Tom Stieghorst
President Trump has suggested that cruise ships be used for emergency housing in the hurricane-battered Bahamas. It has been done before, but there's a couple reasons why it is unlikely -- unless use of the ships is donated by the cruise companies.
Cruise-industry watchers will recall that Carnival Cruise Line in 2005 dispatched three of its ships to New Orleans for housing after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city. But as the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.
Carnival chartered the ships to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) at terms it said would allow the line to break even on what it would have earned had the ships been kept in use for cruises. Critics pilloried Carnival Corp. and questioned the deal. It was hardly an invitation to repeat the experience.
Consider also the geography of New Orleans. As a book title says, a river runs through it. That meant that the ships could be docked in the heart of New Orleans where people working on them were close to the problem.
Now consider the geography of the Abaco Islands. There's no place, to my knowledge, to dock a cruise ship of a size that would be meaningful as relief housing. And on Grand Bahama, the port is in the south, miles from the north coast where the need is.
Still, when the United Nations' World Food Program chartered two ships in 2010 for earthquake relief workers in Haiti, the ships were a 40-minute bus ride to the U.N. logistics base in Port-au-Prince. So it is possible.
Perhaps the most relevant example is the most recent. When Hurricane Irma devastated the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2017, Carnival once again chartered one of its ships, the Carnival Fascination, for relief workers. This time, Carnival kept the price tag out of the media, saying only that it was enough to cover costs. Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line also chartered a ship to FEMA.
Therein lies the real problem. In both New Orleans and St. Thomas, the bill was footed by FEMA, the emergency relief arm of the U.S. government. In Haiti, the tab went to the U.N.
In the latter case, the U.N. paid $3.6 million to charter the Sea Voyager for 90 days, and $6.5 million for the Ola Esmerelda (the former Black Prince), according to a report.
The Port of Palm Beach recently asked the state of Florida for a 30-day subsidy for tenant Bahamas Paradise to continue using its Grand Celebration ship for hurricane relief at cost, which the port quoted as $9 million.
So where is that money going to come from? I was unable to find online the budget for the Bahamian National Emergency Management Agency, the country's equivalent of FEMA. But considering that the entire national budget of the Bahamas for 2019/20 was projected (before Hurricane Dorian) at $2.6 billion, I doubt it will be leasing any cruise ships for post-storm relief housing.