A Carnival Cruise Line ship that sails out of Port Canaveral was seen with its iconic smokestack funnel on fire Thursday morning while docked in Grand Turk.
Carnival Cruise Line officials said in a statement the ship’s “emergency response team quickly activated and extinguished a fire inside the ship’s funnel while the ship was in Grand Turk. All guests and crew are safe, and the ship’s guests were cleared by local authorities to go ashore. We continue to assess the situation.”
Photos posted by Twitter user @AirborneJM show black smoke and orange flames billowing out of the starboard side of the red-white-and-blue funnel.
“Carnival Freedom caught fire in Grand Turk while docked this morning. Praying there are no injuries and everyone will be safe,” reads the post.
The ship was alongside Mardi Gras, which also sails from Port Canaveral, and images and video of the incident poured in on social media.
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Twitter user @Budman922 said in a post, “Shortly after the Carnival Freedom arrived in port next to us on the Mardi Gras, smoke and flames began to shoot out of the exhaust funnel. The crew quickly started to battle the fire to extinguish it. A partial piece of the funnel fell from the top deck while smoke and ash flew in the wind. Luckily the wind was blowing away from our ship. The crew did a great job as it appears the fire did not spread any further than where it was.”
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Carnival provided an image of passengers from both Mardi Gras and Freedom moving about as normal later in the morning.
Freedom Cruiser – TURKS AND CAICOS.
The fire fighting group managed to extinguish the flames from the exhaust system in an effective manner.
no injured. congratulations for the teamwork. pic.twitter.com/Aw8sUwawDH
— Chester4x4 (@Chester4x4) May 26, 2022
Photos after the fire was extinguished show the charred and gutted remains of the of the funnel system with the exhaust pipes exposed.
The 110,000-gross-ton, 952-foot-long ship debuted in 2007 and sails four- and five-night Bahamas and Caribbean voyages. It has a maximum passenger capacity of 4,075 and a crew complement of 1,150.
It departed Port Canaveral on a five-night cruise on Monday and is slated to return to the port on Saturday.
It’s unclear if the ship will be able to return as scheduled.
Also Thursday morning, the cruise line was dealing with reports of a chemical smell that caused sickness on passengers on board Carnival Magic, which was sailing into Norfolk, Virginia. The U.S. Coast Guard boarded the ship to investigate but said there was no immediate distress.