Adrift off Seychelles, Costa Allegra waits for supplies, tugboats

— -- A Costa Cruises ship with more than 1,000 people on board is adrift in the Indian Ocean after a fire.

The 28,597-ton Costa Allegra was sailing from Madagascar to the Seychelles early today when the fire broke out in an electric generator room, the line says.

Fire fighters and fire suppression systems on the ship extinguished the blaze, and no one was injured in the incident, but the ship has been without propulsion since the fire took place at around 4:39 am ET.

"The fire did not spread to any other area of the ship," the line says in a statement. "Inspections of the engine room are ongoing to determine when the equipment can be restarted."

Costa says that, as a precaution, the ship's general emergency alarm was sounded and all passengers and crew not engaged in the management of the emergency were sent to muster stations.

The fire knocked out power to the ship's engines as well as to its lights and air conditioning.

Italian Coast Guard officials say emergency generators were keeping the ship's control room illuminated and communications equipment such as radios running. Officials said the cruise liner was holding steady, despite 5-foot waves in the area, and passengers were being kept in the ship's big communal rooms, not in their cabins.

Costa says the Costa Allegra is more than 200 miles southwest of the Seychelles and approximately 20 miles from Alphonse Island. Tug boats from the island nation of Seychelles were steaming toward the drifting Costa Allegra, but they were not expected to arrive until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest.

Italian coast guard officials say a large French fishing boat could be the first vessel to reach the stricken cruise liner.

The line says it alerted relevant authorities including the Maritime Rescue Control Center in Rome, Italy.

The Costa Allegra is a sister ship to the Costa Concordia, which partly sank in January after striking rocks near the coast of Italy. Built in 1992, it has the capacity for 1,000 passengers, not including crew, although the line says just 636 passengers are on board the vessel this week. In addition, there are 413 crew members on the ship, the line says.

Based in Genoa, Italy, Costa caters mostly to Europeans but draws some North Americans to its vessels, and the line says there are eight Americans and 13 Canadians currently on the Costa Allegra. The majority of passengers on board are French, Italian, Austrian and Swiss.

Today's fire-caused loss of propulsion on the Costa Allegra comes 15 months after a cruise ship operated by sister line Carnival was left adrift for days following an engine room fire. The 3,006-passenger Carnival Splendor was off the coast of Mexico at the time of the incident and eventually had to be towed back to California.

Costa Cruises and Carnival Cruise Lines are both owned by Miami-based Carnival Corp.

The Associated Press says officials in the Seychelles are looking into evacuating passengers on the Costa Allegra using a small airstrip on Alphonse Island.

The general region where the cruise ship is adrift — off the coast of Tanzania — has seen a rash of attacks by Somali pirates, though a cruise ship never has been hijacked, the news service notes.