Well, this is a disturbing new twist in a battle that’s left a bad smell over floatplane operations in Vancouver for way too long already.

Business In Vancouver is reporting that the provincial government is refusing to release the independent safety study of the new $22-million floatplane terminal in Vancouver that it commissioned last year.

I’ve got some questions about that, and I’ll get to them in a minute. First, some background.

The business newspaper BiV filed a freedom-of-information request in January asking for the safety report as a bitter battle was playing out over everything from fees for using the new Coal Harbour terminal to how safe its design was.

Months earlier, as the battle hit a fevered pitch, Harbour Air, the province’s biggest floatplane operator, lost a plane at the new terminal’s dock. (The company that built the terminal quickly did its own “independent” study of the dock the plane was tied to and ruled that everything was fine, but that’s another story.)

Harbour Air didn’t move into the new terminal when it opened in early 2011 (and it still hasn’t) because of concerns about the design, safety and exposure of the new terminal to waves and wakes.

But it agreed last November to tie one of its planes up there as part of an engineering test of the terminal; while tied up to the dock, the plane took on water and began to sink — something that had never happened to one of the airlines’ planes, Harbour Air said.

The engineering report commissioned by the province was to have been in the hands of  Jobs Minister Pat Bell by late last year. He has never released it publicly, or said what it concluded about safety and design of the new site.

Now PavCo, the Crown corporation that runs the terminal and the convention centre it is attached to, is refusing to release it too. Business In Vancouver is reporting that its request for a copy was turned down over concerns its release could be “harmful to the financial or economic interests of a public body” and to the “business interests of a third party.”

So much for open government, eh?

The saga of the new floatplane terminal has been a sorry mess.

It began in 2003 when the new convention centre was conceived and the floatplane fleet was told it would be moved to a temporary site during construction.

Talks about plans for a permanent terminal in the new convention centre were rocky. Operators were worried that a single private operator would have a monopoly and that it might charge fees too high to pass along without badly affecting their ticketing prices.

They were especially worried when the newly formed PavCo granted the right to build the private terminal to the Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre, a joint effort of Graham Clarke and construction giant Ledcor.

So the companies that operate the planes got together and tried to get approval to build their own permanent terminal, for about $12 million, to the east of Canada Place.

They got nowhere.

They had to move into the new terminal built by Clarke and  Ledcor — essentially, a monopoly operation handed to a private developer by PavCo, the Crown agency that runs the new convention centre.

The story took a lot of messy twists and turns, with accusations and denials flying thick and fast. You can read some of them here and here and here.

Me, I have two questions of my own. I hope a journalist with enough clout to ask them, and enough budget to file their own FOIs, will get them answered:

1. This group of floatplane operators spent time and money trying to open their own terminal and run it, roughly speaking, as a co-op. It is widely rumoured that they approached the Vancouver  Airport Authority either for advice or to arrange a deal to have the authority run it for them. It is also widely rumoured that they got nowhere with their request.

Graham Clarke, who was chair of the airport authority at the time the operators would have come in to talk, later left the airport authority to build the new terminal himself.

There’s nothing up with that, right?

2. The floatplane operators also had to deal repeatedly, over time, with Port Metro Vancouver as they attempted to get approval to open their own terminal east of the convention centre, in an area controlled by the port. They got nowhere with that either, and in the end were left with one option: becoming tenants of a terminal built by Mr. Clarke.

Anne Bancroft-Jones is a member of the board of directors for the port, which turned the operators down when they tried to open their own site.

I understand that she is also Mr. Clarke’s wife.

There’s nothing up with that either, right?

Maybe someone somewhere could get us some answers to those questions — because when a Crown corporation hands a monopoly to a private developer, and a hugely powerful port authority turns down a group of businesses seeking to run their own facility on the public land that the authority administers, we deserve answers.

When the chatter and the rumours are so widespread on the waterfront — and through the industry — that they wash up on my doorstep, it would be really nice to know if there’s anything to them.

Oh, and that safety report we all paid for? It would be nice to have a copy of that too.

It doesn’t matter what I do between now and the day I die: I will never have an obituary as lovely as this.

What can you say about a man who rowed across the Atlantic? And Pacific?

And those were only two of the achievements in Fairfax’s crazy, courageous, life-affirming 74 years.

These couple of paragraphs in his New York Times obit give you a taste of who the man was:

“At nine, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

“At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

“Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.”

Now go read the rest of the piece. And then go out and do something with your own day.

Comoxvalley.com is reporting that riders were angry over recent service and ship-shuffling that was kicked off when the Queen of Burnaby was pulled out of service for repairs just two months after an $11-million refit.

About two dozen residents of Texada — among the folks who have lost three daily round-trip sailings to Powell River — protested on board the Tachek this morning.

When the substitute ferry arrived at Texada, boarding was delayed for about 25 minutes by a “study session” — and unloading on the Powell River side was similarly delayed.

Company reps were apparently available and answered questions.

BC Ferries spokeswoman Deborah Marshall told reporters that the company hoped passengers “would have a bit of patience with us. We are trying to provide the best possible service to all our customers.”

And she suggested the Queen of Burnaby may be back in service by Feb. 17.

So what to make of the fact tempers are reaching the breaking point?

Well, picture this happening to you:

Your regular ferry, the Queen of Burnaby, is sent off into drydock for repairs to a propeller hub that may or may not have been included in a refit that appears to have been rushed into completion for the Christmas holiday.

