NEW YORK: The incident reminded many of the Titanic. And in many ways there were resemblances -- there was a ship, there were some 2000 passengers, there was panic and there was water all around. However, fortunately, there was no shipwreck or loss of lives.
It happened on Saturday to the 965-foot cruise ship, Norwegian Dawn, carrying about 2,000 passengers, off the coast of Georgia, when a 70-foot wave crashed into its front, creating virtual mayhem.
Many of its passengers vowed never to venture into the seas narrating the sven-hour ordeal on the highs seas. The freak wave, or rather the rogue wave, smashed windows, sent every movable object into a tizzy and created a whirlpool in the ship.
The ship, with all the passengers safe, yet all of them in a state of shock, returned to New York harbor later docking on a berth on the Hudson river.
The white ocean liner had left New York on April 10 and was sailing back from the Bahamas when the pounding took place over weekend. Its 62 cabins out of 1,112 were flooded and four passengers suffered minor injuries. The wave had reached deck 10 on the ship. The owners of the ship later said passenger safety was not "compromised in anyway".
A spokesperson for the cruise line said the captain had slowed the ship to 4 knots rather than its usual 20 to 25 knots while navigating through the storm. That may have minimized damage.
Passengers got a refund of half the trip's cost and a voucher for half the price of a future cruise.
"The ship was like a cork in a bathtub when the storm hit," said Celestine Mcelhatton, a passenger, honeymooning with wife, Anne Marie.
Other passengers said there was a storm which pounded the ship for almost 11 hours, before the wave hit it. Weather experts, however, said there was nothing abnormal about the storm. The ship was in the windy "gradient" zone between a low-pressure system stretching from the Carolinas to Bermuda and a high-pressure zone on the East Coast, Eric Christensen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said.
However, the wave is a different matter, he said. "As far as the size of that wave, that's definitely a rare event. We would call that a 'freak wave' or a 'rogue wave'. The area can get waves as high as 20 to 25 feet, especially when hurricanes are active, he added.
At least two passenger ships have been hit by such waves in the last one year. In one instance, the wave broke a window of Norwegian cruise liner, the Norwegian Majesty, near Boston. Early this year, a 50-foot wave dashed a ship that was carrying students undertaking a sea program near Alaska.
