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Sewage Cruise Passengers Celebrate Arrival

After enduring five days of overflowing toilets, scarce food, and sickening odors.

It took four hours after docking in Mobile, Alabama, late Friday night, but the last disheveled Carnival Triumph passenger has finally disembarked the doomed cruise ship. The approximately 4,200 people who were stranded on the Gulf of Mexico after an engine-room fire left their vacation liner dead in the water, celebrated their return to dry land by either checking into nearby hotels to bathe and eat immediately or boarding homeward-bound buses. Many of those who arrived in Mobile just before dawn were exhausted, some of them emotional about the conditions they’d suffered. “It was horrible, just horrible,” 28-year-old Maria Hernandez said, with tears in her eyes, of the “girls trip” turned disaster, complete with food shortages, overflowing toilets, and sickening odors. “I just can’t wait to be home,” she said.