So Texada’s regular ferry, the North Island Princess, is sent off to Comox, although it isn’t nearly big enough to replace the Queen of Burnaby and has its own mechanical challenges.

The Tachek is sent to Texada.

And then today, the Tachek is re-assigned to help move traffic that’s backing up out of Comox.

So water taxis are assigned to Texada.

And our provincial ferry company is now flying passengers around on chartered planes to cope with the backlog.

And all of this is going on because the company no longer budgets, or can budget, for a genuinely spare vessel to keep around for emergency replacement duty.

And because its managers don’t seem to know how to plan and carry out regular maintenance, and refits, that are both timely and sufficient to keep this mess from happening.

Feel free to use the comment box below to explain how you might react.

I got several emails yesterday after I speculated that BC Ferries knew it still had problems with the Queen of Burnaby when it pulled the ferry out of an $11-million refit last December.

The simple answer to all of the people who wrote: yes, there are questions here that journalists should be asking.

If it’s true that the company was aware of possible problems  – and there is much chatter out there on the waterfront to just that effect — then it was a very expensive decision.

If it’s true, it was a troubling decision in other ways too.

There’s the money, first off. When you see news stories reporting that the ferry is “going into drydock” for repairs, you don’t often find reporters asking about the cost.

That’s too bad.

In this case, the ferry had been in drydock for some time late last year for the refit. If failing to complete the work properly (and rushing her back into service for the busy Christmas season?) forced a return to drydock this month, here’s just a rough initial calculation of the costs of pulling her back out. (The figures are all mine; anyone with a better, documentable set should feel free to weigh in.)

• Drydock booking fee: $4400
• Drainage fee: $8200
• Per day fee while on the chocks: $8800
• Per day fee for security: $450
• Per day docking charge: 12 cents per ton
• Plus cranes at anywhere from $450 to $950 per hour
• Plus sewer, power, water and air

And that’s just to get you ready for the work that needs done, which you also pay for.

Not a fortune, but a ridiculous waste of a whole lot of money. Especially at a time when the company has already to started to cut back heavily on routine maintenance.

Because the company has run out of ships, with the Queen of Burnaby out of service, Ferries has no choice but to fly passengers around on chartered air flights. That’s more money. So  journalists might want to ask for a running tally, or what the company expects it to cost — or for a date when we can get the final tally.

But the concern is more than just money.

As I’ve said, we just paid for two shiny new reports on safety and management practices at BC Ferries. One was commissioned by BC Ferries, which we own; the other was done by the provincial ferry commissioner, whose work is funded by the public through BC Ferries.

Together, they concluded that our company was safely and efficiently run.

I think that’s odd, given what’s going on with the Queen of Burnaby.

The repair work is still being done, and there’s no official word yet on what forced the ferry back into drydock.

The company says it needs to repair one of the propeller hubs. Most of us drive cars; we’ve heard about wheel hubs and we know all too well how parts can break suddenly, and at the most inconvenient times. So the announcement makes a kind of sense.

The problem is, the prop hub is a very complicated bit of machinery. And it was worked on as part of the refit. Or at least one of them was.

Let me put it this way: would you feel differently about this week’s ferry “problems” if you read a news story that said the Queen of Burnaby was being pulled from service, causing huge headaches for passenger and commercial traffic, to return for very expensive repairs to a part of the propulsion system that should have been addressed during an $11-million refit just two months earlier?

Right then.

How about if the story went on to question whether the problem was caused because maintenance was only performed on one prop during the refit? Sort of like you took your car in for an expensive tune up and they only rotated one tire?

That’s the kind of chatter that’s rippling around the waterfront this week as the Queen of Burnaby sits in drydock and our provincial ferry company flies passengers around on chartered planes.

And if there’s anything to the speculation, then how the heck can maintenance have fallen so completely apart just a month before the company’s safety practices got such a glowing review? How can a company be well managed, how can it be run efficiently when this kind of stuff happens?

And which officials from which outside agencies signed the ferry back into service, knowing if this was true?

This week, we’re watching exactly what happens when you don’t resolve those questions.

We’re watching BC Ferries Airlines in action.

Here’s a question for some enterprising journalist: did BC Ferries pull the Queen of Burnaby out of an $11-million refit knowing that problems remained with part of its propulsion system?

Might be nice to track down the answer, because that ferry just got pulled from service for prop repairs less than two months out of refit, and is now at Esquimalt in drydock for some undoubtedly pricey work, including pulling her out of the water again.

Because the company doesn’t keep any genuinely spare vessels around, the breakdown and the repairs also prompted a frantic shuffle to move ferries around to cover for the missing vessel — a shuffle that included moving the tiny North Island Princess, which was suffering her own brief mechanical challenges.

And then there’s the cost of extra customer service – which so far amounts to “shuttle service, hotel accommodation, meals, flights and alternative transportation” and includes charter flights, especially for medical appointments — while the regular ferry is out of commission. (At this point, I’d settle for someone asking what the extra services alone will cost…)

As well, I’m thinking that if the propulsion problem was clear before the ferry left refit, it might also be nice to track down an answer to this question: How can a company do things like that at a time when we have just paid for two reports that insist the company’s safety practices and management expertise are just fine?

The Queen of Burnaby was pulled out of service last week with what a problem the company now describes as a “hub” problem.

Good of them to let us know, for sure. But just to be clear, that’s not like the wheel hub on your Ford Focus. Not the same thing. Nowhere even close.

The hub is a critical end of the drive line that makes the propeller do its thing, including setting the blades at the command angle. It’s not simply some nut holding the screw in place.

It’s a complex piece of gear, as the clever folks over at TidalStation have pointed out.

No hub, no propulsion from that prop.

And if the ferry left refit with a question about the hub, maybe because of enormous pressure to get the ferry back in service for the busy Christmas season, then that would be, well, a lack of due diligence.

And it would underscore the fact that no matter how many people you hire and no matter how much you pay them, you won’t get a clear answer on how safely and efficiently this company is being run until you hire someone who can pry the full range of real, relevant data out of the company, understand what it means — and then feel free to say.

So maybe some journalist with access to company officials and a budget for FOI requests could get on those questions.

Because we’re not too far away from the day when the provincial government is going to have to make some decisions on the ferry service, and how it’s run, and who should be running it, and it would be nice for the public to have some accurate information with which to measure those decisions.

Getting a chance to pretend to run a tug in our own port is just plain cool. Just. Plain. Cool.

William “Bull” Shelby, a marine carpenter, fell about 100 feet, hitting scaffolding on the way down. He died at the scene.

It’s always sobering when news breaks about a worker who leaves home one morning and never comes back, killed while simply doing his job.

It was certainly sobering for Mr. Shelby’s coworkers.

I was moved by news of a comment from Steve Hirsh, a spokesman for the shipyard, who said the yard was immediately stood down and remained that way during the investigation — because no one knew what had gone so wrong, and because workers were distracted.

“People are really affected by it,” Hirsh told the Kitsap Sun.

“(Mr. Shelby) was a good guy. He was a friend. It looks like these are tough men and women who have a hard job in this industry, and they do, but they’re people, and when one of their coworkers suffers this fate, it hits everybody hard.”

“We want to be sure people’s heads are in the game and not thinking about their friend,” he added. “At that time, that’s exactly what they should be focusing on, so we stopped work.”

The circumstances aren’t clear yet on Mr. Shelby’s death; news reports say there were no witnesses.

What is clear for those of us in Vancouver, who so recently celebrated the award of a big federal shipbuilding contract to the Washington yard here, is that the death of this Bremerton man should serve as a reminder.

There is indeed much joy in the winning of the contract. There is much to be celebrated in the revival of coastal yards over the next decade, and in the prospect of good jobs for people who live here.

But many of those jobs will come with risk for the workers who do them.

We all need to remember, and insist, that their workplaces are safe.

They all need to be able to get up in the morning and come home at the end of their shifts. Every one of them.

Meantime, our sympathies to Mr. Shelby’s family.

For now, let’s deal with today’s news: the breakdown of the Queen of Burnaby, and cancellation of at least a day’s worth of sailings Monday on the Comox-Powell River route.

It’s a nasty business for citizens and commercial interests to lose that big a bite of their transportation service. And it’s nasty for a company to have to shut down service when it’s trying to keep its lips above water and collect as much revenue as possible. And avoid big repair bills.

Here’s what occurs to me, off the top.

BC Ferries had to cancel all those sailings because there was no spare relief vessel in the fleet. And why is there no spare? Because the company decided to put its spares up for sale. Over warnings from staff. Because they were deemed too expensive to keep. Because the company is so chronically short of money.

There used to be a handful of ships the company could call out at moments like this — the Queen of Tsawwassen, for example, on the route that was affected today. She used to be tied up at Saltery Bay on the Sunshine Coast, I believe, and be pulled into service when needed, with a crew appropriately familiarized and ready to sail her.

She was one of the four Queens put up for sale in 2008 in a move that former CEO David Hahn described in remarkably accurate terms. “The sale of these four vessels marks a new phase in the evolution of BC Ferries,” he said.

Indeed.

Spare V-class ships were sold off with much gloating about the handful dollars they fetched. But that left no truly spare ships to call out in an emergency. So today there was a frantic shuffling of vessels — in this case, the much tinier North Island Queen was called into service to replace the Burnaby (although she has a capacity of 49 vehicles,  compared to 192 vehicles for the Queen of Burnaby, and no elevator, and washrooms only in the upper passenger area. And some of her own ongoing mechanical challenges). Some travellers will get left behind. Most commercial traffic won’t be accommodated while all this is going on.

It’s getting late tonight. So how about we keep this short and sweet…

We had two official reports in the last month assessing operations at BC Ferries. One said safety practices were basically ok. The other said the company was being managed well.

Huh.

So the Queen of Burnaby is laid up with some sort of problem related to her propulsion system — that is, she has a steering problem. I’m sure we’ll get a full report from the company as soon as they know what it’s all about, or as soon as curious reporters decide to ask.

Maybe it’s got to do with the oil distribution box on her port prop. Which maybe means there isn’t reliable pitch control on that prop. (Pitch control, that sounds familiar.) And maybe means the ferry will be heading over to the Esquimalt dry dock for repairs. And yes, that’s after an $11-million refit in 2011.

And the company that is being managed so competently decided it didn’t need to have a spare ship ready to drop into service for times like this, when it experiences mechanical problems of a kind that it’s way too familiar with already…

Huh.

