Passengers aboard a cruise ship expecting sunny Bahamas weather instead faced an itinerary changed to much colder climates because of severe conditions that made the original route unsafe.
The MSC Meraviglia cruise embarking from Brooklyn, New York was compelled to chart a course to ports in New England and Canada rather than the intended Bahamas destination last Saturday.
Unseasonably worsening weather precluded the possibility of securely navigating from New York City to the southern Atlantic, according to a statement from the MSC cruise line.
Recent heavy storms along the East Coast and Bahamas brought flooding, power losses and fatalities. Altering the schedule allowed the cruise to proceed rather than the more extreme measure of an outright cancellation that would have stymied thousands of vacations, the company said.
Complexities in obtaining last-minute berths for the unscheduled stops and stocking the vessel as it traveled left the Canada and New England route as the sole feasible choice.