As someone who graduated from a maritime college--albeit I'm not STCW/USCG certified as I went the US Navy route sans-USCG/STCW certification (the norm, not an exception), I'll say that I'd be *very* surprised if this was about the USCG coast guard inspection missing something. STCW requirements and inspections are *no forking joke* and …
As someone who graduated from a maritime college--albeit I'm not STCW/USCG certified as I went the US Navy route sans-USCG/STCW certification (the norm, not an exception), I'll say that I'd be *very* surprised if this was about the USCG coast guard inspection missing something. STCW requirements and inspections are *no forking joke* and the institutes that mint 3rd mates and 3rd engineer officers have extremely stringent requirements and testing standards. The industry and every ship goes through great lengths to pass these checks and they are very very stringent and are comparable to FAA/NTSB standards for the airlines (this is why the AirMax 9 blowout was such a huge deal and Boeing's CEO is stepping down as a result of a single QAQC event). There will be a massive investigation, and the fault will be found eventually. It could come down to the folks who did the recent maintenance on the ship signing off on it, but I don't think it will fall on the USCG. I also don't think this will come down to any kind of "DEI" BS because every single 3rd mate and engineering officer on that ship went through the same rigorous STCW qualifications and certification standards required across the industry. If there is fault with the crew, that fault will not be there because of relaxed STCW standards for "diversity"--there are no sliding standards for qualification/certification between men or women or racial groups in the Maritime industry the way there are for physical fitness standards between men and women in the military and police forces.
From what it sounds like, the crew responded in appropriate fashion to an emergency and so did the police in a very short time frame. If they were able to change the ship's lighting at all (the power went out) they would be flying "red over red, the captain is dead" on their lighting scheme while sending out the emergency call on the appropriate radio frequencies. That the police got the signal and closed the bridge means that those signals went out. The loss of life thus far is tragic but could have been so much worse had this happened during daylight working hours and we're lucky that this happened at the hour that it did. These conspiracy theories out there are absolutely batshit crazy.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience! I'm not even sure if the whole "DEI" theory is supposed to be for the ship or the bridge, either way it seems completely divorced from reality.
That might only be because it's probably the smallest academy with the fewest seats available. I couldn't comment on that with the lack of knowledge I have about the academies as a whole and their standards as I'm a ROTC grad, not a "ring knocker" as they say. I just know that the academies generally produce the snobbiest officers, especially if they're either pilots or former lacrosse/rugby/football players (or both).
People are, by and large, ignorant of the existence of the USMMA (United States Merchant Marine Academy) located in Kings Point on Long Island. It is a service academy that educate/trains people for positions as merchant marine officers (and you can also get a naval commision through there). It is, I think, even smaller than the USCG Academy.
I tried to get into the service academies (would have accepted any one) but did not have the political connections to get the congressional appointment. I was offered a spot at the USMMA (probably because few people apply for it because few know it exists) but did not take it. Still not sure if that was a mistake or not. Did not really see myself as a mate on a merchant ship.
One of my civilian supervisors at KAPL was a grad.
USMMA kindly referred to us over at SUNY Maritime on the other side of the Long Island Sound as "the bridge trolls" haha. At the end of the day, we had more freedom on/off campus and would leave college with the exact same credentials/commissions if we wanted to. We'd commission some 150+ "strategic sealift officers" (as they're now known) each year back in '13. Not sure what the numbers are now.
That's interesting. The two best managers I ever had were Air Force and Naval academy graduates. Maybe the snobbiness disappears in the private sector.
Probably more evident in the services themselves, like inside the officer's mess/wardroom and what not. Also probably better than run-of-the-mill civvie managers used to far less stressful workloads by comparison.
Was the Air Force academy dude/gal super-religious?
The guy didn't give off that vibe. He worked so hard to get the little branch I helped start up really get going. There was a lot of chaos going on in our business during those years, but he was always so squared away and positive. A total pro.
