![]() ![]() "We've seen a level of planning that suggests to us the company is taking seriously the conditions they're going to face." The Canadian and American coast guards and federal bodies including Transport Canada are also overseeing the trip. "They may not have the resources or the experience to put the planning into a further voyage."Ĭrystal Cruises has spent three years planning the Serenity's voyage to prevent Titanic-like scenarios (and is requiring $50,000 in evacuation insurance for passengers). "We're concerned that there are going to be other companies looking at this and saying, 'Oh, that looks easy,'" said Jeffery Hutchinson, deputy commissioner of strategy and ship building for the Canadian Coast Guard. It took 40 hours to evacuate passengers and the Canadian Coast Guard filed a half-million-dollar lawsuit for damages over pollution from the ship's grounding. In 2010, the small Clipper Adventure, which carried 128 passengers and crew, ran aground on an uncharted rock. Crystal's luxury-line competitor, Regent Seven Seas, had to cancel a similar trip to the Northwest Passage in July, 2017, over concerns of large Arctic ice packs. In my view, there's a serious tension involved in that."Ĭanada's Arctic waters are perilous, with only 10 per cent considered adequately charted. "It's the nature of the exercise, which is to take a large cruise ship with a very large carbon footprint to the Northwest Passage to take advantage of the melting caused by climate change. "I've used the term extinction tourism," Prof. Smaller expedition ships with a fraction of the passengers have made the trip, but larger ships such as the Serenity could accelerate the area's destruction, said Michael Byers, a professor at the University of British Columbia and expert on climate change and Arctic sovereignty. In 1906, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen finally conquered the passage (calling it "that baffling mystery to all the navigators of the past"), and paved the way a century later for shipping vessels and, now, commercial cruise lines. History has deepened the allure, most notably with the doomed 1845 expedition led by British explorer Sir John Franklin, whose two ships jammed into ice. Rising temperatures and shrinking ice coverage have opened the once-impenetrable passage, allowing travel providers to capitalize on a region shrouded in mystique.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |