I’ve sent an email to Mikey to update the story. The Seattle Times is now reporting that the fourth crew-member didn’t survive and it was just repeated on the 11:00 news. The company involved Ballard Marine Construction is probably better known to most folks by their former name Ballard Diving & Salvage.
<begin rant>
I watched most of the rescue and recovery via a live stream from KIRO TV’s helicopter with my vhf for sound track. It’s perfectly reasonable to switch to body recovery mode and avoid needless risks to responding personal but if one is working with a presumed patient things should be going all out. For the presumed urgency involved I was a bit surprised by how slow and deliberate things were run. The fire boat Chief Seattle must have been on scene with divers ready to splash for ten minutes before they got wet. Once they had the victim/patient on the GC 25’ boat they dicked around for about ten more minutes trying to decide weather to hoist him with the CG helo which was already on scene. If they thought they had a viable patient (IMHO our water isn’t that cold) I don’t understand why the coxswain didn’t beach the small boat in the lee of Alki. Pt where they could have either loaded him in an ambulance with paramedic level ALS care which was already on scene for the short ride to Harborview Hospital (probably 5 minutes by ambulance) or used the 100’ x 200’ lawn at the light house for a helicopter LZ. I suppose that this is an example of a unified command causing confusion rather than letting the personal on scene of a relitivly simple incident run things.
</end rant>
I’m sure that this will get the whole workplace fatality investigation which hopefully will become public in about six months. The Washington State Dept. of Labor and Industries usually does publish their findings publicly when they run the investigation.