Steve's Marine Disaster Pages

"DIAMOND PRINCESS" The completion of the Diamond Princess, a 113,000 ton luxury cruise ship, was already 5 months behind schedule when, on 1st October 2002, a fire broke out. There were 1,000 Mitsubishi workers on board, but all got off safely. Insurers face a bill of many hundreds of millions of dollars. There were two sister ships being built at the time in the Mitsubishi yard, and although this vessel was meant to be the first to be completed, this fire was obviously going to cause a serious delay in her completion, so they "swapped" the names of the two vessels, re-naming the OTHER (undamaged) ship, DIAMOND PRINCESS, and this one the SAPPHIRE PRINCESS, (and which was completed in mid-2004). ........... BACK TO MAIN PAGE

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