The Viking Sky outage has raised questions about the cruise traffic in the northern part of the Norwegian coast.
In a letter to Oslo daily Dagens Naeringsliv, Norwegian University of Science and Technology professors Ingrid Bouwer Utne and Jan Erik Vinnem argued that certain sailings should be banned.
The 48,000-gt cruiseship Viking Sky (built 2017) suffered engine failure off Hustadvika, Norway. Viking Cruises chairman Torstein Hagen has avoided speculating about what went wrong.
Potential consequences
“With more than 1,000 people onboard, the consequences of a casualty could be worse than both [the] Titanic and Estonia,” the professors at the Department of Marine Technology said.
The 16,000-gt Estonia sank in the Baltic Sea in 1994, claiming 852 lives.
The Viking Sky incident showed the vulnerabilities linked to the evacuation of passengers and crews on large passengerships, the two stated. They asked what might have happened if an accident had happened off the coast of Finnmark or at Spitsbergen?
Utne and Vinnem argued that most people onboard Viking Sky would have died in the case of a grounding.
The poor weather, they said, would have made it difficult to despatch lifeboats and there were a large number of older people onboard that would not be able to save themselves.