I guess it would be cynical to wonder if that’s what you get when you shovel your ferry company debt and expenses off the government books to clear room for other debt, set up a new ferry company with a commercial mandate that it can’t possibly meet and then lard it with chief executives distinctly short on maritime experience.

The kind of experience that might have lead you to understand it would have been wise to have a spare ferry to tap on a day like today. And the kind of experience that also tells you that you have to know how to run the company efficiently enough to ensure you have the money to make it possible to keep that spare ferry around.

Huh.

BIV’s story said the government had made the decision, and that BC Ferries had confirmed that the request was put on hold pending release of a review of the Coastal Ferry Act by the provincial ferries commissioner. That review is expected to be released by the end of the month.

My apologies for some confusion in my post. Before I wrote it, I did a quick search of both the freedom-of-information sites run by the provincial government and by BC Ferries and couldn’t find a copy of the company’s proposal to drop the routes, a proposal that BIV’s story referred to.

It looks like my search of the provincial site must have been flawed. The proposal is actually there. And our thanks should go to BIV for making it public.

The proposal makes for a pretty interesting read.

It says that with traffic down four per cent on major routes over a year earlier, the company was seeking a four per cent decrease in the sailings it is required to provide on those routes,  for 18 months. If ridership worsened, the company would pursue further reductions; if it improved, they “would ensure sailings continue to match the capacity to carry traffic.”

It looks like the plan pretty much matched what then-CEO David Hahn said he was seeking when he announced the application last summer: 400 sailing cuts, mostly on extra sailings and only on the major routes.

Hahn did say it would only affect the off season, though, and the proposal clearly shows calculations through June of 2012 on Route 1, from Swartz Bay to Tsawwassen.

The proposal lays out exact proposed changes to the routes, and what saving were expected.

It’ll be interesting information to keep in mind as the ferry commissioner’s report is released and the debate over how well the new ferry act and the decision to push the company off the provincial books, and provide it with an operating subsidy and fixed sailing demands, has worked.

I’m out the door now, so you have a look for yourselves. I’ll be updating later with some thoughts.

Find it here.

Most of the fingers, I would also note, are being pointed by the company that employs him, and that will be on the hook for the costs of the accident — which will be considerable, given the six deaths that have now been confirmed and the dozens of people still reported missing.

There are some interesting counter-arguments starting to surface, including this one posted over at gCaptain. It appears to be a spirited defence by the manager of guest services, who points out that crew managed to evacuate 4,000 passengers in the dark of night and got most off safely against some heavy odds. And that’s certainly worth remembering.

I think it will be a while before there’s any reliable word on what happened, and on what combination of factors put the ship on a course it shouldn’t have been on, and saw it holed and  left laying on its side.

But meantime, I’d advise caution as the accusations and “facts” of the matter leak out.

If it’s true, for example, that the captain was conducting a bit of a tourist-friendly stunt sail-by that had been carried out before, who’s really to blame here? The guy ordering the manoeuvre? The company that knew it happened regularly? Both of them?

Equally important are the other details, if they turn out to be true — charts that are up to date, evacuation drills and practices that are conducted as often as necessary and executed appropriately.

It all matters. We just don’t know what mattered most that night.

Here’s an odd item from Business in Vancouver, which is reporting that the provincial government has given a quiet thumbs-down to BC Ferries’ request to drop as many as 400 sailings from its schedule, given a projected debt of about $30 million this year.

The story quotes a BC Ferries official saying that Victoria turned down the proposal last month.

Spokeswoman Deborah Marshall tells the newspaper that Victoria first wants to read the review due out this month from the provincial ferry commissioner on how well the eight-year-old Coastal Ferry Act is working.

The story also says that via a freedom of information request, BIV got a copy of a confidential proposal from CEO David Hahn to the transportation minister detailing which sailings he wanted to cut and how much savings the company would realize.

I must be missing something, because I’ve search the company’s FOI website and I can’t find the memo. It may have been posted briefly and since disappeared.

BIV is reporting that when Hahn announced the plant last summer, he was reported to have said cuts would affect only the Friday and Sunday extra sailings during the off season.

But the application apparently says the cuts could extend to August 31 of this year — “well into the busy summer season, and could affect weekday and holiday sailings.”

The paper says it will have more on the issue next week.

His story echoes a lot of what I’ve heard: that the traffic chaos that had been predicted never materialized — not in a big way, anyway. And the waits didn’t get unbearably long.

Bellaart’s story focuses largely on the efforts of Melanie Lucia, regional manager of terminal operations for the three Nanaimo terminals, including the Gabriola Island terminal downtown.

But both Bellaart and Lucia give you a good idea how widespread the effort was across that region of the fleet.

BC Ferries should be rightly proud of its workers and their ability to pull out all the stops when something goes wrong.

You can find the Daily News story  here.

Mikhail Voytenko, a professional navigator who maintains the Maritime Bulletin, has assembled a list of some of this week’s casualties.

Not pretty reading. I’ll have some thoughts on this later today, because it’s frustrating to me that the general reaction to this kind of news is to demand a ban on tankers, or shipping, or other understandable but complicated things like that.

There’s another way of thinking about this, and that’s what I want to talk about.

Meantime, the list from the Maritime Bulletin:

Jan 11: Three crew dead when Korean fishing vessel Jung Woo 2 is destroyed by fire deep in the Antarctic waters.

Jan 13:  Boxship FAS Provence sinks while under tow in Mediterranean off Malta.

