Cruises that Sank | The Worst Cruise Disasters of all Time

This cruise ship sank due to what was probably the biggest incident arising from neglect of the ships health. In 1994 on August the 4^th, Oceanos sank.

The ship had been victim to either intentional or unintentional neglect, amazingly it sailed the day before it sank with a gaping ten centimetre hole in the “water tight” bulk head between the generator and the sewage tank, with loose hull plates and check valves that had been stripped for parts from a recent cruise.

For these many reasons, there was an explosion heard apparently from near the engine room, on the 3^rd of August at 2130 hours. As soon as the ships crew and the captain realised the ships fate, they fled, packing their belongings and being the first to leave – failing to fulfil the emergency procedures of closing the lower deck port holes. Not even an alarm was raised to the passengers. By the time the passengers realised that the boat was sinking, through people in the lower decks seeing water spilling in, the captain and the crew were already departing.

The Oceanos sailed into 40 knot winds and thirty feet swells, the storm then worsened and meant that the ship was rocking side to side so much that plates were falling off the tables while people were eating and decorations were falling over.

As the water was entering through the 10cm hole and as there was no check valves in the holding tanks, the water began to enter the ship through every shower, waste disposal unit and shower connected to the system, and as the water had flooded the generators, the power to the engines had been cut in fear of shorting the electrics, the Oceanos was now just a sitting duck in bad weather.

Luckily however for the passengers, vessels that were nearby picked up the distress call and raced to the location in order to save the passengers. It took the South African Air Force and the Navy seven hours and 16 helicopters to rescue every single person on board, saving 571 people.

The Oceanos managed to stay afloat all the way until 1530 hours on the 4^th of August before it finally reached its watery grave.

The RMS Empress of Ireland was an ocean cruise liner built between 1905 and 1906 and was built by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering at Govan for Canadian Pacific Steamships. The ship departed Quebec City on route to Liverpool at approximately 16:30, at our local time, on May the 28^th, 1914 – carrying onboard 1,477 crew and passengers. At the beginning of the month, Henry George Kendall was promoted to the captain of the ship, making this trip his first through the Saint Lawrence River as commander on board the Empress of Ireland.

In the early hours of the next morning on the 29^th of May, the ship was on its way down the channel near the Pointe-au-pere in Quebec, sailing through very heavy fog.

At 02:00 hours local time, the Norwegian Collier ship Storstad collided into the side of the Empress of Ireland.

The Storsdad itself did not sink however the damage sustained by the Empress was sufficient enough for it to take on a rapid flow of water. With extremely severe damage to the starboard side of the Empress of Ireland, the ship rolled over and sank – in a total of 14 minutes, claiming 1,012 crewmen and passengers.

Out of the total passengers, only 465 survived, and shockingly, only four of these were children, 134 children were lost. Only 42 women were found and 279 had been killed.

Among the dead was the English Novelist, Laurence Irving. On the other hand, one of the survivors Frank “Lucky” Tower was said to have been one of the few crew men to have escaped. Frank “Lucky” Tower is said to have survived the Titanic, then survive the Empress, and then survive the RMS Lusitanian whilst serving as a crewman during WWI.