À l’intérieur du plus grand paquebot de croisière du monde

Inside the World’s Largest Cruise Ship January 2024. A massive vessel slowly departs the port of Miami. It’s longer than the Eiffel Tower if it were laid on its side. Nearly 10,000 people are on board. That’s more than the entire population of some Caribbean islands. And each of them will spend a week inside an engineering marvel so cleverly concealed that almost no one on board will even suspect its existence. Because behind the water slides, the seemingly endless pools, and the 20 luxurious decks, a crew of 2,350 is at work. And their job isn’t simply to serve cocktails. They maintain a system whose complexity is closer to that of a nuclear submarine than a vacation. Its own power plant. Its own freshwater supply. Its own hospital with an operating theater. And a wastewater treatment system producing water cleaner than what some countries are allowed to discharge into their rivers on land. This is the Icon of the Seas. Two billion dollars. 250,800 tons. 365 meters long and twenty decks high: it’s like placing a twenty-story building on the water and sailing it. Almost every system on board is designed to perform at least two tasks at once. Let’s start with one component that ten thousand passengers pass by every day. None of them suspect that it’s precisely this component that prevents the deck above their heads from collapsing.