Jan 13: Six people confirmed dead, 70 missing as Italian cruise liner Costa Concordia capsizes after hitting the rocks of Giglio island

Jan 15: Heavy casualties as two tankers sin after blasts in cargo tanks, the Doola No.3 in the Yellow Sea and the Edirne in the Adriatic Sea. Three fishermen also missing in South China Sea when Chinese freighter Cheng Lu 28 rams a fishing boat.

You can find the links to stories about the incidents here.

Five crew are reported dead and six still missing after a South Korean fuel tanker suffered some sort of explosion and then sank off Incheon today.

A spokesman for Doola Shipping, which owns the tanker, told reporters that the vessel usually transports diesel, but this time it was carrying gasoline. An investigation will determine if that played any part in the blast.

Yonhap news agency is reporting that the explosion was likely caused by gases leaking from the ship’s oil tanks.

“We believe that something went wrong during the process to take out remaining gas in the oil tank,” the Doola spokesman told Yonhap.

The dead crew included one South Korean, two Burmese citizens and two others whose nationalities have not been announced. Five other crew were rescued from the ocean.

You can find footage of the partial sunken ship here and some initial coverage here and here.

There’s lot of new coverage tonight of the grounding of the Costa cruise ship off the coast of Italy. Most of it is raising more questions than it’s answering.

Here are a few of the bits and pieces that have surfaced since my quick original post, which repeated an inaccurate early count of deaths, among other things. Tonight it’s being reported that three, not six, people died, and that about 50 people are still unaccounted for.

The Globe and Mail, which is offering a small collection of photos and video coverage, paints a picture of both the scary and inspiring moments in the ongoing disaster. The BBC, CNN and the International Herald Tribune are also offering ongoing coverage. (I’d encourage you to keep checking in on the Tidal Station site too, for news and analysis that’s way more informed than my own.)

Among the highlights:

• The cruise ship’s black box has been recovered and is being analysed.
• Associated Press is quoting the Italian coast guard’s Francesco Paolillo as saying the exact circumstances of the accident were still unclear, but that “the first alarm aboard went off about 10:30 p.m., about three hours after the Concordia had begun its voyage from the port of Civitavecchia to Savona, in northwestern Italy.”
• The vessel “hit an obstacle” that tore a 50-metre gash in the port side of the hull and it and started taking on water, Paolillo said. There were no details on whether the obstacle was a rocky reef or something else, Paolillo said, although a large boulder can be seen wedged in the gash in many of the photos of the ship lying on its side.
• Paolillo said the captain tried to steer his ship toward shallow waters, near a small port on Giglio island, to make evacuation by lifeboat easier. Whether the move into shallow water was intentional or not will be determined by an investigation. One coast guard official said that after the ship began taking on water, crew kept going because they believed the vessel could keep sailing, but steered closer toward port.
• Speculation among industry experts has begun on the cause of the grounding, and suggests that “a loss of power coupled with a failure of backup systems could have caused the crew to lose control.” The Telegraph is quoting Malcolm Latarche, editor of shipping magazine IHS FairPlay Solutions, speculating that a catastrophic loss of power  led to a series of disastrous consequences. A power surge — something that happens regularly in generators — could have caused the explosion heard by passengers, he said, and that the problem with the electric supply to the ship’s main propulsion motors could have lead to a problem with steering. Backup systems may have failed and in shallow water, he noted, you run aground at some point. The ship has a reported draft of 26 feet.
• Some passengers report that crew continued to tell them for 45 minutes that a simple “technical problem” had caused the lights to go off earlier. Many said that evacuation directions were unclear, that the exercise was chaotic and that they had never been given an evacuation drill. One was scheduled for the 14th, a week after the cruise began. A hostess on the liner told reporters a drill is held every 15 days to accommodate the fact passengers arrive and disembark daily.
• The captain was arrested late Saturday and was being investigated for abandoning ship and manslaughter, local police said. The arrest would have been a relatively automatic procedure in Europe when there are deaths. Some passengers have reported seeing the captain in a lifeboat while other passengers will still being rescued from the ship.

I have a couple of thoughts of my own.

If I’m following the timeline (and it is still confusing), it sounds like the ship hit something but kept sailing for shallow waters for 45 minutes, which might mean the watertight doors worked, and that as she might have actually grounded and rolled rather than have rolled over because of water she took on. Secondly, it looks like the gash is right on the hull where the stabilizer should be, so maybe that’s what hit and ripped off and opened her up (Someone has answered this in the comments area below; the answer is no). The only other thing I wonder about (and I don’t know how the list developed) is a question someone sent to me about how the massive open atrium area in cruise ships affects a list in a real-life emergency, as opposed to a tank test. That’s an interesting question.

In fact, they’re all interesting questions. Hope some answers start surfacing soon.

Anyone with information or any kind of informed speculation is welcome — hey, is encouraged — to type it into the comments box below.

As I said earlier, I was confused by repeated news reports today in which a BC Ferries spokeswoman was quoted as saying the Queen of Oak Bay wobbled in to Horseshoe Bay on one engine Thursday night with a “smoking clutch”.

I was confused because I’d got a call when the coast guard hovercraft was scrambled to the scene after the coast guard was contacted by  the ferry — which was reporting a crankcase explosion.

