Cruise-ship health, crime information available in new database

Multiple reports of stolen items on a Royal Caribbean megaship. High pH levels that closed a pool on a newer Norwegian Cruise Line ship. Soiled dishes at a Carnival Cruise Lines buffet.

Travelers shopping for a cruise vacation can find these and other health and safety issues in a new online database from ProPublica and USA Today. It covers every cruise-ship port in the United States. The ports closest to Phoenix are in San Diego and Los Angeles.

Find the database at projects.propublica.org/cruises.

It includes records from ship inspections by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as onboard crimes and injuries reported to the U.S. Coast Guard and local police.

ProPublica’s “Cruise Control” report notes that most cruise ships get a passing health grade from federal inspectors in their twice-yearly inspections. The database includes each ship’s latest score plus information on deficiencies noted in the most recent report as well as reports going back to 2010. There also is a tally of each ship’s deficiencies since 2010 for those who want to compare the volume of deficiencies among ships they are considering.

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Many deficiencies will mean little to the average passenger — the terms are too technical to understand.

Like this from a 2014 inspection of Royal Caribbean’s giant Oasis of the Seas:

“The documentation for the anti-entrapment cover in the Solarium spa pool indicated that it was to be used for multiple drains only, but the drain in the pool was a single drain. In addition, the documentation stated that the product should only be used when the application and design was by a registered design professional. However, it was not clear on the signed installation certificate if the signatory was a registered design professional. The vessel was aware of these issues and provided documentation about actions being taken.”

Other deficiencies will seem relatively minor unless your house is always spotless: “A portable fan had dust on the fan guard and the air from the fan was blowing into the back bar area.” “One of the top bowls in a stack of bowls had a piece of dried food soil that had fallen into it.”

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Your best tactic is to look for trends, volume of incidents and major incidents, such as widespread sickness on a ship and how the cruise line handled it. The number of illness outbreaks, which are generally well publicized as they occur, is highlighted in the database.

There’s scarier stuff on the crime front. ProPublica notes that at least 94 people have been sexually assaulted on cruise ships since 2010. More than 20 million passengers cruise annually.

The crime data, also tallied back to 2010, includes information on theft, fights, medical emergencies, injuries to passengers and crew and shipboard deaths.

Kendall Carver is a retired Phoenix businessman whose 40-year-old daughter Merrian vanished from a Royal Caribbean Alaskan cruise in 2004. It is not known whether she was murdered, committed suicide or simply disappeared.

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Carver led a grass-roots campaign to hold cruise lines accountable for crimes and to be more forthcoming in their reporting and investigation.

It was successful. Late last year, the U.S. Senate passed a law that will make public the reports of all crimes aboard cruise ships operating out of U.S. ports and compile the numbers on a Department of Transportation website.

Republic reporter Robert Anglen contributed to this report.