My late husband worked on tugboats in SF Bay for many years. He loved/hated it. It was hard work under often difficult conditions. I went out on a tug a couple of times. It was kind of thrilling to chug under the GG Bridge in darkness and up to a ship waiting outside the bay for its pilot, then watch as the pilot climbed the rope ladder of the swaying ship with spotlights on him. But, the tugs' galleys smelled strongly of diesel and bacon. There were fatal accidents - a deckhand was impaled on metal post at the dock when he fell from the deck; a tugboat was lost with all 6 crew when it went out in a big storm to rescue a paper barge from BC whose original tug had been broken loose by the storm. The job paid well, with 4 days on, 4 days off.
One of the most memorable experiences of my time in the Navy was when we would be pulling into Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico on the boat. The water gets shallow pretty far out, so we would usually surface over 30 minutes before we hit the actual entrance to the bay. Clear Caribbean weather, crystal clear water, a 10ish knot breeze, standing on the hull. You could look over the side and see the bottom... plus you were out of the stink of the inside of the boat.
In the submarine service, it is the most senior people who go topside to do the line handling (and there is firece competition for the spots), unlike the surface fleet where it is generally the noobs.
I remember being on my Navy ship (a large one) in the late 80's going under the GG bridge heading out to sea one brisk Bay Area morning. It was totally enthralling to watch the city skyline slowly get smaller as we came upon the bridge. The very amazing thing is the optical illusion caused by being on our very large and tall platform with our mast being many feet higher than the ship's bridge...and approaching the GG bridge giving every appearance that we weren't going to fit under it. It appears so much like you're going to hit the bridge until you go under it and then realize how much taller the bridge is when you are directly under it. It was a pretty amazing thing to watch and participate in.
When I was attending SUNY Maritime, the Throggs Neck bridge the campus resided under had a maintenance worker fall from it into the drink in 2012. Even with the USCG on site immediately (their academy was on the opposite side of the Long Island Sound), the currents toke that dude and he was presumed dead. A lot of people don't understand that operating on the water is a lot like operating in outer space--albeit with oxygen present so long as you're not a submariner. The environment is constantly trying to kill you and it's up to human engineering and protocols to prevent the environment from killing you via hypothermia, dehydration, or spatial drift, etc.
Correction: the USMMA academy is on the other side of the LIS. USCG academy is in Connecticut or something. Either way, USCG was on site hella quickly given how seriously NYC took terrorism post-9/11 (with USCG being part of DHS and not DOD) and that dude was still presumed dead really quickly as well. And that's a pretty busy channel as far as ship traffic goes.
The USCG doesn't miss much, but that doesn't mean that it gets fixed. Until proven otherwise, I am skeptical that whatever mechanical failure occurred could not have been prevented with better maintenance. We live in a world where "CHEAP" is the key thing. This is a commercial vessel and the operator is responsive to the market, meaning they are cost sensitive and need to deliver "CHEAP" to their customers. Freight customers only see price. This necessarily leads to minimizing maintenance.
If we require better maintenance, prices of goods will increase marginally. If we keep tugs on major vessels until they are safely out to sea, prices will increase marginally. This incident will cost billions of dollars, but the "CHEAP" benefit has been accruing for years. Was it worth it?
Finally, I live very close to the Golden Gate Bridge. Freighter traffic into and out of San Francisco accelerates out of the Bay, under the bridge, and into the Pacific. When I say accelerates, I mean they line up the entrance to the bridge miles away and start accelerating. Would going out of the Bay at a reasonable pace really impact operations? See my comments about "CHEAP" above.
Yea I'd agree with all of this. It could very easily come from human negligence on the maintenance side, but I doubt it came from the USCG not flagging something. And if there were corners cut, it was either to keep things cheap or out of simple laziness. Whether that came from the crew or from the maintenance yard (the ship recently went under maintenance) will be determined by the coming investigation. But I doubt very much it's from any shortcomings via the USCG.
Tugs are a good idea and the US Navy routinely uses 1-3 tugs to get ships in and out of their pier operations even with bridge crews that are more than triple the number of manning that commercial ships use and even in ports that don't have bridges traversing the entry/exit channels.
Just to bang on my "CHEAP" drum a bit more, I calculated out what it would cost to keep two tugs on alert 24 hours a day all year under the Golden Gate Bridge. Crowley Marine charges $2760/hour for general tug services. Leaving two tugs on alert 24/7 would cost about $48m.