I’m not sure what the clutch issue was all about, but here is what has actually been determined so far, according to sources who would know: It was the crankcase. The liner had a crack of some sort. Cylinder lubricant was washed away. The doors on the case blew. One piston in particular suffered damage.

That’s it. Everyone apparently responded very well, did their jobs properly and repair work is now under way. Someone will determine if it was just metal fatigue, or a bad metal part, or wear, or a heating/cooling issue. Or a maintenance problem. Or delayed maintenance. Or maybe they won’t ever figure it out. Sometimes you can’t.

It all seems pretty straightforward to me. That’s what went wrong, and at some point we’ll know why.

I’m not sure why release of information is sometimes so complicated.

There’s a nasty story out of Italy tonight — at least six people are dead and 15 hurt after a cruise ship ran aground off the Italian coast northwest of Rome.

Witnesses say the accident occurred at dinnertime. There weren’t any immediate details on how the people were killed.

Rescue efforts were hampered by the position of the listing ship, and several people reportedly fell into the cold sea during the rescue, news reports said. Rescue efforts continued into early Saturday morning, Italian time.

The BBC is reporting that as passengers were eating dinner Friday night, they heard a loud bang and were told that the ship had suffered electrical problems.

“We were having supper when the lights suddenly went out, we heard a boom and a groaning noise, and all the cutlery fell on the floor,” one was quoted as saying.

The Costa Concordia, built in 2006, was on a Mediterranean cruise from Rome with stops in Savona, Marseille, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Cagliari and Palermo, according to the cruise line.

I’m sure there will be more on this as the weekend unfolds. You might want to follow the story over at the Tidal Station site, where there is already a stunning photo up and some informed commentary.

Nasty story, though. It sounds like it was tough launching the lifeboats, and a number of people tried to swim for shore. You can only imagine that kind of chaos. Or desperation.

You can find details of the CNN coverage here, and the BBC story here. There are some photos and video footage here and here, along with news coverage in Italian.

I got a call last night as coast guard crews were heading for the ferry to respond to what they had been told was a crankcase explosion. Apparently there was smoke on the ferry and passengers were mustered and a fire crew assembled.

This morning, spokeswoman Deborah Marshall is saying that the problem was due to a smoking clutch, which is very different than a crankcase. She has repeated that to several news outlets, including the Vancouver Sun and the Times Colonist.

I don’t know quite what to make of that.

But engineers are still telling me this morning that it was the crankcase. And they seemed kind of ticked at the release of what they say is faulty information.

We’ll know one way or the other eventually. Investigators from the Transportation Safety Board will be on board today, I’m told, since a crankcase problem has the potential to endanger life.

Meantime, just in case the engineers are right, you can find some very useful links to information that a reader helpfully provide in the comments section of my post last night. You can find them by scrolling through the comments section at the bottom of this.

It quotes Mark Collins, who is head of engineering at BC Ferries, saying that “there are three backup systems in place and those backup systems were available but not used.”

He goes on to say: “Our question is about why all of the safety and redundancy systems weren’t used in the manner that could have prevented this. And so that’s where we are going, in general terms.”

So that makes it an operations question.

And that it makes it even more interesting to see what the new report by George Morfitt says, now that he’s updated his 2007 look at the company’s safety practices.

The former auditor general was called in after the Queen of the North sank to take a good look at a broken safety-management system. The company then set up a very expensive SailSafe program to rebuild its safety practices, and Morfitt has been back in recent months to see how things are going. His report is done now and is presumably before the company and the government (as the owner of the system, I’d hope the government got a copy, anyway). It is due for public release any day now.

Pretty much every accident report from the Transportation Safety Board has mentioned the company’s safety practices. It’s a critical issue, not only in safety but in financial terms, and it’s hard, and expensive, to fix. (Ferries has never produced a line item that says how much the SailSafe program cost. But years ago, when it first set up a system voluntarily to comply with international regulations, the bill was about $20 million. It couldn’t have cost less to properly rebuild the broken mess of that system that existed when the Queen of the North sank, if that gives you any idea.)

I hope Ferries has fixed it. I hope Morfitt has really figured out whether they have or not.

And I hope what the company is now saying about the Duke Point crash isn’t a sign there are still big lessons to be learned.

Because blowing off less than safe practices a month or two from now in the wake of a “good enough” report would be pretty sad.

But we’ll see.

The Queen of Oak Bay is limping in to Horseshoe Bay right now, just before 7 p.m., down one of its two engines after suffering a reported crankcase explosion.

Coast guard is telling its crew there is no fire and no injuries. The hovercraft is en route.

That was the callout information, none of it immediately confirmable. BC Ferries was only calling it a mechanical problem.

Hope all is well with all on board. But not looking good for traffic on Route 2 for the rest of the night.

Update: News 1130 has now offered an interview with a passenger who said that about 15 minutes out of Horseshoe Bay, fire alarms went off,  smoke was visible and some crew began putting on firefighting gear. Passengers were mustered at the front of the ferry and firedoors were closed, the station was told.

And over at the West Coast Ferries Forum, the ever-fascinating ferry fans have posted a track of the Queen of Oak Bay’s passage that shows exactly where she began to drift. They’re also beginning to chat about replacement vessels on the route.

And, despite word from the company this morning that the problem was a smoking clutch, engineers continue to tell me it was the crankcase.

Sorry, like its title, this is a long post, but the details matter here, and there are lots of them. If you need some music to keep you awake while you read, this might work.

