The Port of Los Angeles will be getting a new cruise ship next year, replacing a bigger one that’s leaving.
Carnival Cruise Lines has announced that its 2,124-passenger ship, Carnival Spirit, will be home-ported in San Pedro for at least four months beginning in September 2011.
“This is a nice shot in the arm for us,” said port spokesman Phillip Sanfield of the 960-foot ship, which will cruise to Mexico and Hawaii. “It’s been eight years since Carnival Cruise home-ported a ship here.”
The July 1 announcement came just weeks after Royal Caribbean International, owned by Miami-based Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., announced that it would move its 3,835-passenger ship, Mariner of the Seas, in January after less than two years at the port.
The vessel, the West Coast’s largest cruise ship, will relocate to Galveston, Texas, where it will travel to Europe and the Caribbean. Though company officials would only say that the move was economic, several cruise industry experts said it was driven by fears of the drug war in Mexico, which has cut into passenger counts on cruises to Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco and other destinations on the Mexican Riviera.
Carnival’s boat may be a better fit for the smaller market. Carnival, a unit of Miami-based Carnival Corp. & plc, has scheduled the Spirit for several five to nine-day cruises to the Mexican Riviera through next December. The ship, which currently divides its time between San Diego and Alaska, also is scheduled for a 15-day voyage to Hawaii.
A Carnival spokesman, Vance Gulliksen, did not address the problems in Mexico, saying only that the move to Los Angeles is “part of our strategy for providing consumers with a wide range of embarkation port options.”
The company has two other ships, Carnival Pride and Carnival Paradise, home-ported year-round in Long Beach. The Pride makes seven-day cruises to Mexico; the Paradise offers three and four-day trips to Mexico and Catalina.
Gassing Up
A 1.4-acre site once used to dump trash will now be used to train truckers.
A portion of Lopez Canyon, in the Lake View Terrace neighborhood, has been renamed the Lopez Canyon Truck Driving Academy by a vote of the Los Angeles City Council.
The June 30 action “will provide training and job placement for…a community that is struggling with high unemployment and economic distress … ensuring a brighter future for their families,” said Councilman Richard Alarcon, who represents the area and was instrumental in the 1996 shutdown of the 600-acre site.
Lopez Canyon was used for 21 years as a landfill for street sweepings, and residential, construction and demolition waste materials. Since then it’s been the site of a system that captures methane gas seeping from the buried trash accumulated for more than two decades. The gas is burned and converted into electricity that currently powers about 4,500 houses.
Once the landfill is declared safe for public use – which should happen around 2030 – it’s supposed to become a community recreation area. In the meantime, city officials have decided to use some of it to turn out new truckers.
“Lopez Canyon, a location that was once a dirty landfill, can now be used to help train people for well-paying jobs,” Alarcon said.
The training will be conducted by Transportation Opportunities Program, a non-profit established for the purpose, and will be done using eight tractor-trailers donated by local businesses.
The four-week classes, expected to enroll at least 100 students in the first year, are intended to enable successful graduates to obtain Class A California driver’s licenses and employment in the trucking industry.
Inaugural Flight
The Long Beach Airport recently celebrated the arrival of its newest air carrier: Allegiant Air. The airline’s inaugural flight from Bellingham, Wash., arrived at 5:05 p.m. July 1, less than a month after the airport welcomed Frontier Airlines, which operates two daily flights between Long Beach and Denver.
Utilizing a 150-seat MD-80 series jet aircraft, Las Vegas-based Allegiant offers five nonstop flights per week to Stockton, and three to Bellingham. The addition of Allegiant brings the airport’s total number of daily commercial flights to 41, the full contingent allowable under a strict city noise ordinance.
The airport also offers nonstop flights to 15 other cities including San Francisco; Las Vegas; New York; Boston; and Washington, D.C.
Staff reporter David Haldane can be reached at [email protected] or 323-549-5225, ext. 225.
