Tanker Slams Into Docked Cruise Ship on Mississippi River in New Orleans; All 180 Aboard Survive

A tanker that apparently lost its steering slammed into a docked river cruise ship carrying 180 people in New Orleans on Friday, setting off a massive rescue operation as passengers and crew plunged into the Mississippi River and the stricken vessel took on water and began to topple over. Everyone on board survived, the city's mayor said.

Video from the scene showed the much larger Atlantic Asphalt tanker striking the American Heritage cruise boat at its dock in a crunch of metal and glass. Tugboat operators, nearby workers, police officers and other rescuers rushed to help.

"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. She said 32 people were taken to hospitals, none of them with critical injuries.

The cruise boat began listing within minutes of the impact and flipped while emergency workers were still trying to get everyone off. Dozens of those on board, along with at least two police officers, were pulled from the 66-degree Fahrenheit (19-degree Celsius) river onto nearby ships.

Devon Flanagan was at his job nearby at the Port of New Orleans when workers raced down the dock. He got out of his truck to find the ship on its side and passengers in the water. "It was just chaos," he said. "You had all types of ships, like other barges and other companies down there trying to help out, which also was a little convoluted because you had people still in the water."

Coast Guard Capt. Melanie Burnham said the tanker appeared to have suffered "some type of loss of steering," though the exact cause of the crash remained unknown. The National Transportation Safety Board planned to investigate, but its members were initially unable to reach New Orleans because all flights nationwide were grounded due to communications problems at regional air traffic control centers.

Passengers who were not injured were taken to a nearby auditorium, where cruise officials conducted a roll call to make sure everyone was accounted for, Moreno said. Many people lost their IDs and even car keys in the disaster, and most were from out of town. "They needed chargers for their phones. Some people didn't have phones," Moreno said. "This has now made national news. They need to contact their families to let them know they're OK. Food, hotel rooms, transportation."

The American Heritage, built in 2015 and operated by American Cruise Lines, is five stories tall and can hold up to 150 passengers. The 520-foot-long (160-meter-long) vessel, sailing under a Marshall Islands flag, was finishing an eight-day cruise to several Mississippi River destinations in Louisiana and Mississippi, with a final destination of New Orleans, according to the shipping tracker MarineTraffic.

Martin Davies, a maritime law expert at Tulane University, said it is too early to tell what caused the crash, but that videos indicate some kind of catastrophic system failure on the vessel and "super bad luck" that it struck the boat as passengers were departing. He noted the tanker was traveling upriver, going slowly against the current, and had already made the difficult Algiers Point turn on the Mississippi River before it crashed, with a local pilot aboard as is standard for tankers. "For something like this to happen for an upbound ship indicates that something must have gone really badly wrong," Davies said.

The tanker is owned by a company called Nave Shipping SA, registered in Monrovia, Liberia, according to the International Maritime Organization. MarineTraffic identifies it as a subsidiary of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, a sprawling Chinese state-owned conglomerate that in 2022 accounted for nearly a quarter of the global commercial shipbuilding market and was also the largest military shipbuilder in the world at the time, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. China State Shipbuilding Corp. did not respond to an emailed request for comment Friday afternoon. The tanker specializes in carrying large quantities of asphalt and bitumen, a semi-solid substance often used for road construction and roofing.