I was troubled by recent comments from Mark Collins, head of engineering at BC Ferries, about the Coastal Inspiration’s crash last month into the loading dock at Duke Point.

So I spent a couple of days trying to figure out why.

After a whole lot of interviews with a whole lot of smart people, I’ve figured out what bothered me: Collins has to know by now pretty much what went wrong. But I don’t think he felt he had to share any of that with the public, who actually own and ride the system.

His remarks also read a whole lot like “look over here at the exquisite mystery that we are trying so hard to solve, and not over there at the things we could have done to prevent this.”

Collins offered his comments during an interview with the Times Colonist. You can read them in full here.

I want to repeat a number of the things he said too, because the paper’s links can disappear fairly quickly.

The story starts off by saying that although the crash was apparently caused by a failure of the propulsion system, the failure of the backup systems is the real mystery. I’m assuming that’s Collins’ take on the situation, not just the reporter’s.

Then it notes that the ferry has a “controlled-pitch, constant-propulsion system” (so the prop rotates at a constant speed, even when the vessel is stationary, but its angle is adjustable).

And that the system is “similar to 17 others in the fleet”.

It says the system has been “used on vessels around the world for about 70 years” and is popular because it cuts maintenance and fuel costs — although it also poses the risk that you might lose control of the pitch of the prop, which will keep it spinning in ways you don’t want it to.

Again, I’m assuming that the information came from Collins, or was at least confirmed by him, although it isn’t attributed to him.

Where Collins actually jumps into the story by name is to say that the ferry has “three backup systems in case there is a pitch-control failure”.

And that “one of the backups is independently connected to the control room, which increases the odds of at least one of the systems working in an emergency.”

And finally, Collins is quoted saying that it would take a “catastrophic explosion in the engine room” to take out all the systems at once.

Hmm.

Where to begin?

Apparently no, it doesn’t take a catastrophic explosion to take out the systems. They, um, went out. Without an explosion.

And that backup remedy independently connected to the “control room”? I’m not sure why the reporter didn’t ask, and report, what it was. Because it really isn’t clear what Collins means.

I’m assuming he didn’t mean the anchor.

It sounds like he’s talking about an emergency manoeuvre that would be conducted from the engine control room. The bridge of the Inspiration has an “emergency manoeuvre” mode that overrides the computer system and produces direct pitch-lever control on both ends of the ship. But in order for the engine control room to take engine control, the bridge would have to give it to them. And that would require someone being on the line to the engine room continuously during the berthing process to give engineers the order to “override NOW” if need be. (This actually happens on most large passenger vessels, by the way.) But BC Ferries has no such communications in place during berthing. So … details on that backup would sure be nice.

Then there’s the bit about the propulsion system and its 70-year history. That all depends on what part of the system Collins is talking about. The drive-line configuration on the Super Cs is unique — and it certainly hasn’t been around for 70 years. Collins is right that  controllable-pitch propellers have been used in ships since about 1940. What isn’t typical is BC Ferries’ decision to use constant-speed motors with them — or to skip the cycloconverters that would provide variable speed control on the motors.

And that reference to the number of ferries with controllable pitch props? A red herring. And it’s not accurate. The truth is, the configurations and type of propulsion differ widely across the fleet. CPPs are the only similarity across the boats.

As for having a single engine, these ships are unique. They are larger than any other double enders. True, Washington State Ferries uses single engines on each end and they use constant-speed CPP in some ships. It’s also true that they have a hell of a time with them.

What we don’t hear Collins talking about is the fact that the German yard that built the Super Cs didn’t want to go with the configuration that exists now. They wanted either two pods per end or a combination CPP and variable-frequency motor on each end. But Ferries was all about future savings and so it opted for a system that had not been proven, but whose numbers promised to give them the best fuel savings on the long haul. BC Ferries went for the cheapest, most simplified drive line, aiming for the best fuel savings — but sacrificing guaranteed control.

And it offends me that Collins either didn’t admit more of the above details to the reporter, or that the reporter failed to report them.

Still awake? Because I think we’ve just got to the really interesting part.

I think Ferries has already discovered that there’s some sort of problem in the configuration it choose despite the warnings.

Crew are telling me that it’s looking like the captain of the Inspiration did not engage the emergency pitch override until just before hitting the dock. (To repeat, I’m being told this by many people I trust, but have not confirmed it. )

They say the captain may have hesitated to use the override because experience with the Super Cs has shown that using it can too easily cause the ship to brown out and lose all its other systems — including steering and propulsion.

That’s scary. Because if that’s true, the problem is bigger than one crash that took out a single loading ramp — however awful that was.

Maybe one day, we’ll also be hearing the screech of colliding metal hulls in Active Pass.

Follow along for just a minute. This is the last bit of the puzzle.

Because even if the captain hesitated over fear of shutting down the ship, there’s more to it than that. And it involves … yes, money.

Roughly speaking, ferries sail in what’s known as Mode 1. Docking involves a switch to what’s known as Mode 2.

In Mode 1, the ferry sails as fuel-efficiently as possible.  Mode 2 is less fuel efficient. Crew at BC Ferries are under serious orders to keep a constant watch on fuel efficiency. And rightly so; all ships are. I think it’s the degree to which costs conflict with safe practices that’s at issue.

BC Ferries has just released a couple of reports on how fares are decided at the company, and on some of the factors that affect travel and indirectly affect the price of a ferry ride.