The Port of Oakland, the largest port in the area, moves around 2.2 million TEUs (essentially a measure of a container) annually. If you divided the cost of the tugs out across all the container traffic into Oakland, each TEU would cost about $21 more.
What does this mean for you, the American consumer? Let's look at bananas. Each 40 foot container (2TEUs) carries about 117,000 bananas. The additional cost of $42 (2x$21) for the tugs on site would add $0.00036 per banana.
To further put that into perspective, the recent rebuild of the Bay Bridge cost $6.5 billion to build.
As someone who works in a regulated industry as well - I got a chuckle out of a “single QAQC event.” It’s factually correct, just stripped of any severity context. I often have to deal with the flip side of “falsification of data” when the mistake is completely innocuous. It sounds far worse than it actually is in most cases.
And there are a lot of industries out there who do QAQC via "batch testing." The bolt carrier groups of the rifles I was issued in the Marine Corps, think they pressure/magnet inspect every single one to make sure they don't accidently blow up in the face of the Marine firing the rifle? Lol... you don't get to a unit price of ~$650 per rifle that way. They'd check one BCG out of every 100 at best via "batch testing" and call all 100 BCGs good based off of testing just the 1/100. The more stringent the testing requirements are, the more expensive the unit costs are. And in *most* industries it's important to remember that your parts and equipment were made by the lowest bidder so that the guys at the top of the profit chain can maximize their gains. And the longer the parts are designed to last, the more likely that QAQC ain't going to live up to that acquisition/retention lifetime.
It was always fun explaining to people why things like the half inch globe valve installed in one of the ship's nuclear systems cost $40,000 rather than the $5 they could get it for at the hardware store.
Our QAQC requirements were out of this world.
I was QAQC qualified, radcon qualified, environmental monitor qualified, plus a several other things, some of it specifically one time for this job because no one has EVER done this before kind of stuff (ask me about core-installed reactor plant chemical cleaning, go ahead, I dare you--I can't answer though because... classified, LOL). That was some scary stuff.
I did a lot of paperwork, wrote a lot of the work orders/procedures--and God forbid you get something wrong. Definate career ender. I spent more time doing the paperwork than the actual work.
Yea, whenever people talk about how scary nuclear power is I tell them to look at the Navy's nuclear program. They've been operating reactors under the crushing depths of the ocean since the 1950's without any nuclear disaster incidents. That's because Admiral Hymen Rickover made the program stringent as shit and it's stayed that way to this day.
In fact, more often than not, it is just shit happening--because the perversity of the universe tends to the maximum. There is FAR less intentionality out there that people desperately want to believe. People don't like the idea that life is largely "random." That God plays dice with the universe.
We desperately seek intentionality and purpose and coherence. It is why we are creatures of narrative--we NEED these narratives to make us feel more than inconsequential specks in the vastness. To lend us purpose we cannot find ourselves, to have the universe make sense.
As Travis notes, it looks like the crew and the response people did their jobs. Minimal loss of life. No structure is going to withstand an impact like that... especially since they are not designed for that so much as they are designed to not fall down under other types of loads.
We go out in the world and take our chances
Fate is just the weight of circumstances
That's the way that lady luck dances
Roll the bones, roll the bones
Why are we here?
Because we're here, roll the bones, roll the bones
Re a random loss, I'm thinking about the familes of the two men found in a red pickup truck at the bottom of the river. Until they were identified, those families started to worry when Dad didn't come home, as he always does. They know where they worked and when. And they don't know until they're found days later. And Daddy's gone. Just like that.
They are desperately seek intentionality and purpose and coherence now.
