All Passengers and Crew Survive New Orleans Cruise Ship Crash With Tanker on Mississippi River

On Friday in New Orleans, a tanker that appears to have lost its steering struck a docked river cruise boat with 180 people aboard. Video from the scene shows the far larger Atlantic Asphalt tanker hitting the American Heritage while metal and glass crunched and broke. Passengers and crew went into the Mississippi as the boat took on water and began to topple.

Amid the wreckage came a rare piece of news. "We have zero people unaccounted for, which truly is a miracle on the Mississippi," Mayor Helena Moreno said at a news conference, as rescuers and others cheered. Thirty-two people were taken to hospitals, she said, and none had critical injuries.

The boat began listing within minutes and flipped while emergency workers were still trying to get everyone off. Dozens of people from on board, along with at least two police officers, were pulled from the river, which was 66 degrees Fahrenheit (19 Celsius), onto nearby ships. Tugboat operators, workers nearby, police and other rescuers rushed in.

Devon Flanagan was working at the Port of New Orleans when colleagues ran down the dock. He got out of his truck and saw the ship on its side with passengers in the water. "It was just chaos," he said, describing barges and vessels from other companies converging to help, which he found somewhat convoluted because people were still in the water.

Coast Guard Capt. Melanie Burnham said the tanker seemed to have suffered "some type of loss of steering," but she said the exact cause is not known. The National Transportation Safety Board plans to investigate. Its members could not initially get to New Orleans, because all flights nationwide were grounded by communications problems at regional air traffic control centers.

Uninjured passengers were taken to a nearby auditorium, where cruise officials called a roll to confirm everyone was accounted for, Moreno said. Many lost IDs and even car keys, and most were from out of town. Their needs were basic and immediate: phone chargers, and in some cases phones themselves, so they could tell relatives they were safe now that the crash had made national news, plus food, hotel rooms and transportation.

The American Heritage was built in 2015 and is operated by American Cruise Lines. It has five stories, is 520 feet (160 meters) long and can carry up to 150 passengers. It was finishing an eight-day cruise to several destinations in Louisiana and Mississippi, with New Orleans as its final stop, according to MarineTraffic. It sails under a Marshall Islands flag.

Martin Davies, a maritime law expert at Tulane University, said it is too early to determine the cause. Videos suggest some kind of catastrophic system failure on the vessel, he said, along with "super bad luck" that the collision came as passengers were departing. The tanker was heading upriver, slowly against the current. "For something like this to happen for an upbound ship indicates that something must have gone really badly wrong," Davies said. He noted that tankers carry local pilots, and that this one had already made the difficult Algiers Point turn before the crash.

The International Maritime Organization lists the tanker's owner as Nave Shipping SA, registered in Monrovia, Liberia. MarineTraffic identifies it as a subsidiary of China State Shipbuilding Corporation, a state-owned conglomerate that in 2022 held nearly a quarter of the global commercial shipbuilding market, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It was also the world's largest military shipbuilder then. The company did not respond to an emailed request for comment Friday afternoon. The tanker carries asphalt and bitumen, used in road construction and roofing.

The NTSB investigation, delayed by the grounded flights, will be where the cause of the steering failure is established.