Ironically enough, it may be that Carnival Cruise passengers may enjoy greater safety than the passengers on other cruise lines in the immediate months ahead. That's because Carnival's management, frantic over a series of power-outages or failures that so bedeviled the lives of passengers these past two weeks, are apparently taking emergency measures to equip their ships with back-up power sources. According to a conference call by Carnival to various financial analysts, made more specific to Gene Sloan, cruise editor of USAToday, Carnival will spend "tens of millions of dollars" in immediately upgrading the electrical connections from one set of generators to another on its ships needing such improvements.

By way of explanation: the newest cruise ships -- those built, say, within the last several years -- apparently have redundancy in their electrical generators, according to recent reports. Older ships sometimes do, and sometimes don't, possess such back-up facilities. Older ships in the Carnival fleet will be equipped with substitute sources, or access to substitute sources via more powerful and protected power cables, as a result of the considerable immediate expenditures that Carnival executives have promised.

"We expect to make an announcement early next week on the initial steps of our implementation program…," said a formal statement issued by Carnival. By "implementation program," they mean the physical upgrades that will be made to existing electrical equipment.

And what will now happen to older ships of other cruiselines? There's been silence, complete silence, on the part of the other companies. Whether they are taking similar steps to insure the availability of back-up programs if one source of power should go dead, is simply not known.

If I were a passenger scheduled to sail in the weeks ahead, I would pose some urgent questions to the company whose ship I have chosen. I would demand to know whether the ship in question has back-up generators far removed from the main generators. And if such companies should refuse to provide that information, then I would demand the right to cancel without penalty and to make a similar cruise booking on another line.

First it was the 2,000-passenger Carnival Splendor in 2010. It had an "engine fire" off the coast of San Diego and had to cut short its scheduled voyage.

Then it was the Carnival Triumph last month, losing electrical power in the Gulf of Mexico and leaving 4,000 passengers without all the accustomed amenities of cruising (toilets, elevators). They were stuck onboard, in harrowing conditions, for five days.

Yesterday, it was the Carnival Dream that lost some power while the ship was docked in Philipsburg, St. Maarten. So it is no longer sailing, and all its 4,000 passengers are awaiting chartered airplanes to fly them home.

Today, as unbelievable as it may seem, the Carnival Legend has suffered from diminished sailing speed because of a mechanical problem, and is unable to make a scheduled stop in Grand Cayman. So it is slowly making its way back to Tampa, and passengers will receive a proportional refund.

What's with Carnival? A lot of people will be asking whether it has cut corners in the design, manufacturing, or maintenance of its ships. But one point remains crystal clear: It is vital that back-up generators be installed in all cruise ships, so that passengers in the future do not find themselves adrift in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or some other vast sea. How can a ship embark on a lengthy voyage without reliable redundancy in the generation of its electrical power? And should ships be compelled to reveal, in public statements, whether their power-generating features are sufficient to overcome disastrous problems? Then passengers could intelligently decide whether to book aboard the deficient ships.

As someone who obviously doesn't have expertise in ship design or maritime safety, I felt somewhat hesitant in passing comment on the recent tragedy of the Carnival Triumph, whose electrical system -- knocked out by an engine room fire -- caused it to drift without power for five days in the Gulf of Mexico.

And yet it seemed obvious to me. A cruise ship is like a city at sea. Shouldn't it possess back-up generators if the main source of electricity is knocked out? Of course it should, as I proceeded to write in this blog. And if such an event happens during a time of stormy seas, or when the ship is hundreds of miles from land (as on a trans-Atlantic sailing), grave tragedies including loss of life could occur.

Would you believe that The New York Times has this morning published a well-researched article reaching the same conclusion? And it points out, amazingly enough, that the event on the Triumph is the third such instance to occur during the past three years. One such loss of power occurred, amazingly enough, on another ship of Carnival Cruise Lines, the Splendor, in 2012.

Because of an ambiguous situation of government regulation (all ships carry the flags of tiny countries like Liberia and therefore claim to be immune to supervision by the United States), no government has rushed to enforce comprehensive or effective rules for the installation of safety equipment aboard ships. Though various admonitions to create redundancies in the production of electric power have been issued, only 10-or-so modern cruise ships contain back-up generators located far from the main engine room. The other 100-plus cruise ships contain one such system, and if it is knocked out, then the boat and its passengers are out of luck.

Two years ago, the Splendor experienced an engine room fire that eliminated its electrical power, amid resulted in harrowing circumstances almost identical to what befell the Triumph. Yet Carnival did nothing. And passengers of the Splendor rubbed their eyes when they read about the identical later occurrence on the Triumph.

What is needed is strong action by Congress. Asserting its authority over any ship that docks at a U.S. port, or that is marketed primarily to a U.S. audience, Congress could demand that ships be re-fitted with back-up generators. Though this will require the ships to give up a fair number of passenger cabins in order to create the space for those second generators, it is a requirement that cries out to be enacted. Otherwise, we will soon see an even greater tragedy than the one that so affected the passengers aboard the Triumph.

To install such a facility on existing ships will cost a lot of money. To make space for another massive generator will probably mean eliminating as many as 200 passenger cabins. No longer will such ships carry 3,000 passengers, but rather 2,500 passengers.

But isn’t that a small price to pay for avoiding such tragic events as recently endangered the Carnival Triumph and its passengers? Imagine if that loss of power had occurred on a transatlantic or transpacific crossing while the ship was several hundred -- even a thousand -- miles from land!

A cruise ship is like a city at sea. And like any city, it should have an alternate source of energy and power, located at the other end of the ship from where the basic source of power is found. To rely on a single producer of energy located in or near the engine room entails a giant risk, as Carnival discovered.

Most cities have back-up plans, back-up connections to other electric grids that can be used if the main source of power fails. And such a back-up source should also exist on cruise ships carrying a thousand and more passengers. New ships should be re-designed to enjoy such alternate remedies; old ships should be altered -- sent back to the shipyard -- to install such alternate remedies.

And that way, we won’t encounter an even greater disaster than the one that was partially avoided on the Carnival Triumph. Since the large cruise lines -- Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian -- now enjoy earnings measured in the billions per year, they have the obvious wherewithal to institute this improvement in the reliability of their systems of energy.