Sask. family weathers massive storm on cruise ship
A Regina family is happy to be on solid ground after a harrowing experience on a cruise ship this week.
The Kumaran family was on a holiday on the Royal Caribbean Anthem of the Seas cruise liner headed to the Caribbean.
The ship ended up heading through a storm belt near the eastern United States, causing massive damage on board.
Pathma Kumaran was on board with eight other family members when the weather took a turn for the worse on Sunday. Kumaran was at the spa getting a pedicure for her birthday.
"That's when everything started to fly all over the place," she said. "It was scary."
She said all the little creams and bottles in the spa started falling and the ladies doing the spa treatments couldn't stay in their chairs.
"They had chairs with four wheels, so they were sliding all over the room," she said.
"This one lady, she's been working with the cruise line for 15 years, she said 'I've never experienced this before.' So that`s when I started to panic."
While Kumaran was waiting for her nails to dry the captain came over the loudspeaker asking everyone to return to their rooms.
Luckily for Kumaran, her family was waiting outside the spa and was able to help her down the stairs from the 15th floor to their ninth floor stateroom in the treacherous, shaky conditions.
"The wind was howling and it was really loud. Like, kind of almost like cracking," she said.
Packed into stateroom overnight
The whole group packed into one of the family's three staterooms to wait out the storm overnight.
"We had three staterooms but we all stayed in one in order to comfort each other," she said.
The next morning Kumaran and her family emerged from the state room to find massive damage to the ship's common areas.
"When we came out there are places kind of blocked off with tapes and stuff saying that there are damages to this area please don't go."
Kumaran said there were broken windows, the roofing had come down in parts and there were chairs strewn about. She said the crew was working hard to try and put things back together.
That morning that captain announced the ship was heading back to its port at New Jersey, and it wouldn't be carrying on to its Caribbean destinations.
Passengers are being given a full refund and 50 per cent of their next cruise.
Garth Materie, host of CBC Radio's The Afternoon Edition, asked Kumaran if she would ever be going on a cruise again.
"Actually to tell you the truth, I will go with Royal Caribbean because they really treated us really well," she said.
"They made a bad decision to try to beat the storm," she said. "But Mother Nature, who can predict, right?"
