Jorge Luis Alverio Nunez took 20 steps on the pool deck of the Carnival Magic last May. That short walk left him with second-degree burns on the soles of both feet. Now he wants $5 million from Carnival Cruise Line, and his lawsuit paints a picture of a company that knew its decks were burning passengers and did next to nothing about it.
Nunez, a Florida resident, filed suit after the May 21, 2025, incident on the ship's Lido Deck. His attorneys say the surface was so hot that, as the New York Post reported, "within a matter of seconds, he'd suffered second-degree burns on the soles of his feet." The complaint targets Carnival's alleged failure to warn guests, install cooling systems, or require footwear near the pool.
But the most striking allegation in the case is not what happened to Nunez. It is what Carnival allegedly already knew.
The lawsuit claims at least 25 other passengers have suffered burns on Carnival ship decks over the past six years. Two of those passengers, the complaint alleges, required foot amputations as a result of their injuries. If those numbers hold up in discovery, they would suggest a pattern of harm stretching back years across multiple vessels in Carnival's fleet.
Nunez's legal team argues that Carnival had every reason to act and chose not to. The complaint alleges the cruise line failed to post warning signs about deck temperatures, failed to install misting or cooling systems, and failed to advise passengers that walking barefoot near the pool could cause serious injury. The lawsuit frames this as a straightforward negligence case: a foreseeable danger, a company on notice, and a guest who got hurt.
His attorneys put it plainly in the filing, as USA Today reported:
"It is reasonable for a passenger to believe they can walk safely on the pool deck when they are going to the pool."
That sentence captures the core theory of the case. Passengers pay for a vacation. The pool deck sits next to the pool. Walking on it barefoot is not reckless behavior. It is exactly what any reasonable guest would do.
Maritime personal injury claims like this one typically turn on whether the cruise line exercised reasonable care to protect passengers from known hazards. Under general maritime law, a carrier owes its passengers a duty of reasonable care under the circumstances. That standard does not require perfection. It requires a company to act on what it knows.
If Carnival's internal records confirm anything close to 25 prior burn incidents, the company will face hard questions about what steps it took after each one. Did it commission studies on deck surface temperatures? Did it test alternative materials? Did it issue fleet-wide advisories? Did it do anything at all?
Carnival has not publicly responded to the specific allegations in the Nunez complaint. Investigators and the court will need to determine whether the company conducted internal reviews after prior incidents and what, if anything, those reviews recommended. The answers will shape whether this case settles quietly or becomes a much larger problem for the cruise line.
The case also raises questions about industry standards. Cruise ships operate in tropical heat. Their pool decks absorb direct sunlight for hours. Whether other major cruise lines have addressed this hazard with cooling systems, shade structures, or mandatory footwear policies could become relevant if the case proceeds to trial.
This is not the only lawsuit testing Carnival's duty to its passengers. A Miami jury recently hit Carnival with a $300,000 verdict after a passenger alleged the cruise line bore responsibility for injuries sustained in a stairwell fall. That case involved questions about alcohol service and supervision. The Nunez case involves a physical condition of the ship itself, which may present an even more direct theory of liability.
The $5 million demand signals that Nunez's attorneys believe the prior-incident evidence gives them serious leverage. In personal injury litigation, proving that a defendant knew about a recurring hazard and failed to fix it is often the difference between a modest settlement and a verdict with real teeth.
Large corporations facing repeated claims of consumer harm sometimes treat individual payouts as a cost of doing business. That calculation only changes when the legal exposure grows large enough to force systemic action. Lawsuits alleging corporate negligence and consumer harm across other industries have followed a similar arc: isolated complaints, growing evidence of a pattern, and eventually a reckoning in court.
The two alleged amputations stand apart from everything else in the complaint. If passengers lost parts of their feet because they walked on a cruise ship pool deck, and the company knew about those outcomes before Nunez ever boarded the Carnival Magic, the negligence theory becomes far harder to defend.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed the details of those prior amputation cases. The identities of those passengers, the ships involved, and the circumstances of their injuries have not been disclosed in the Nunez filing as reported. Discovery could fill in those gaps, and if it does, the results may determine whether this lawsuit stays a single-plaintiff case or attracts broader attention.
The severity of the alleged injuries also matters for damages. Second-degree burns on the feet can require weeks of treatment, limit mobility, and cause lasting pain. Burns severe enough to require amputation represent a catastrophic outcome from an activity as ordinary as walking to a swimming pool.
When companies face allegations of ignoring harm at that scale, the legal system's response often depends on how clearly the evidence shows the company chose cost savings over safety. That same dynamic has played out in major corporate liability cases involving billions of dollars and years of litigation.
The Nunez case is in its early stages. Carnival will have the opportunity to respond to the complaint, and discovery will determine whether the 25-incident figure and the amputation claims can be documented. The cruise line may argue that passengers assume certain risks, that deck conditions vary with weather, or that Nunez should have worn shoes.
Those defenses may carry weight with a jury. But they will have to overcome the central question the complaint poses: if Carnival knew its decks were burning people, and two passengers lost parts of their feet, why did the company let the next guest walk out barefoot without a word of warning?
The answer to that question will determine whether Carnival writes a check or fights this case to verdict. Either way, the cruise line now faces a public record alleging that it treated a known safety hazard as someone else's problem for half a decade.
A company that knows its deck burns skin and still lets passengers walk on it barefoot is not offering a vacation. It is running a liability clock and hoping it does not run out.
