What the heck happened here? Did the gangway go from fine, to failure, to 7 dead in seconds? gCaptain does a good job reporting it but CBS gives the grisly details that leads to all the unanswered questions. Horrible situation.
The fools let 40 people onto the gangway at once.
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Was it a giant gangway like cruise ships have or one of those narrow gangways like on medium sized OSV’s? Fuck’ed up this happened because most organizations have gangway science figured out by now imo.
That opinion is shared by Stacey and Jacobsen, PLLC who know how to litigate gangway failures, just ask the Port of Bellingham.
if you use the average weight per passenger that the USCG uses for passenger vessel capacity its 180 lbs per person times 40 is 7200 lbs or over 3 tons.
Sapelo Island passengers if they are adults will average way over 180 pounds from what I saw when I was there.The state of Georgia managed that dock and they should know how big their people are, you’d think.
Some of the answers are buried in the noise - there were multiple fatalities because there was a significant current running and people were drawn/pinned underwater by the current.
As to why it failed, apparently 40 people had crowded onto the aluminum gangway (you can see the end of it in the second video segment) and it failed because it was overloaded. Apparently, this dock was a substitute because the normal dock for the ferry was being rebuilt to be ADA-compliant. At the regular dock, people were prevented from crowding onto the gangway, but at this substitute dock, there was no control.
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I do a lot of construction and repair work in a harbor with a lot of head boats. It is extremely common to be called out on gangway failures — luckily not so common that they fail catastrophically like here, but some of the ramp/pin assemblies I’ve seen in active service are a hairs breadth from a story like this one.
It is shocking to see the condition of ramps that these companies are putting thousands of passengers over per day. I have said many times to my partners that I find it shocking there haven’t been more gangway incidents. One operator in particular fabricates some of their ramps in-house, using design schemes that are simply inappropriate from an engineering perspective, and then piles 20+ people on at a time. It is quite frightening, and they have been told many times how dangerous it is, however they will not stop ostensibly until they have a major incident.
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i worked with ferry boat operators in san Francisco for 40 years as a marine surveyor.
passengers were required to be on the pier and before 911 they had a chain going across the gangway. changed to a locked gate after.
the deck hand with a hand counter would open the chain and count heads one at a time as they walked down the gangway to get the proper count for passenger capacity.
apparently the SOP is no followed in Georgia