Cruise Ship Accident Lawyer Blog
You take your family on a cruise featuring a huge Olympic-sized swimming pool on deck. Your kids are excited to get a chance to enjoy the water while on the ship. However, when you arrive at the pool you notice something quite troubling – no lifeguards. For our team of cruise ship injury lawyers, not having a lifeguard on duty is simply unacceptable and extremely dangerous.
As of the date of this posting, only Disney requires lifeguards to be on duty at swimming pools onboard cruise ships. You read that correctly – out of all the various cruise lines (e.g., Carnival, Viking, Winstar, etc.) only one liner requires on-duty lifeguards. The other cruise lines appear to have decided that since lifeguards are not legally required, they do not want to invest in this important safety precaution.
There does not appear to be any other legitimate reason for not having at least one lifeguard on duty at swimming pools on cruise ships, especially with so many ships being occupied by families with young children able to access the pools. The cruise ship industry has grown precipitously with mega cruise ships featuring massive pools utilized by hundreds of passengers. These cruise liners must understand that a drowning can occur in the blink of an eye. In fact, in many instances, a drowning situation may not even be recognized by a passenger until it is too late.