Boat fire: Coast Guard repeatedly rejected calls for tougher boat safety rules

Professional Mariner Forum
21

Neither did, I stated that is where his line of thinking leads, although he does in fact attribute a perceived failure of the agency as contributory and this I do not accept.

Nope. You don’t get to speed cause of your belief in enforcement or make the argument that you should not be held liable for violating black letter law (and prudent seamanship). It is still breaking law and if cops are necessary to make citizens follow law in person all the time, that’s a level of governance not a lot of people can get behind. But if you believe that, cool, I don’t think most people would look at the speeder who hit the tree but got out the car and pointed at the cops saying, “I blame you!” as particularly credible but being I suppose that’s one way to consider the powers and responsibility of the state. The US has this ongoing personal responsibility kick, though (at least when it’s other people).

But of course, there is enforcement, so the idea of whether or not the CG was doing enforcing is a red herring. There are violations on the books, the CG does issue violations, revoked licenses including for watchstanding lapses, so there is enforcement and there will be enforcement for the lapse here. It is irrelevant whether or not the master believed or believes there would or wouldn’t be enforcement penalties for lapse in watchkeeping. Since there is—it then becomes a matter of subjective perceptions of any enforcement, and trying to quantify that is trying to quantify the master’s subjective (and thus irrelevant) consideration of same. Hence my original comment that the eventual line of KC argument supposed a personal conviction on the part of possible perpetrators being necessary for being law-abiding was, is, absurd.

Or to put it another way—how many revoked licenses would be convincing the ‘absolve’ the CG of KC’s perceived liability? How many unscheduled draconian boarding team visits? Where’s that line that it can all just be the failure of a master, one person who had all the power to comply, the knowledge of the requirement by his holding a credential and being tested on required watchkeeping and CoIs, but didn’t?

1 Like
22

This thread seems to have gone off the rails a bit but…

First I was looking at this from a technical point of view, not the least interest in blaming anyone. The term 'failure" does in some cases have moral implications but it’s very common usage.

Second to say that particular event is the cause and this person is blame, that’s not the point. It’s a probability thing. The point is learn from these incidents what can be done to reduce the risk in the future.

The Duck boat and the Dive boat incident are very similar in some ways. In each case the CG had written into the COI a single procedural type requirement. The Duck boat it was a weather restriction, in the case of Dive boat it was for a roving watch.

Audits are done all the time in the maritime business. They don’t have to be punitive. If the vessel can not demonstrate to the satisfaction of the auditor then another audit can be scheduled at a later date to give the vessel time to get up to speed.

Also audit do not have to be burdensome. In any case to be avoided is what each of these boats did go through, a “brutal audit”

Our ability to deal with chaos depends on structures that have been developed before the chaos arrives. When the chaos arrives, it serves as "an abrupt and brutal audit: at a moment’s notice, everything that was left unprepared becomes a complex problem and every weakness comes rushing to the forefront. The breech in the defenses opened by crisis creates a sort of vacuum" (Pat Lagadec).

3 Likes
23

Who said ‘failure’ had any moral implication in this case? you alleged a failure, I inferred, as I believe you meant —a procedural ‘failure’. Something should have happened in your estimation and the failure contributed to two specific incidents in you explicit statement. I contest that. It implied a mandatory action on the part of the CG where none existed.

Yes and this is important to note. The roving patrol on COI was redundant. Regulation specifically calls for it, but it’s presence doesn’t change anything on the part of the CG, if anything it is sign of explicit attention being drawn to an operational matter. The weather stuff on duck boats is completely different, since it is not inherently a regulation spelled out elsewhere, it was a stipulation, as is the Cg’s responsibility—to determine and spell out conditions of service. If you can’t see the difference between these two conditions, ok, because it doesn’t really matter. However once again - the issue is what the master was in a position to absolutely know, understand and give effect to, without further contribution by the agency.

Your discussion of audits as a practice is not relevant. Your charge of a failure, however you would like to parse the term now, and a link from agency to Master’s actions onboard the dive boat in doing so is inappropriate in this case and unsupported as a contributory factor.

24

I used to do this type of boat inspection as an E-4 in the CG. I attended a class, was given a check list and boarded boats in Alaska to do a safety check.

I don’t know how these boats were inspected but I assume it’s very similar. If it’s not on the list it’s not going happen.

25

There is obviously no direct link. I never claimed it was a contributory factor.