Exactly. Murphy's Law will always trump the best laid plans of mice and men on a long enough timeline. Shit happens. On a long enough timeline, the probability of *anything* goes from 0 to 1. 1-in-a-million odds happen 300+ times a day in a country of 330M. We're all Guinea pigs to the whims of industry, and we're all rolling thousands of sets of dice on any given day. People can get struck by lightning more than once:
As someone who graduated from a maritime college--albeit I'm not STCW/USCG certified as I went the US Navy route sans-USCG/STCW certification (the norm, not an exception), I'll say that I'd be *very* surprised if this was about the USCG coast guard inspection missing something. STCW requirements and inspections are *no forking joke* and the institutes that mint 3rd mates and 3rd engineer officers have extremely stringent requirements and testing standards. The industry and every ship goes through great lengths to pass these checks and they are very very stringent and are comparable to FAA/NTSB standards for the airlines (this is why the AirMax 9 blowout was such a huge deal and Boeing's CEO is stepping down as a result of a single QAQC event). There will be a massive investigation, and the fault will be found eventually. It could come down to the folks who did the recent maintenance on the ship signing off on it, but I don't think it will fall on the USCG. I also don't think this will come down to any kind of "DEI" BS because every single 3rd mate and engineering officer on that ship went through the same rigorous STCW qualifications and certification standards required across the industry. If there is fault with the crew, that fault will not be there because of relaxed STCW standards for "diversity"--there are no sliding standards for qualification/certification between men or women or racial groups in the Maritime industry the way there are for physical fitness standards between men and women in the military and police forces.
From what it sounds like, the crew responded in appropriate fashion to an emergency and so did the police in a very short time frame. If they were able to change the ship's lighting at all (the power went out) they would be flying "red over red, the captain is dead" on their lighting scheme while sending out the emergency call on the appropriate radio frequencies. That the police got the signal and closed the bridge means that those signals went out. The loss of life thus far is tragic but could have been so much worse had this happened during daylight working hours and we're lucky that this happened at the hour that it did. These conspiracy theories out there are absolutely batshit crazy.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience! I'm not even sure if the whole "DEI" theory is supposed to be for the ship or the bridge, either way it seems completely divorced from reality.
https://www.levernews.com/feds-recently-hit-cargo-giant-in-baltimore-disaster-for-silencing-whistleblowers/
I read once that the Coast Guard Academy was the toughest military academy to get into.
That might only be because it's probably the smallest academy with the fewest seats available. I couldn't comment on that with the lack of knowledge I have about the academies as a whole and their standards as I'm a ROTC grad, not a "ring knocker" as they say. I just know that the academies generally produce the snobbiest officers, especially if they're either pilots or former lacrosse/rugby/football players (or both).
People are, by and large, ignorant of the existence of the USMMA (United States Merchant Marine Academy) located in Kings Point on Long Island. It is a service academy that educate/trains people for positions as merchant marine officers (and you can also get a naval commision through there). It is, I think, even smaller than the USCG Academy.
I tried to get into the service academies (would have accepted any one) but did not have the political connections to get the congressional appointment. I was offered a spot at the USMMA (probably because few people apply for it because few know it exists) but did not take it. Still not sure if that was a mistake or not. Did not really see myself as a mate on a merchant ship.
One of my civilian supervisors at KAPL was a grad.
USMMA kindly referred to us over at SUNY Maritime on the other side of the Long Island Sound as "the bridge trolls" haha. At the end of the day, we had more freedom on/off campus and would leave college with the exact same credentials/commissions if we wanted to. We'd commission some 150+ "strategic sealift officers" (as they're now known) each year back in '13. Not sure what the numbers are now.
More info here: https://www.netc.navy.mil/Commands/Naval-Service-Training-Command/NROTC/SSMP/
That must have come in since I was involved, I don't remember it working that way at that time (1979).
The times they are a changin'
That's interesting. The two best managers I ever had were Air Force and Naval academy graduates. Maybe the snobbiness disappears in the private sector.
In the private sector it is not a differentiation that means much.
Probably more evident in the services themselves, like inside the officer's mess/wardroom and what not. Also probably better than run-of-the-mill civvie managers used to far less stressful workloads by comparison.
Was the Air Force academy dude/gal super-religious?
The guy didn't give off that vibe. He worked so hard to get the little branch I helped start up really get going. There was a lot of chaos going on in our business during those years, but he was always so squared away and positive. A total pro.
Ask him about religiosity at the academy sometime, you'll probably hear stories.
My late husband worked on tugboats in SF Bay for many years. He loved/hated it. It was hard work under often difficult conditions. I went out on a tug a couple of times. It was kind of thrilling to chug under the GG Bridge in darkness and up to a ship waiting outside the bay for its pilot, then watch as the pilot climbed the rope ladder of the swaying ship with spotlights on him. But, the tugs' galleys smelled strongly of diesel and bacon. There were fatal accidents - a deckhand was impaled on metal post at the dock when he fell from the deck; a tugboat was lost with all 6 crew when it went out in a big storm to rescue a paper barge from BC whose original tug had been broken loose by the storm. The job paid well, with 4 days on, 4 days off.
