Feinstein introduces legislation to improve passenger vessel safety

[Eric Sedletzky]

I think it is Feinstein’s another purely political venture.

The minute ANY politician opens their mouth about anything it automatically becomes a purely political venture by default simply because they are professional politicians. Almost like a cop is a cop whether on duty or off.

 

[Wookie]

Thinking back in time....

During annual safety inspection, the best Coast Guard inspectors ask questions like "How do you meet this requirement?" and "Show me where." whereas the bad Coast Guard inspectors say "Why don't you have thusandsuch to meet this requirement.

For instance, we often navigated at night. When navigating, you must post a lookout 100% of the time. If the navigation watch has to take a leak, s/he wakes a competent individual to relieve the watch or piddles over the side. But what they can't do is a roving fire watch. So the Coast Guard would ask "How do you maintain a roving fire watch?"

The answer is, we had wired and IP security cameras all over the vessel, including IR cameras. We could see hot spots in berthing, but not people. That didn't work in the enginerooms, so we had regular cameras in the enginerooms and other machinery spaces, as well as the sundeck. The navigational watch could and did flip the chart plotter over to camera, usually every 15 minutes or so.

When at anchor or moored, the navigation watch could rove. Had the coast guard required a separate roving watch, we would have complied. However, I'd have complained vociferously.

 

[Scraps]

Disclaimer: I am speaking as an ignorant consumer here, fearing for his life ... or maybe more accurately, married to one such...:
Is safety inspection data of boats publicly accessible?
In an organized summarized way?
Is there a (meaningful) rating system of sorts that potential customers could use to guide themselves on the amount of risk they might take seething footboard a vessel?
IDK, like (complete phantasy construct and just in regards to fire... Just as a (stupid) example )of course a certain seaworthiness and inherent robustness are also desired):
A - meets all standards, is constructed mostly out of materials known to be fire resistant and has multiple appropriate fire doors and proper use policy to keep any fire effectively restraint to one area of the boat for a duration that allows for proper and safe evacuation of passengers if so indicated without necessitating water entry.
B - same as A, but maybe more flammable materials, but still with effective fire doors etc.
C - You are going to get out you may get wet and cold
D - Functional safe boat with a chance of survival, but think hard before choosing to sleep below.
E - It‘s not bad enough yet to use it as an artificial reef, but think harder before setting foot on it!

Anyway, I have no particular trust that more or redundant regulation will fix anything that maybe is broke. I do think that enforcement tends to help. I do know that meaningful ratings, while defeatable or possibly outdated if the system setup to arrive at them is more flawed than good, allow customers to make a more informed choice.

Akin to some may have a reason to buy a vehicle with bettetet crash test rating & and some may have a reason to not take that particular rating much into account. Some may choose not to fly an airline with a dismal safety record, some will choose to go where it goes... but all had the option to know what they chose. And a hardware (boat) rating like that of course does not speak to crew and policies, ... just like car crash test ratings don‘t say a thing about drivers...

One important difference between passenger vessels and cars is that cars maintain their overall crash test rating over the vehicle's life. The safety of a ship requires continuous updating, training, maintenance, record keeping, drills, replacement of equipment with expiration dates and test dates, cleaning, prevention of fire load, officer licenses, manning requirements, and so forth. A vessel that is completely in compliance one day, won't be the next day unless the master continues to maintain all the systems, procedures, etc. up to snuff.

 

[Scraps]

Most people on this thread, with obvious exceptions like Wookie, don't realize how mature the international and USCG regulatory regimes for passenger vessels are or how much hard work from industry, the Coast Guard, and its counterparts working through the IMO went into creating the systems we have now. It's the result of more than a half century of serious analysis and management. It's a continuous work, and the refinement of the regs and their implementation and enforcement never stops at either the national or international level. And the overall safety record of the industry is remarkable when one considers the inherent dangers of putting a lot of people to sea.

The system can always be improved, but the improvements need to be considered deliberately, in context of everything that has been learned and tried over the past fifty-plus years.

I can't imagine anyone making an informed argument for "no regulation" or even "no more regulation." I'm just arguing for no hastily written new regulations that bypass a process that works pretty well, albeit more slowly than we'd like sometimes.

 

[Schwob]

Yes
Yes
No


Auto manufacturers pay for those crash tests, and operate on a different plane of existence than liveaboard dive boats.

At some point, you and your nervous dive buddy have to ask the dive operator questions they may or may not want to answer, and be willing to spend your diving dollars going elsewhere.

@Wookie , where does one find and how does one access that safety inspection data?

As far as "yes" for it being publicly available, are you saying "yes" for in the US - or?

