In 2013, the National Transportation Safety Board published "Safer Seas 2013," a summary of accident investigations for commercial vessels. From a safety education standpoint, it was informative enough that boat owners used it in crew training and safety meetings.
This week the NTSB released "Safer Seas 2014." It covers a diverse group of nine boat and vessel types from tankers to cargo vessels to the tall ship Bounty, but commercial fishing boats and towboats take the top two spots for number of entries. There are five accident reports for fishing boats, including four sinkings and two deaths, which took place in 2012 and 2013.
In "Safer Seas 2014," the National Transportation Safety Board summarizes accident investigations, listing probable causes, and provides safety recommendations for preventing future accidents. NTSB photoEach report has color photos of the boat and summarizes the circumstances of the accident, including weather and sea conditions, and the crew's reaction once they realized they were in a bad place. That's followed by a summary describing the accident's probable cause.
When a boat sinks and isn't recovered it's hard to pinpoint the exact cause of an accident, but in at least two cases for commercial fishing boats, poor maintenance seems to have been the culprit.
The 110-foot wooden Moonlight Maid ("Safer Seas 2014" lacks dimensions for its boats, which would be a good thing to add for next year's report) was built in 1942 as a subchaser. She was on a run from Seward to Kodiak, Alaska, in heavy seas when a plank pulled loose and from then on the pumps couldn't keep up with the incoming water.
The NTSB said the probable cause was "detachment of portside hull planking... Contributing to the hull failure was inadequate maintenance of the aging wooden vessel."
Then there was the Long Shot, a 30-year-old shrimper with some very tired steel that went down in the Gulf of Mexico. In 10- to 12-foot seas, she was taking on water in the lazarette and the engines were losing power because water was getting into the fuel.
The NTSB determined that after initial lazarette flooding, the probable cause of sinking was "water contamination of its fuel-oil storage tanks, which led to failure of the propulsion and electrical generator engines and [increased] flooding of the lazarette compartment in heavy seas."
Sometimes something small lets go that ends up costing a lot of money. That happened with the 334-foot freezer trawler Arctic Storm when a fractured fitting on a fuel-oil vent resulted in fuel oil spraying onto a hot engine surface and igniting.
The boat was towed back to port and there were no injuries, but the fire's damage bill ran to $5 million.
Read these reports for yourself — and not just the commercial fishing boat accidents — and ask yourself if any probable causes recounted here apply to your boat.
