[Jolly Amaranto]

Maybe things would work out different in the Bahamas. Carnival, under contract with FEMA tried that after Katrina.

They are truly cruises to nowhere. Docked in New Orleans, two luxury liners, the Ecstasy and the Sensation from Carnival Cruise Lines, are temporarily home to thousands of city workers and their families.

Originally sought as floating residences for evacuees, the ships have been shifted to another use by the government, which signed a noncancelable contract for them and two others in the days immediately after the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency agreed to pay $192million for a six-month charter of three Carnival luxury liners and a$10million contract for a more spartan vessel. Struck quickly when many evacuees remained trapped in horrific conditions, the deals were widely viewed as a creative solution to an immediate crisis.

But it has hardly been smooth sailing. Two of them remain empty and may stay that way for weeks. The two in New Orleans are providing berths to city workers, after having sat empty for days in Galveston, Tex., when evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston refused to board them.


Already traumatized by the floods and eager to put their children in schools and apply for jobs, evacuees chose cots over cabins, an embarrassment for FEMA and a disappointment for Carnival, the Miami-based owner of the ships and the world's largest cruise company.

"We normally sell those rooms for a lot of money," said Bob Dickinson, the Carnival president and chief executive who was awakened by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the middle of the night to begin drafting the contract. "It was frustrating that no one wanted to come."