Four ferry crashes in a year. If they were airplanes, would you have questions?

Update, noon Wednesday: I’ve been sent a bit of  early, unconfirmed information that as the Coastal Inspiration approached the ramp Tuesday, the propeller feathered (that is, went into “glide” position) instead of pulling into reverse, which would have slowed the ship down. Whether that’s true, and what kind of failure it represents, isn’t clear yet. I thought it was interesting enough to pass along, given the some of the wanking I’ve read around the web.

So is it just me who has some questions after one of BC Ferries’ new Super Cs rammed the loading ramp this afternoon on its way into Duke Point in Nanaimo?

It’s the second time in a month that one of their ferries has crashed into something during a landing or departure. And the fourth time this year.

The fourth time this year.

I’m wondering about some of today’s news coverage of  the latest “hard landing”, as these events are known in the biz.

I’m wondering what questions reporters would ask if an airline repeatedly rammed its planes into the terminal as they taxied into place with hundreds of people on board. And they hit so hard that many of the passengers fell over, and some got hurt. And the planes were damaged. And so was part of the terminal. And it happened four times in one year. Or worse still, if they had four “hard landings” out there on the runway.

I’m wondering what they’d ask if a bus line — Greyhound, just to name one we all know — had the same problem with its coaches.

Because it really isn’t any different. It’s a question about whether companies that move passengers are doing so safely. And if they’re not, it’s a question about what’s going wrong.

This afternoon, the Coastal Inspiration hit the loading ramp hard during its approach.

According to interviews with passengers on board and people ashore, the ferry was still moving forward at a decent clip, not powering backward to slow it down, when it hit. The company says two people were hurt, the lower vehicle ramp on shore was heavily damaged — “significant” damage, it said — and the ferry suffered minor damage.

Some of the crew I talked to tonight describe it a little more graphically. One of the shore crew said the attendant on the ramp had to run flat out to get to shore because the ferry came in so hard it almost snapped the ramp off the shore structure — “he was lucky he didn’t end up in the ocean.” They said the ferry came in at what looked like five knots, with another two knots of momentum, or way, on. The ramp was smoked, there was
“huge structural damage to the cement part” and it looks like it will be at least a month before the terminal at Duke Point will be usable, they said. Many of the crew were pretty shaken up.

The earlier crashes? On Nov. 18, the Queen of Coquitlam crashed at the Departure Bay terminal in Nanaimo, likely a human error made in misjudging how to make the approach with some clutches that had been locked out during repairs. In early July, the Queen of Nanaimo crash-landed at Tsawwassen when a mechanical failure kept the ship from pulling into reverse. In that case, pins used lock parts together were replaced years ago with the wrong kind of pins, and they finally failed. On May 5, the Coastal Celebration crashed at the Swartz Bay terminal.

We’ll see what answers the company turns up in this case.

After four accidents in a year, it would be good to see someone check whether there’s any pattern here or not.

Maybe there is. Maybe not. But it’s an obvious kind of question. Maybe it’s one that the Transportation Safety Board should look at.

There’s a lot of speculation going on tonight, and to be really, really clear, it’s all just speculation.

Maybe it was something mechanical this time; crew can do everything right and the ship can let them down. Maybe a fault in the controls. Or maybe it’s an ongoing problem with the way the company does its approaches and departures — they run the ships in and out pretty hard, as one crew member pointed out in an email tonight. Maybe it has something to do with the push the company has under way to move a number of  captains and senior officers out of the union and into management — which several crew told me has the effect of breaking up teams who are used to working together, and moving them around the fleet, and where not enough familiarization training is done, it’s leading to problems.

Maybe it was a combination of a lot of things.

Crap happens. It’s why smart countries  make ferry companies adopt an internationally approved safety-management system, a sort of code of practices and procedures that lays out how to do things safely, and how to fix things that are found to be less than safe. It prevents crap from happening and it tries to keep it from happening twice. BC Ferries isn’t required by Ottawa to have an internationally compliant safety management system. It set one up voluntarily, at a cost of at least $20 million, years ago. And then, because safety costs a lot of money, the system fell apart. In 2006, after the Queen of the North sank and the province ordered another look at safety procedures, at least another $20 million was spent to set another safety system back up.

None of this is to second-guess an inquiry that hasn’t happened yet. Or to point fingers at anyone or anything.

It’s more to say that unless there were four totally unrelated, utterly coincidental, one-time-only problems this year, it’s important for the public to know that whatever has gone wrong is being addressed in a systematic way.

You want to know the company is serious about safety and a real safety budget.

You want to hear are things like: we take all incidents seriously, we are investigating, we acknowledge there has been a problem this year, we will be investigating all incidents and any connections between them. And doing whatever it takes to remedy the problems. Stuff like that.

Because in the end, that’s what a fully functioning safety system does. The system broke once, and a ferry sank. The company has paid plenty to reconstruct it, and Mike Corrigan, the guy who oversaw that work, is now running the show. He’s the new CEO. So it’s an issue that is fully understood at the very top levels of the company.

Rumour has it that BC Ferries management is  about to declare that all is well and good with safety practices now, and that the the companies that have been helping put new safety practices into place at considerable cost can be dismissed by March.

It would be nice if the public, staring today at a three-year-old ferry that took out a loading ramp in good weather in the middle of the afternoon, can be convinced that’s wise.

You can find CBC coverage of the crash here, with a photo and some brief interviews with passengers who were on board. The Nanaimo Daily News has a story here, with more passenger comments. And you can find BC Ferries’ update on the incident  tonight here.

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