In this handout from the U.S. Coast Guard, the cruise ship Carnival Triumph sits idle February 11, 2013 in the Gulf of Mexico. (Paul McConnell/U.S. Coast Guard via Getty Images)
Photo of Carnival ship pulling into dock in Mobile, AL. (Courtesy Pete Smith)
MOBILE, Ala. -- After five days without electricity, passengers of the Carnival Triumph finally exited the disabled cruise ship late in Mobile Thursday night.
The 4,000 passengers, originally destined for Houston, had the option of a two-hour bus ride to New Orleans or a seven-hour trip to the point of origin, Galveston, Texas, extending what many already described as a nightmare trip.
"The electricity went out, the water went out, and our room flooded," said passenger Cheryl Espe. "It just kind of went downhill, downhill, downhill."
"Feces on the wall, on the floor, urine, throw up, all over anything you can imagine," two fellow passengers added.
Passengers confirmed reports from Carnival's Twitter feed that a tug line helping to pull the ship into Mobile Harbor at an agonizingly slow rate had broken. The line was replaced, and the ship began to get back underway, moving slowly toward port.
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As of 4 p.m., the Carnival Triumph was located about 40 miles south of Mobile, and slowly drifting back out to sea. According to CNN, officials in Mobile had anticipated the ship would arrive between 10 p.m. and 12 midnight Central Time Thursday.
CNN interviewed passenger Julie Morgan by telephone, who said she and others with rooms on the ship's lower decks had been sleeping on the deck over the past few nights.
Morgan's first-floor room had little ventilation after the outage, and was "very hot and extremely smelly." She said sewage backed up in their showers.
Though people had to wait in lines for food, people weren't left in hunger. "We're not hungry at all. We're doing fine on that front," Morgan said. The Coast Guard and a sister cruise ship had dropped off supplies earlier in the week.