Rowena Vasquez News Today

We called it Voyage of the Damned: Days of despair on the Grand Princess Christopher Goffard © (Noah Berger / Associated Press) Passengers aboard the Grand Princess celebrate as they arrive in Oakland on March 9. The cruise ship, which had maintained a holding pattern off the coast for days, carried multiple people who tested positive for the coronavirus. (Noah Berger / Associated Press) Michael Dorety was a retired 68-year-old Dallas firefighter who had the long-standing men...

Michael Dorety was a retired 68-year-old Dallas firefighter who had the long-standing mental habit of calculating catastrophes, the better to avoid them. He sat by exit doors. He refused to book 11th-floor hotel rooms, because engine ladders only reached 10. He taught his kids to avoid escalators, which could snag shoelaces. Yet Dorety showed no alarm when he and his wife, Susan, climbed aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship at Pier 27 in San Francisco on Friday, Feb. 21, joining some 2,500 pas...