Land Ho! Empress of the North Runs Aground in Alaska

A cruise ship out of Seattle ran aground in Alaska over the weekend. As fortune would have it Seattlest profiled this ship in our 'Getting to Know Your 2007 Cruise Ships' series, so you may remember the faux-sternwheeler Empress of the North. It would seem odd that this ship in particular would have problems running aground--it's happened in the past on its home stretch of Columbia down by Portland--when you take into consideration the fact that it has a much shallower draft than a standard cruise ship. Why does this smaller vessel have problems between Seattle and Juneau where other, much gianter, vessels roam freely? We're guessing that either the Empress plays a little loose with its shallow draft and repeatedly wanders off the beaten path into waters where other boats dare not go, or that its big, broad cruise ship sides and its little bitty non-cruise ship draft repeatedly cause it to be blown onto rocks. Here's what Seattlest wrote in April:

Running aground shouldn’t be a problem in the channels the cruise ships take up the Inside Passage, particularly for a boat this shallow, but we’re guessing weather can push it around something fierce with such a small amount of the boat under water.

Anyway, no one was hurt, but they were evacuated after the Empress started taking on water.