Who to blame when disaster is inevitable?
How the Queen lost its way
Mark Hume, Globe and Mail, 25-Mar-2006
Who to blame for the state of our ferries? There are many candidates
Vaughn Palmer, Vancouver Sun, 25-Mar-2006
COMMENT:The sinking of the Queen of the North vividly underscores the near-inevitability that if something can go wrong, it eventually will. When we're talking about drilling and tankers along British Columbia's coast, it's the likelihood of catastrophe that we're toying with, and not just a game of odds.
The best trained and most disciplined workers, the best maintained modern equipment and vessels, the tightest and most rigorous regulation and monitoring - all these factors can reduce the odds of a disaster, but cannot reduce those odds to zero, or anything close to zero.
This being the real world, with companies more interested in reporting profits to shareholders than safety, with governments sluffing their regulatory duties at every turn, and humans being, after all, merely human, the odds are a long way from zero.
As British Columbians contemplate the 17th anniversary of the Exxon Valdes, as we consider the number of things BP deliberately did not do to ensure the reliability of its Prudhoe Bay pipeline, and as we give thanks to the crew of the Queen of the North and the folks at Hartley Bay who ensured that 99 of the 101 people aboard ship are still with us, we also face the spectre of our coast opening up to to oil and gas exploration and increased tanker traffic.
Grandstanding and finger-pointing is not helpful in the debate, especially when those pointing are as culpable as those pointed at (Vaughn Palmer, below).
We must remain especially mistrustful of those who tell us that "nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong ...." with their oil tankers or drilling rigs.
MARK HUME
Globe and Mail
25-Mar-2006
Vancouver — The last voyage of the Queen of the North has haunted Lew Glentworth for the past two nights.
Lying awake, staring into the darkness, the retired British Columbia ferry captain with 30 years experience on the northern run has played over in his mind the harrowing stories told to him by the crew members he worked with until recently.
And he has come to a shocking conclusion.
The ferry that went down off British Columbia's rugged north central coast shortly after midnight on Wednesday didn't blunder into a sunken reef — it ran to its death at full throttle, straying 1.7 kilometres off course before striking Gil Island and tearing its guts out along a long, rocky shoreline that plunged straight into the sea.
Only a miracle, he said, kept the badly damaged vessel afloat long enough for 99 of the 101 passengers and crew time to abandon ship. Two people are missing, and an underwater search of the wreckage is being attempted.
The once proud flagship of the B.C. Ferries fleet lies in more than 365 metres of water, its hull broken into four pieces.
Nobody knows for sure yet what went wrong, and it is likely to be several months before the Transportation Safety Board has finished its formal inquiry.
But Mr. Glentworth said it is easy enough to speculate based on his conversations with former colleagues and his own vast experience on the route. For 30 years, he sailed the Inside Passage in command of the Queen of the North and its sister ship, the Queen of Prince Rupert.
“What I am told by people who were on the scene was that that ship went along the shore, almost parallel to the shore, and systematically ripped open the bottom going at full speed,” Mr. Glentworth said in an interview from his home on Vancouver Island yesterday.
“One of the fellows I know told me he was in bed, down below, and he felt and heard the first impact. He leaped out of bed, pulled his trousers on, and by the time he had his trousers on, the water was up to his knees. That's how fast it was happening. That just boggles my mind.
“I'm also told . . . after the ship glanced along the beach, it then came to rest on a rock that protrudes just from the beach. So there's no water between this rock and the beach. It hung up on that rock The rock is called Gil Rock. Had the ship not hung up on that rock then she would have continued into deep water and simply sunk and there would have been major loss of life. The fact that she hung up on the rock allowed them the time to get those people off.”
When Mr. Glentworth uses the word “beach” he doesn't mean a gently sloping shoreline of sand. On the North Coast, the shoreline is an almost uninterrupted wall of rugged black cliffs and rocky promontories. That's where the ferry hit.
