Frumped

Congress Sneaks in Passenger Ship Safety Cuts

Congress Sneaks in Passenger Ship Safety Cuts

Tough to have maritime safety highlighted better than this past week, right?

The cruise ship Triumph wallows home to safety and passengers literally kissed the ground.

The survivors of the tall ship Bounty testify about their terror at sea. 

All on or around the thirtieth anniversary of the sinking of the SS Marine Electric off the Virginia Coast in 1983 — a disaster I covered that led to sweeping safety reforms.

So what makes me uneasy over any of this?

After all, if you listen to the Bounty testimony, most everyone (save the poor cap’n) survived.  And they survived because the Bounty carried modern lifesaving gear, what’s known in the trade as out-of-the-water flotation or lifesaving devices.

This is important because hypothermia kills quickly.  And if your body is in cold water, that is generally worse than if it is, say, on a raft, or even a plank. (See last reel, “Titanic”)

So here’s to modern-day safety measures, right?  Our Coast Guard saved lives here not just through copters but through wise rules.

Here’s the bad news.

Less than two months after the Bounty sank, Congress quietly sneaked in a provision that ties the hands of the Coast Guard safety inspectors from enforcing out-of-the-water regulations for passenger boats and small ships like the Bounty.

The February edition of Workboat Magazine leaves it very clear how this happened. The Passenger Vessel Association lobbying group boasts of it.  Says the PVA president:

Out-of-Water Lifesaving Equipment. PVA successfully had Congress extend the deadline for certain passenger vessel operators to replace their existing life floats with out-of-water lifesaving apparatus and have the Coast Guard study the issue to determine operating environments that are appropriate for such devices. This issue must be studied to ensure that requirements are fair and appropriate depending upon the operating environment. 

Studied more?  Really?

Please folks, it’s been studied. To death.  Literally.  ( Ibid, “Last reel of Titanic.”) The evidence-based conclusions are that if you just have life rings on fishing boats, whale watching boats, those wheeled amphibious tourist boats and sight-seeing boats, you are courting disaster.

How did this sneak its way as a rider in the last hours of the worst Congress in known history?  Word is all courtesy of a coastal Congressman from New Jersey, who thinks he is doing his boat-owning constituency a favor.

He’s not doing you one.  Boat owners have had not just decades but centuries to understand the simple word of a great author uttered after the Titanic sank.

Said my favorite maritime writer, Joseph Conrad:

If you can’t carry or handle so many boats, then don’t cram quite so many people on board. It is as simple as that–this problem of right feeling and right conduct, the real nature of which seems beyond the comprehension of ticket-providers. Don’t sell so many tickets, my virtuous dignitary. After all, men and women (unless considered from a purely commercial point of view) are not exactly the cattle of the Western-ocean trade, that used some twenty years ago to be thrown overboard on an emergency and left to swim round and round before they sank.

If you can’t get more boats, then sell less tickets. Don’t drown so many people on the finest, calmest night that was ever known in the North Atlantic–even if you have provided them with a little music to get drowned by. Sell less tickets!

But of course, the answer is that lobbyists buy tickets at the fund raisers.  So even basic lifesaving science is overlooked.

Most maritime safety experts consider the question settled and without need for further study.   As the wreck of the SS Marine Electric showed thirty years ago, you stand a lot better chance of surviving if you are out of cold water.
If you want a another study, just watch Titanic again.  He dies, she lives.   Out-of-water devices work.  Life rings, not so much.
This isn’t studying. It’s stalling.