Here is my post:

26

Of course the CG is not responsible to make sure that, for example the watchman makes his rounds. That’s the captain’s responsibly.

But it is the owners responsibly that the captains are familiar with the requirements and the CG’s that the owners are aware, it’s not something that should be left to chance.

This is what I’m talking about:

This is from the article

Coast Guard wrote that the violations ranged from “material condition to crew familiarity” that need to be corrected before the boats can sail again

Presumably the inspectors determined familiarity by asking the crew questions or something similar. In any case more than a count of the fire extinguishers. In other words, an audit.

27

Yes and there are rational reasons why familiarity or other issues that would fall into inadequate training by the company or master in certain situations would be relevant depending on complexity, which can range.

But not for watchkeeping like in the dive boat case. Too fundamental too general too specifically called out as well —though I’d feel the same even if it wasn’t on the COI.

Your approach here posits some barrier existed between the Master and performing his duty in setting the watch appropriately. Also that the barrier was external, and a CG creation hence your comments on the CG failure in this case. I would think a Master of your background would look at that situation and say, ‘nope he had all he needed for that.’ There was no external barrier preventing him performing the required action he had a duty to perform. This wasn’t about a system the owner failed to ensure was operational, a failure to orient crew to safety procedures or a standard unavailable because the CG didn’t author one. Quite the contrary. There was no external cause preventing fulfillment of the duty.

28

But this guy wasn’t an unlimited Master, all oceans. He was (presumably) a recreational diver who got his license so he could be paid to dive, in a situation where the navigation crew also had a brutal schedule of hotel duties with strong financial incentives to prioritize them over navigational ones. If @Lee_Shore (?) is right that’s the typical condition pertaining on these dive boats. Seems to me there’s a lot of moral hazard on the part of the owners, just as there is in big-ship companies. CG (or whoever) are in a position to balance out the competing forces in the situation to even things up a bit.

1 Like
29

So you’re suggesting this guy was either too stupid to read the COI or understand the regulations or that his required service time and experience to get the license was otherwise insufficient to inform him? A plausible presumption of ignorance unless he has explicitly been hand held thru a process of CG auditing explicitly pointing it out (which actually may have occurred—we won’t know until the history of inspections and investigations of the vessel and the mariner are presented)? Disagree.

30

That’s very likely.

1 Like
31

I presume the Master and mate of this and most other small passenger vessels. Held only the minimum required certificates.
Had experience limited to similarly operating vessels. Resulting in a minimum understanding of regulations and responsibilities.

If the standard, on similar vessels. particularly the company vessels upon which they had gained their experience was the same as on the night of the fire.
There are very unlikely to have been aware it was a breach of the regulations.
How many other small commercial charter boats Masters would have routinely operated the same way prior to this incident?

1 Like
32

There are two separate issues here; who is responsible for this specific incident. To my mind that’s a question that will get sorted out later when more details come out, No doubt a lot of this will be in the context of the legal system.

Another issue is the effectiveness of the current regulations, that’s why I brought up the DUCK boats .

Earl put it exactly the way I think about it here:

If you’re responsible for managing risk at sea or elsewhere you do not want your crew to fail. After an incident it’s a whole other story.

After the outcome is clear, any attribution of error is a social and psychological judgment process, not a narrow, purely technical or objective analysis.
•Richard Cook and David Woods

1 Like
33

Then you were premature in making an explicit statement that the CG failed in the dive boat incident?

34

This is a mariner’s forum, I was expressing my opinion based on my experience.

The CG is responsible for boat safety. It seems unlikely in these two cases there is absolutely no practical steps the CG can take to reduce the risk of future incidents.

My view is that audits can be very effective. YMMV etc etc.

35

KC, that’s surprising and I’m a little disappointed. You could have just said, yeah we should wait for all the facts before making conclusions. Internet debates…

Ok, you explicitly described your position as opinion based, so that’s cool, and you have a right to do so. You also describe the investigation as on going and not all the facts are in. So, in my opinion, your argument is poorly supported and poorly reasoned. It also has the flaw that it suggests there is no counting on personal or professional responsibility as a barrier to incidents and I am surprised to see a professional make such a statement.

You made an indefensible (in my opinion) statement about the CG being a contributing factor in a personal action/professional responsibility failure without supporting facts. There’s some statement about facts and feelings out there. It applies here. conflating the duck boat stuff with dive boat is weak. Though they are on a common track they are significantly different.

This is about railroad crossings.