The Inside Passage is made up of deep fjords where mountains plunge into the sea and keep going straight down into the depths. The result is deep water right up to the shore. It is a safe place to run a ship, said Mr. Glentworth, as long as you keep off the rocks.
Over the past two days, he has had conversations with the crew members he served with on the northern run. Most of them are still in shock, he said, but from the “bits and pieces” they told him, he thinks only one explanation for the accident makes sense.
The Queen of the North, a massive 125-metre-long vessel loaded with state-of-the-art navigation equipment, somehow lost its way on the dark waters of Wright Sound and steered right into Gil Island.
The ferry would have been pushing a big bow wave as it came down Grenville Channel, and shortly after midnight the three officers who would normally be on the bridge — a senior deck officer, a junior deck officer and a helmsman — would have been watching for a flashing light on their port side.
The light at Sainty Point, beneath the looming black shape of Mount Fry, marks the entrance to Wright Sound. It's a transit mark, where the ferry is supposed to alter course, jogging to the north to line up with the distant Point Cumming light that signals the entrance to McKay Reach.
Any ship running out of Grenville Channel that fails to make that course adjustment will be headed straight for the northern shore of Gil Island, where Juan Point bulges out into Wright Sound.
That's exactly where the Queen of the North hit, before grinding along the shoreline and coming to rest — briefly and miraculously — on Gil Rock.
Mr. Glentworth said it would have been pitch black out at midnight, but that would have posed no problems for the crew on the bridge, who had an array of modern navigational equipment.
“They would have had a GPS, Global Positioning System, that GPS would have fed at least one radar and an electronic charting system. They would have had at least two radars. They would have had a gyro compass, which allows you to see a true course rather than a magnetic course, and they would have had an automatic pilot. Now whether that automatic pilot would have been used is subject to conjecture because different officers had different levels of faith in that. There were no written parameters as to when you would use that or not. It was to the judgment of the officer on the watch.”
Question: “What about visual? What could you see out the window at 12 o'clock at night?”
Answer: “Oh, you could see nothing, except the navigational aides that would be lit. In that position they would have seen two. They would have seen Sainty Point, which is at the bottom end of Grenville Channel, which is what they had just exited, and they would see their next alteration point, which was Point Cumming at the entrance to McKay Reach.”
Q: “And so Gil Island is off to your right?”
A: “It's off to your right, the starboard side, and there are no lights on it. You would not have seen that until you saw the [ferry] lights reflected in the trees.”
Q: “I take it one quick glance at your radar screen would have lit that island up?”
A: “Oh yeah, that is what makes the whole thing so puzzling, it really does, I mean people have suggested perhaps there was an equipment failure. Well, yeah, there may have been an equipment failure, but everything wouldn't have quit at once. You wouldn't have had two radars, the GPS, and an electronic charting system all go down at the same time. . . If they didn't, for whatever reason, recognize they were at Sainty Point, whether they were distracted or preoccupied, I don't know, but if they didn't make that acknowledgement that they were at that point, then they would have simply continued on their course, and if you extend that course out of Grenville Channel, you will ultimately come into contact with Gil Island, at precisely the spot that they did. So my, and it's strictly conjecture, my theory is that they didn't make the alteration. . . And so they weren't strictly speaking off course. They were on course for an island. And they hit it.”
Mr. Glentworth said it will be easy for Transportation Safety Board inspectors to check. They will need to look at the ship's logs, which the captain should have taken into the life boat with him, and they can check the electronic tracking records kept by the Coast Guard.
Ships travelling B.C.'s coastline are equipped with a broadcast transponder system, the Automatic Identification System that tracks their movement the way aircraft are followed by air traffic control.
The Queen of the North's AIS records, a Coast Guard spokesman said, have been turned over to TSB inspectors. Mr. Glentworth said other data may yet be recovered from the wreck.
“I think they are also going to try to get the hard drive out of the electronic charts. I don't know how successful they are going to be with that. It'll be on the bridge and the bridge should be accessible. I don't know how daring these fellows are . . . and if they can get the computer, I don't know if the information on the hard drive will be useful after being submerged at that depth. But I'm sure they'll find out.”