About asking the right questions:
Been there done that. Even got decent answers (i.e.smoke detectors are being tested by smoking underneath and not just by pushing the test button and yes I get to test the emergency exit...), but:

About that nervous dive buddy. I guess your label corresponds to the truth. I don't like the label so. While I know you won't, some may say safety as a macho thing. As in "What you worried, you nervous ?" I believe we agree that it can't be that way.
Anyway, despite decent answers, and despite wanting to book an available above deck cabin, she is spooked and she isn't going to sleep on a boat amy time soon. Which means our January trip is off. Which sucks. Which contributes exactly nothing here... except maybe "the industry" takes note. She can't be the only nervous one...

Anyway, I'll either have to plan the next trip w/o her or preferably as a shore based trip. Would hate to see her stop alltogether.

 

[Wookie]

@Wookie , where does one find and how does one access that safety inspection data?

As far as "yes" for it being publicly available, are you saying "yes" for in the US - or?

About asking the right questions:
Been there done that. Even got decent answers (i.e.smoke detectors are being tested by smoking underneath and not just by pushing the test button and yes I get to test the emergency exit...), but:

About that nervous dive buddy. I guess your label corresponds to the truth. I don't like the label so. While I know you won't, some may say safety as a macho thing. As in "What you worried, you nervous ?" I believe we agree that it can't be that way.
Anyway, despite decent answers, and despite wanting to book an available above deck cabin, she is spooked and she isn't going to sleep on a boat amy time soon. Which means our January trip is off. Which sucks. Which contributes exactly nothing here... except maybe "the industry" takes note. She can't be the only nervous one...

Anyway, I'll either have to plan the next trip w/o her or preferably as a shore based trip. Would hate to see her stop alltogether.

I never meant the word "nervous" to be anything other than exactly the way I said it. Certainly not as a bad thing. Please forgive me if that's the way it sounded. Nervous is a good thing, it helps to keep us safe.

The coast guard has a website that is not particularly easy to use called the PSIX, short for Port State Information Exchange. USCG PSIX Search Page

You may look up boats there. For instance, there was only 1 Spree. So if you use the search term Spree with the official number 572368 you'll get my boat (as an archive file, since she no longer exists under that name) If you search for a summary of USCG contacts, you will get the results of every contact the USCG had with the vessel. Every inspection, every casualty, every fire, every hurt person or fatality.

Unless a foreign flag vessel comes in contact with the Coast Guard, they would not be in that file. There is no reason a foreign flag liveaboard would ever visit the United States, so no, they are not in the PSIX.

 

[jgttrey]

The part I always worry about when I see these reflexive "we'll fix that!" initiatives is that hasty changes often introduce other risks.

You can't just fight the last war and many times regulations are balancing a variety of risks - flooding, ease of escape, fire isolation, etc. Too much emphasis on mitigating one risk creates others.

I have no expertise in this area at all, so just a general observation.

 

[Bigbella]

NTSB investigator Jennifer Homendy said in September that she was “taken aback” by the small size of the emergency escape hatches, adding that she thought it would be difficult for passengers to exit during an emergency in the dark.

The Times reported last month that the Conception was one of about 325 small passenger vessels built before 1996 and given special exemptions from safety standards that the Coast Guard imposed on new vessels, some of which required larger escape hatches and illuminated exit signs.

Frankly, having seen recent news footage and having been a passenger on the Conception many times over the years, I was not overly surprised that NTSB's Homendy had difficulty negotiating the hatch of a sister ship (read clumsy, desk-bound bureaucrat); that being said, the size of those on Conception were academic; they may as well been the diameter of Hula Hoops, since both, if I recall correctly, opened upon the large galley area -- the site, if not the primary source of the fire . . .

 

[Scraps]

The size of scuttles on newly constructed liveaboards may warrant attention, regardless of its relevance to M/V Conception, given the lack of mobility and ample girths of so many passengers nowadays.

I was on a sail liveaboard last month, a catamaran with six staterooms on the second deck, each with a scuttle to the weather deck portion of the main deck. I regularly used the scuttle during the week because it allowed me not to track water through the salon. Of the other nine passengers, I doubt more than two of them—my wife and an Army veteran—could have egressed through those standard size scuttles even in a non-emergency.

 

[Bob DBF]

May be I missed something, is the NTSB final report out? It seems to me that writing legislation and changing USCG regulations is a bit premature if there is no determination of what actually happened. It seems the preliminary report and USCG bulletin should suffice untill more is known. Why start rebuilding a fleet when it may have to be redone differently once more is known.

Not to be overlooked, is that the sweeping changes legislated may very well doom the dive/fishing pasengers boat industry. USCG regulation balances the need for the maritime services and infrastructure we have with that of safety, legislation has no need to find any balance, if the law is too demanding the industry ends.



Bob