One of the most memorable experiences of my time in the Navy was when we would be pulling into Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico on the boat. The water gets shallow pretty far out, so we would usually surface over 30 minutes before we hit the actual entrance to the bay. Clear Caribbean weather, crystal clear water, a 10ish knot breeze, standing on the hull. You could look over the side and see the bottom... plus you were out of the stink of the inside of the boat.
In the submarine service, it is the most senior people who go topside to do the line handling (and there is firece competition for the spots), unlike the surface fleet where it is generally the noobs.
I remember being on my Navy ship (a large one) in the late 80's going under the GG bridge heading out to sea one brisk Bay Area morning. It was totally enthralling to watch the city skyline slowly get smaller as we came upon the bridge. The very amazing thing is the optical illusion caused by being on our very large and tall platform with our mast being many feet higher than the ship's bridge...and approaching the GG bridge giving every appearance that we weren't going to fit under it. It appears so much like you're going to hit the bridge until you go under it and then realize how much taller the bridge is when you are directly under it. It was a pretty amazing thing to watch and participate in.
Alondra, that sounds like dangerous work. I can see why he loved/hated it.
When I was attending SUNY Maritime, the Throggs Neck bridge the campus resided under had a maintenance worker fall from it into the drink in 2012. Even with the USCG on site immediately (their academy was on the opposite side of the Long Island Sound), the currents toke that dude and he was presumed dead. A lot of people don't understand that operating on the water is a lot like operating in outer space--albeit with oxygen present so long as you're not a submariner. The environment is constantly trying to kill you and it's up to human engineering and protocols to prevent the environment from killing you via hypothermia, dehydration, or spatial drift, etc.
Correction: the USMMA academy is on the other side of the LIS. USCG academy is in Connecticut or something. Either way, USCG was on site hella quickly given how seriously NYC took terrorism post-9/11 (with USCG being part of DHS and not DOD) and that dude was still presumed dead really quickly as well. And that's a pretty busy channel as far as ship traffic goes.
The US Coast Guard Academy is in New London CT.
Ya' gotta have "the right stuff", as Tom Wolfe put it, to do that work.
The USCG doesn't miss much, but that doesn't mean that it gets fixed. Until proven otherwise, I am skeptical that whatever mechanical failure occurred could not have been prevented with better maintenance. We live in a world where "CHEAP" is the key thing. This is a commercial vessel and the operator is responsive to the market, meaning they are cost sensitive and need to deliver "CHEAP" to their customers. Freight customers only see price. This necessarily leads to minimizing maintenance.
If we require better maintenance, prices of goods will increase marginally. If we keep tugs on major vessels until they are safely out to sea, prices will increase marginally. This incident will cost billions of dollars, but the "CHEAP" benefit has been accruing for years. Was it worth it?
Finally, I live very close to the Golden Gate Bridge. Freighter traffic into and out of San Francisco accelerates out of the Bay, under the bridge, and into the Pacific. When I say accelerates, I mean they line up the entrance to the bridge miles away and start accelerating. Would going out of the Bay at a reasonable pace really impact operations? See my comments about "CHEAP" above.
Yea I'd agree with all of this. It could very easily come from human negligence on the maintenance side, but I doubt it came from the USCG not flagging something. And if there were corners cut, it was either to keep things cheap or out of simple laziness. Whether that came from the crew or from the maintenance yard (the ship recently went under maintenance) will be determined by the coming investigation. But I doubt very much it's from any shortcomings via the USCG.
Tugs are a good idea and the US Navy routinely uses 1-3 tugs to get ships in and out of their pier operations even with bridge crews that are more than triple the number of manning that commercial ships use and even in ports that don't have bridges traversing the entry/exit channels.
Just to bang on my "CHEAP" drum a bit more, I calculated out what it would cost to keep two tugs on alert 24 hours a day all year under the Golden Gate Bridge. Crowley Marine charges $2760/hour for general tug services. Leaving two tugs on alert 24/7 would cost about $48m.
