but the rescue was delayed, and passengers were trapped aboard for four excruciating days. Shower drains started to overflow with urine. Travelers stopped using the red biohazard bags. And with no air conditioning on board, passengers were forced to sleep on the decks to avoid the heat and stench below deck.
Netflix
And the "it was raining feces" part? That would come when tugboats finally arrived to tow the ship to port. After they attached themselves to the ship, 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 covered in raw sewage, and there was nowhere for the passengers to go.
There have been other documentaries about cruise ships that've turned me off of cruising forever: The 2021 HBO film The Last Cruise, about a COVID outbreak on a cruise ship, was certainly one of them. But Poop Cruise was on another level for me. The footage depicting just how pervasive the damage to the ship was, just how much of it was coated in a veneer of human waste, was beyond what even the news had depicted. 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.
I realize that a cruise ship is a vessel that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and you can't just, you know, sink one willy-nilly offshore somewhere. Still, I waited patiently for an epilogue stating that the Carnival Triumph had been decommissioned and never sailed again, not after that. I've stepped in dog poop, I know how hard it is to get that smell out of something. Considering that a fire in the engine room did destroy a lot of the ship's necessary mechanics, that coupled with the turd wallpaper seemed as good a reason as any to, you know, light the whole thing on fire and give it a proper burial at sea.
But no. The epilogue says, "Carnival spent $115 million cleaning, repairing and refitting the Triumph. Today she still sails, under her new name, Carnival Sunrise." Listen, I'm sure there are health and safety measures that need to be met for the Sunrise to set sail, but just knowing what it went through, seeing what I've seen in this film, I'm haunted by the fact that she got a new name and we're just expected to move on. Is it too much to ask that your vacation accommodations come without a history of biological contamination?
We can laugh at Poop Cruise now, because even gross tragedy plus time equals comedy. But there is no amount of disinfectant in the world that would be enough for me to step foot on the Sunrise. Not after the horrors shown in this documentary.
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