Not every railroad crossing has always had a gate. Many were (are?) still just lights, or in some cases nothing. Accidents happen. They have their various causes. Agencies or bodies charged with responsibility insist or provide the gates or not. Sadly people generally have to have died in sufficient quantities to force action sometimes.

But lack of a gate doesn’t mean the kid who blasts through one willfully or (gross negligently) isn’t responsible. It also doesn’t mean the authorities are.

If an authority responsible for placing gates does so, they are just recognize that for better or for worse, and despite laws or regulations demanding people stop, human nature will out and they must yield to the facts and implement measure to decrease human ability to dispense with deciding to stop or go. Where they set that line will vary, or perhaps they take specific actions for specific situations, like making school bus drivers stop by law, enhancing personal responsibility with professional responsibility placing that specific conduct into a realm with enhanced duties and sanctions for failure.

So it may be with the ultimate end of this dive boat investigation, but it won’t mean that the agency failed by avoiding putting up the gates in any individual case nor draw any amount of liability for any incident where professional responsibility was evident, clear and capable of being implemented like the dive boat case.

The metaphor can only be stretched so far for this case. Gates may not be built. Depends on the authority and the final conclusion of the case. A robust enforcement action against the dive boat master will have an effect—especially if criminal negligence is the case. There’s a range of practical possible options and none of them need involve a deeper intervention into the actions onboard vessels. Audits can be useful but they don’t provide absolute barriers to bad action. Records get pencil whipped. If this is your suggested ‘fix’ to absolve the CG failure you opine, there will still be a space for failure to lead to disaster once the concept of personal or professional responsibility is dispensed with as you seem to suggest it should be. there will still be the ability to drive through that ‘crossing‘ since it would only be one further disregard for professional responsibility to do so at the moment where doing so could affect the outcome regardless of a clean audit score and impeccable records.

36

To early to assign responsibility. Not too early for technical analysis.

It’s a probability thing, as I said the last time you made this argument. Factor implies a direct link. Of course that can’t be done. Again responsibility vs technical.

The opposite of failure is successful. So yes if the current rate of incidents on these boat is acceptable then it could be argued that the CG has not failed here. I am in fact assuming that the rate is too high.

37

You’re conflating policy with performance in your technical analysis. You did link specific incidents to CG, not overall performance indicators which include industry trends and multiple other factors to be conclusive.

The technical analysis available at this point allows conclusions about the specific master actions, and one can certainly try to cast a further analysis to the external actors in the safety net—-the master has primary responsibility, the company is the next level, the law the next. But once you can short out that causality link by abject failure of the first responsibility holder, you don’t get to attribute (fairly) beyond it, and doing so is a massive stretch without much more data. And a case where such a clear personal professional responsibility failure is evident at this stage would not be supportive of any conclusions about other actors performance in the safety net.

38

It’s a well established fact in modern accident theory that employees do not necessarily follow formal written rules. For rules that reduce the risk of low probability high consequence events some sort of audit is required.

Nancy Levenson here for example: 555 pages but a search for "rules’ or similar gives good results.

39

A concept that only belongs in macro level assessment, not specific incident liability like you espouse. And when egregious failures occur they are ultimately useless as a policy approach since it is basically the gun control argument - no matter what guns will kill so no guns. Whoa! Whaat about personal responsibility?!? Ultimately it will always fail, so my client who shot up the school is not guilty, and society is, the defense rests.

Policy level stuff is numbers. And imperfect in achieving goals. But you keep working at it, and the tools available are not infinitely available or selectable (political calculus comes in).

You argue people will fail to follow rules. Yup. The barriers to such failures in the professional conduct of the dive boat Captain placed by the agency are multiple and well understood and defined, from making it necessary to be a licensed Mariner, to issuing and requiring a series of performance requirements both in law, reg and COI. But as you correctly note, barriers fail. They also succeed, do you really feel this is an adequate case to remove the requirement for such skippers to be licensed? That’s your argument now. It’s an imperfect barrier so no point to it? Maybe you don’t want to remove it, you just want further enhancement (audits and such), but you admit rules won’t always be followed and therefore in two years after new audits a future casualty will occur, and then the intervening ‘fix’ will mean little because the same argument will recur ad infinity.

you are so circumspect in giving the benefit of doubts to the flaws of human performance for the Master, how much more inappropriate is castigating the agency? It’s made of people too, did the surveyors do their job, the license issuer? But you went ahead and made a conclusion about the agency. What the agency needs to do to change. These are incongruous positions.

40

Well argued.