For anyone working on the water, the first week of Coast Guard board of inquiry hearings into the El Faro disaster carried the twin weights of discovery, and a sad familiarity.
The threads of the story are emerging: propulsion failure on the 790’ ro/ro containership enroute to Puerto Rico, a dodgy hurricane that caught up to the ship, a captain and crew of 33 who in a last communication to shore still had hopes of saving it.
The U.S. maritime community takes a hit like this roughly every decade. There was the Marine Electric sinking off Virginia in February 1983, with the loss of 31 lives. Writer Robert Frump, who ran down the facts of that disaster, is on the case now in Jacksonville, Fla., covering the El Faro hearing with a keen eye to what it could mean for the straining U.S. industry.
In January 1999, it was the loss of four commercial shellfish boats and 11 crew within days of each other in the Northeast that brought the Coast Guard to commission a commercial fishing vessel safety task force. As we are seeing with the El Faro inquiry, there were long days of testimony on exacting technical details related to each accident.
Seemingly commonsense practices on those boats – opening hatches for ventilation, using sea water in clam holds as ballast – were shown to be fatal mistakes. Free surface effect – the momentum of water rolling in the holds – and downflooding through hatches were implicated.
A package of reformed safety rules for the commercial fishing industry came out of, that process – as had happened almost exactly a decade before, when in 1988 Congress passed a commercial fishing safety law. Safety experts said it did not go far enough – as they had said in 1988.
Another decade went by, and in March 2009 six fishermen were lost when their scallop boat Lady Mary sank off New Jersey. That inspired another punch list of 45 steps the Coast Guard recommended to make the industry safer.
The Lady Mary investigation was chaired by then-Cmdr. Kyle McAvoy, who has appeared again at the El Faro hearings. Capt. McAvoy, who now heads the Coast Guard’s vessel inspection program, testified Monday that El Faro was marked as having a higher “potential for risk” given its 40-year age and other factors.
Without the ship’s voyage data recorder, still lost 15,000’ down, the board can only reconstruct what might have happened in El Faro’s last hours. Saturday’s testimony about captain Michael Davidson’s last call to shore, when he said he had a plan to pump out a flooded hold, indicated that while he had lost propulsion, there was still power. When the board completes its best effort to present likely technical factors in the sinking, the fact will remain that El Faro’s voyage depended on beating a hurricane before they crossed paths. That human factor may mean “we won’t learn anything,” as Mario Vittone wrote in his October 2015 column in gCaptain:
“Otherwise good people, with all the information they needed to make a good decision, made a bad one.”
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