Trainwreck: Poop Cruise—How were the passengers of the cruise rescued after the incident? Explained in depth

Trainwreck: Poop Cruise's Carnival Triumph started like any other cruise. Cocktails and sunburned selfies and the hum of an engine somewhere below that no one paid attention to until it stopped. Just two days after Carnival Triumph left Texas in February 2013, things started going haywire.

What were small problems at first grew bigger way quicker than anyone could have imagined. Then came the smell. Toilets stopped flushing. Sewage started creeping into the hallways. People lined up for hours for sandwiches and defecated everywhere. Beds were dragged onto the deck. Trash piled up. The heat was suffocating. And so was the uncertainty.

News anchors called it the “Poop Cruise.” But for the thousands on board, it wasn’t a punchline. It was five days of survival. Of damp sheets and dead phones. Of raw nerves and desperate questions of how they would be rescued. Now a Netflix documentary, Trainwreck: Poop Cruise aims to dive deeper into the harrowing incident and the days of hell all the passengers went through, all for a cruise on the Gulf of Mexico.

Here's everything you need to know about how the Carnival Triumph broke down and how all the people onboard survived.

Trainwreck: Poop Cruise: What happened at Cranival Triumph?

Trainwreck: Poop Cruise's Carnival Triumph started out as a dream cruise from Galveston to Cozumel and turned into a floating nightmare no one signed up for. The first few days were exactly what you'd expect: sun-soaked decks, overflowing buffets, and everyone tearing it up at karaoke. But on Day 4, while the ship was sailing back to Texas, passengers were jolted awake in the dead of night by an alarm calling for an “alpha team.” Engine room fire. No one knew what that meant, but it didn’t feel good.

By morning, the cruise director chirped over the intercom that everything’s under control, and then the power cut out. Suddenly, the toilets didn’t flush, the air-conditioning vanished, and the only thing working was panic. Showers became urinals, and red biohazard bags were handed out for poop. Once the bins filled up, the bags just sat in hallways. The ship stank like a porta-potty in July. One crew member described a bathroom as having “poop lasagna.” Enough said.

With rooms too hot to sleep in, mattresses were dragged onto the deck. Some folks even got freaky under the stars. The food ran out. Lettuce between bread was “lunch.” There was no signal until a passing ship gave just enough bars to call home and tell everyone about the incident.

How were the passengers rescued?

The plan was simple: tow the Carnival Triumph to Progreso, Mexico, and get everyone off the ship as quickly as possible. But by the time the tugboats arrived, the vessel had already drifted over 100 miles north, carried by strong currents. Progreso was no longer an option. The closest port was now Mobile, Alabama, and it would take several more days to get there. “Oh, that made everybody mad,” one passenger, Larry, recalled while on Trainwreck: Poop Cruise.

On February 11, a glimmer of hope appeared: another Carnival ship, the Legend, approached. Passengers erupted in cheers, thinking they were finally being rescued. But the Legend was already full. It had only come to deliver supplies. To make matters worse, Triumph passengers watched as people on the Legend danced on deck, waved, and took pictures. “They’re doing the ‘Y.M.C.A.,’ and I’m over here popping Imodium,” one Triumph guest said in the Netflix documentary.

Still, the Legend served an unexpected purpose: it sailed close enough for Triumph passengers to briefly connect to its Wi-Fi. For the first time, they could contact loved ones and share what was actually happening. The story spread fast, and the media latched on.

After more than a week, the Triumph finally docked in Mobile on February 14. Passengers cried, hugged the ground, and stumbled off the ship into crowds of reporters and family members. Carnival offered full refunds, free cruise vouchers, and $500, but the backlash wasn’t over. Documents revealed the ship had sailed with only four of the six generators working, despite known risks.

Carnival called it an accident. Lawsuits followed and were eventually settled. The company spent $115 million on repairs and safety upgrades. But for those on board, the smell, the heat, and the humiliation would stick far longer than the headlines.

Here's what real life people who were onboard the ship said about the incident on Trainwreck: Poop Cruise

Trainwreck: Poop Cruise includes multiple testimonies from the people who were onboard the ship, who recounted the horrifying incident that most probably scared them off of cruises for their entire lives.

One passenger named Devin opened up in the interview and said,

"[The day after the fire,] we woke up and everything had changed. I went down to the lower decks and saw and smelt and felt the air of sickness."

He then added,

“But every time I walked into a bathroom, you open up the door, ‘Nope, that one doesn’t work’. Go into the next one, ‘Nope, that one’s disgusting. That one doesn’t work.’”

Another passenger, Bettina Rodriguez, told CNN,

“Just on our deck alone, there were the biohazard bags lined up across the floor. We’re talking about raw sewage at just the end of our deck alone. It was repulsive.”

A cook on the cruise, Abhi recalled,

"It was the most nastiest thing I have ever seen in my life. People were covering the poop with the toilet paper and then again pooping on top of it. So it was layer after layer after layer. It was like a lasagna."

James Ross, who has directed Trainwreck, Poop Cruise said,

“You start off with two worlds, which are the passengers and the crew, and really they never mix. But actually, once this disaster happens, everybody's in the same boat, literally. So what's happening to the passengers, that's also happening to the crew as well, they're having to deal with this situation. So, a lot of the walls that are kind of necessarily built for people to have the holiday vacation of a lifetime, those walls start to crumble down – and then you get this really interesting mix of, we're all just human beings stuck on board a boat with no toilets.”

Trainwreck: Poop Cruise is available to stream on Netflix.