Who to blame for the state of our ferries? There are many candidates
Vaughn Palmer
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, March 25, 2006
The week ended with tough questions about how the Queen of the North plowed into an island and whether there was some failure in the evacuation so two passengers were left on board when it sank.
Reliable explanations await a platoon of investigators from Transport Canada.
But in fairness to all concerned, this was not a drill. Like many observers, I thought about the circumstances -- the early morning hour, the listing and rainswept deck, the confusion -- except at the height of the tourist season.
There'd be a dozen times as many disoriented and frightened passengers as needed to be helped into the lifeboats by BC Ferries staff early Wednesday morning.
There's the nightmare scenario, not to diminish what individuals and their families lost in this tragedy.
Still, I've lost track of how many times I heard people saying it didn't matter if the Queen of the North needed replacing. A ship built to the latest safety standards would probably have ended up on the bottom after that collision as well.
Well, safety standards are designed to reduce risk, not eliminate it. Helmets, airbags and quitting smoking are worthwhile, even if they won't save your life in all circumstances.
The Queen of the North, built almost 40 years ago, had a single compartment hull, making it more vulnerable to flooding if breached.
The modern-day standard is the multiple compartment hull, designed to keep the vessel afloat for a longer period of time.
Might be a useful feature, especially given the aforementioned nightmare scenario.
The New Democratic Party tried to raise the point in the legislature this week.
They cited long-standing concerns about the single-compartment structure of the Queen of the North and its companion vessel on the northern ferry runs, the Queen of Prince Rupert.
But not too long-standing ...
The New Democrats tried to make it sound as if the concern emerged in 2001, as if the B.C. Liberals, along with cutting taxes, somehow managed to reduce the number of compartments in the hull of the northern ferries.
The Opposition had to tack around the NDP's own woeful neglect of the northern ferry runs, brought on by its nitwit dedication to ... well, you know what.
For every government apologist saying it didn't matter that the Queen of the North needed replacing, there was an NDP apologist saying don't bring up the fast ferries.
It was 10 years ago this April Fool's Day -- mark your calendars -- that then-Premier Glen Clark fired up the first cutting torch on the fast ferry project, dealing a multi-year setback to renewal of the ferry fleet.
But as noted in this space earlier in the week, there is plenty of blame to go around for neglecting the fleet.
The B.C. Liberals came into office knowing the two northern Queens needed replacing and did not move with all deliberate speed.
They finally got around to approving an expansion plan this week. A coincidence, I believe. I reported in February how the plan was scheduled to go to the cabinet this month.
Nevertheless it will be a long time before any newly constructed replacements are plying northern waters.
As a point of comparison, BC Ferries chose the builder for three new vessels for the southern runs in the summer of 2004.
Construction won't begin until this fall. The first of the three is not likely to be in service before the end of 2007.
Ship brokers are already hunting for a stop-gap measure on the northern runs, such as a second-hand vessel.
Until then, northerners will be relying on the Queen of Prince Rupert, currently undergoing scheduled maintenance and due back in service in about a week.
Another 40-year-old ship and more than a little creeky.
Only last month there was a fire on board. A minor one, I am assured -- still, as a precaution, the passengers were mustered. "The captain was quite pleased with the way the crew reacted quickly," the Prince Rupert Daily News reported. "All the drills and safety procedures paid off."
They take their safety drills seriously on the ferries, and with good reason.
It was also a week when Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon warned critics about "fearmongering" over safety on the ferries.
The vessels in the fleet are all approved and certified by Transport Canada. They would not be in service otherwise.
But recognize as well that the vessels on the northern runs were on borrowed time and had been so for many years, as a result of policy decisions by successive governments.
Mind, that is not an easy thing for a head of government to recognize.
"No," Premier Gordon Campbell insisted this week, "we were not playing dice with the service."
Yes we were. Yes we are.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
Posted by Arthur Caldicott on 25 Mar 2006