The True Story Behind Trainwreck: Poop Cruise

On Feb. 10, 2013, a fire damaged the cables powering the cruise ship Carnival Triumph, leaving 4,000 passengers aboard stranded in the Gulf of Mexico for almost a week with overflowing toilets and sewage dripping down the walls. Netflix revisits the crappy incident in Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, a 55-minute documentary out June 24, part of the streamer’s series on disasters in recent history. The doc features crew members, a Carnival spokesperson from that time, and passengers who made it through the mess, like women attending a bachelorette party and a man who was traveling with his future fiance’s family.  Here’s a look at the most shocking details about what it was like to be a passenger on the “poop cruise.” When shit hit the fan Passengers had signed up for a four-day roundtrip from Galveston, Texas, to Cozumel, Mexico. The trip from Texas to Mexico was a success, with people partying it up on the deck and pigging out at the all-you-can-eat buffets. But on Day 4, when the ship was en route back to the U.S. from Mexico, guests were woken up in the middle of the night by an alarm summoning an “alpha team” due to a fire. When the sun rose, the cruise director told passengers over the intercom that everything was under control, and then suddenly, the lights went out.  Quickly, staffers had to come up with a contingency plan for using the bathroom because the toilets couldn’t flush anymore without electricity. Some passengers removed the beacon in their life vests and poured water on top of it so the light would flash, and they could see inside the dark bathroom. Crew members announced that everyone had to urinate in the showers and handed out red biohazard bags for poop. Passengers would leave these red bags out in the hallways once waste bins filled up, and the cruise ship quickly began to smell. Not everyone followed the orders to defecate in the red bags. Devin, the passenger who was vacationing with his fiancé’s parents, took a lot of videos of the chaos with his phone, and that footage appears throughout the doc. “You walked down a hallway and all of a sudden, squish-squish-squish-squish…we were in excrement,” he says in the doc. The cafeteria floors were covered in urine and feces, and one crew member in the doc, Abhi, describes seeing what he calls a poop “lasagna” in one bathroom—piles of excrement layered with toilet paper and more poop. There were other issues. One of the chefs onboard talks about scrambling to put together lettuce sandwiches with no working refrigerators. Without air-conditioning, the bedrooms became too hot to sleep in, so passengers brought their mattresses out to the deck and slept outside. According to the doc, some passengers even had sex out in the open.  Carnival Triumph passengers did not have cell service when they were first stranded. “As a 12-year-old, it’s very scary not to be able to talk to my mom,” a passenger, Rebekah, who was vacationing with her dad, says in the doc. When another cruise ship happened to sail by, Carnival Triumph passengers got some of its cell service, and they could make quick calls to family members and share images and videos. That’s one way news of the disaster started to leak out to the press. The rescue and aftermath After the fire initially happened, the plan was to have a tugboat crew pull the ship back to a port in Mexico. But the ship had drifted so far towards the U.S. that the tugboat crew ended up guiding the ship to Mobile, Alabama. After about four days of drifting, passengers can be seen kissing the ground as they disembark. “We were shocked and relieved that so many of them credited the Carnival crew members with superhuman effort,” Buck Banks, a spokesperson for Carnival, says in the doc. Maritime lawyer, Frank Spagnoletti, argues in the doc that the Carnival Triumph never should have set sail in the first place, citing documents that indicated that the ship had a propensity for fires. All of his cases were settled. Carnival spent $115 million rehabbing the vessel—which sails under a new name, Carnival Sunrise—and conducted fleet-wide upgrades of the engine rooms. Carnival Triumph passengers received a refund, $500, transportation reimbursements, and a voucher for a free cruise. Rebekah’s father Larry says in the doc that he still had great memories of being on the cruise with his daughter before the incident and came out of the experience with a better appreciation for “how we can get through things together, good or bad.” They still go on cruises to this day.