The Port of Oakland, the largest port in the area, moves around 2.2 million TEUs (essentially a measure of a container) annually. If you divided the cost of the tugs out across all the container traffic into Oakland, each TEU would cost about $21 more.
What does this mean for you, the American consumer? Let's look at bananas. Each 40 foot container (2TEUs) carries about 117,000 bananas. The additional cost of $42 (2x$21) for the tugs on site would add $0.00036 per banana.
To further put that into perspective, the recent rebuild of the Bay Bridge cost $6.5 billion to build.
As someone who works in a regulated industry as well - I got a chuckle out of a “single QAQC event.” It’s factually correct, just stripped of any severity context. I often have to deal with the flip side of “falsification of data” when the mistake is completely innocuous. It sounds far worse than it actually is in most cases.
And there are a lot of industries out there who do QAQC via "batch testing." The bolt carrier groups of the rifles I was issued in the Marine Corps, think they pressure/magnet inspect every single one to make sure they don't accidently blow up in the face of the Marine firing the rifle? Lol... you don't get to a unit price of ~$650 per rifle that way. They'd check one BCG out of every 100 at best via "batch testing" and call all 100 BCGs good based off of testing just the 1/100. The more stringent the testing requirements are, the more expensive the unit costs are. And in *most* industries it's important to remember that your parts and equipment were made by the lowest bidder so that the guys at the top of the profit chain can maximize their gains. And the longer the parts are designed to last, the more likely that QAQC ain't going to live up to that acquisition/retention lifetime.
It was always fun explaining to people why things like the half inch globe valve installed in one of the ship's nuclear systems cost $40,000 rather than the $5 they could get it for at the hardware store.
Our QAQC requirements were out of this world.
I was QAQC qualified, radcon qualified, environmental monitor qualified, plus a several other things, some of it specifically one time for this job because no one has EVER done this before kind of stuff (ask me about core-installed reactor plant chemical cleaning, go ahead, I dare you--I can't answer though because... classified, LOL). That was some scary stuff.
I did a lot of paperwork, wrote a lot of the work orders/procedures--and God forbid you get something wrong. Definate career ender. I spent more time doing the paperwork than the actual work.
Yea, whenever people talk about how scary nuclear power is I tell them to look at the Navy's nuclear program. They've been operating reactors under the crushing depths of the ocean since the 1950's without any nuclear disaster incidents. That's because Admiral Hymen Rickover made the program stringent as shit and it's stayed that way to this day.
I watched people lose their jobs and rank over some of the smallest shit. But there was a reason for that.
Sometimes shit happens.
In fact, more often than not, it is just shit happening--because the perversity of the universe tends to the maximum. There is FAR less intentionality out there that people desperately want to believe. People don't like the idea that life is largely "random." That God plays dice with the universe.
We desperately seek intentionality and purpose and coherence. It is why we are creatures of narrative--we NEED these narratives to make us feel more than inconsequential specks in the vastness. To lend us purpose we cannot find ourselves, to have the universe make sense.
As Travis notes, it looks like the crew and the response people did their jobs. Minimal loss of life. No structure is going to withstand an impact like that... especially since they are not designed for that so much as they are designed to not fall down under other types of loads.
We go out in the world and take our chances
Fate is just the weight of circumstances
That's the way that lady luck dances
Roll the bones, roll the bones
Why are we here?
Because we're here, roll the bones, roll the bones
Why does it happen?
Because it happens, roll the bones
(Rush, Roll the Bones)
Re a random loss, I'm thinking about the familes of the two men found in a red pickup truck at the bottom of the river. Until they were identified, those families started to worry when Dad didn't come home, as he always does. They know where they worked and when. And they don't know until they're found days later. And Daddy's gone. Just like that.
They are desperately seek intentionality and purpose and coherence now.
Exactly. Murphy's Law will always trump the best laid plans of mice and men on a long enough timeline. Shit happens. On a long enough timeline, the probability of *anything* goes from 0 to 1. 1-in-a-million odds happen 300+ times a day in a country of 330M. We're all Guinea pigs to the whims of industry, and we're all rolling thousands of sets of dice on any given day. People can get struck by lightning more than once:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan