Nine of us booked a trip on the Carnival cruise ship Triumph to celebrate our recent college graduation.

I started out in a room of four friends but we were re-located because our room had a leak. So we were separated and my friend and I headed to our newer, more comfortable room...or so we thought.

Around 5:30 Sunday morning, after a fun day in Mexico, we woke up to a PA announcement calling for crew help. As soon as I heard the captain come on, I looked at my friend and said, "Adriana, if the captain is coming on sounding shaken, we better start to worry."

We put on our robes and rushed out, only to smell a bitter, burning odor at the end of the hall. Keep in mind this was on deck 6, so you can imagine how much worse it was on the lower decks that were closest to the engine room.

People were throwing on life jackets and frantically rushing to find crew, friends and loved ones. By now, we had no cell service, only each other.

People on the first and second decks had opened their doors to find their hallways filled with smoke. They told us of crew members running through the halls to address the situation.

Within an hour, my friends found each other in the halls and ran to the top deck, where we could see black smoke billowing from the smokestack.

It was only 45 minutes to an hour after the first PA announcement that we were informed of a fire.

Six to eight hours later, we learned how bad the fire actually was when we heard that the crew could still not open up the engine room to inspect the damage. Not much information was provided and we were left to put the pieces together.

At this point, the majority of the passengers had been forced out of their rooms due to smoke, sewage or lack of light.