Well, ok, the reports don’t  exactly dissect how fares are decided, but these studies are the kind of background material that’s used when the company is applying to BC’s ferry commissioner to raise fares.

There are two studies.

One was done following the first four-year contract assigned to the new, commercially-driven company created by the Gordon Campbell government in 2003. The second was done recently, in anticipation of the contract’s third term. They both deal with things like traffic data and revenue yields, and in the case of the second anticipatory study, with forecasts for what demand will be like, and how things like fares and gas prices have affected ridership in the past.

The material was released late this afternoon in response to a freedom of information request back in 2010. Our thanks should go to The Tyee for filing it. And to reporter Andrew MacLeod, who asked for the material. MacLeod has a great analysis of the material, and the effects it might have had on fares if the company was free to raise them as high as it wanted, posted here.

I’m having a read through of the reports tonight. Feel free to weigh in with your own observations.

It should be interesting material to think over, given the fact that the new ferry commissioner is due to issue an analysis any day now of how well the Coastal Ferry Act that Campbell penned is working, and how it might be altered to let the commissioner balance commercial interests with the interests of ferry users. The BC Liberal government asked for the review this spring after there was a huge public outcry about fare increases.

So far, my favourite stuff starts at about page 52 of the second report, with the question: What happens when we apply a “common sense” smell test to the idea that the price of a ferry ticket affects ridership numbers? For the answer, you’ll have to click here.

And then a few pages later, the report deals with the issue that former CEO David Hahn was so fond of raising when anyone got uppity about why traffic was falling off: Do gas prices really affect ferry travel?

Hahn’s answer was always yes. He said that again and again and again.

I don’t want to give away any surprise endings, but let’s just say the company’s own report says that between 2003 and 2011, the answer just might have been a big, fat no.

Perhaps Mr. Hahn, the CEO of the company that paid interVISTAS to produce the report in May of 2011, should have read it.

The ferry commissioner posted the report on its website in July, MacLeod notes. The Integrity BC website  analyzed this one way back in August.

Now we know the answer was available to Mr. Hahn much sooner. I guess we’ll just have to assume he didn’t read it. Because the alternative would be to assume….

Anyway, read and enjoy.

First update: One thing I noticed in reading through the material tonight is the degree to which Ferries is able to increase revenue simply through flexible pricing. On page 58 of the first study, the authors conclude that by targeting pricing by time-of-day, route and trip purpose, overall revenues could be increased without violating the fare caps set by the commissioner.

The kicker? The overall potential revenue gain from just the seven routes studied was $21.8 million — or a full 10.8 per cent over the existing fare revenue set for 2010.

The report was written in 2007. The interesting question for me is whether the information was accurate, and whether Ferries made successful use of it, up to the ceiling imposed on it by fare caps. I’m sure the ferry commissioner will help us with those things.

One of the things that MacLeod notes in his analysis is that to max out on the effect of raising fares, you’d really have to jack them up — by say, 75 per cent. That’s something the ferry commissioner doesn’t allow. Right now.

Second update: The first report also concludes that there’s room to charge more during congested periods and less during quieter times. But it also suggests the system offer “significant” discounts for regular users and “more market-based” fares for tourists and business travellers. Hmm.

Third update: The second report makes several interesting observations:

1. There’s a “major transition” in traffic patterns under way at Ferries. There are demographic shifts and changes in ownership of island properties (meaning a shift from commuting to temporary visits), both of which are complicated by recessions and the after-effects of 9-11. The conclusion: it would be foolish to expect any sort of short-term growth in ridership.

2. Price and ridership really are linked. But the pricing-demand rubber band isn’t as elastic as many people think .

3. Mostly, ridership appears to be linked to the health of the economy in general. With a recession, it falls. With a healthy GDP, it grows.

So much for peace and light at this festive time of year.

I’ve been trying hard not to stay angry over BC Ferries’ response to the fact that one of its new Super Cs crashed hard into a loading ramp at Duke Point last week.

In some of the early news coverage, spokeswoman Deborah Marshall was quoted as telling people that 10 “hard landings” — i.e. crashes — in one year was pretty good, considering the number of sailings BC Ferries offers annually.

“There’s certainly not a lot, and I go back to the fact we’ve conducted 185,000 sailings a year — so that’s 185,000 times we’ve landed ships,” Marshall told the CBC. She was also pretty chipper about the fact there have only been 10 this year, less than the annual average of 12. And only four of the 10 really screwed up traffic at the terminals.

I thought that was a troubling and less than professional response, as I wrote earlier. It bothered me partly because the reaction to a bad accident — apparently some kind of loss of control over the prop that was supposed to slow the ferry down as it approached the terminal — shouldn’t be to say “oh well, when you sail a lot, sh*t happens”.

It should be something more like “one accident is one too many, we are grateful no one was seriously injured, we are investigating any and all associated factors and will address them fully, and the investigation and our response will be entirely transparent to the public who own and ride the ferries.”

And then I decided to stop wanking. I reminded myself that it’s the holiday, newsrooms are short staffed, lots of reporters don’t get to cover maritime stuff very often, and sometimes the best you can do with the time you are assigned is get your soundbite and run.

But then Marshall’s comment was repeated again this week, by a reporter who should, and does, know better.

Keith Baldrey — who I had the pleasure of working with at the Vancouver Sun years ago, and who is a senior member of the legislative press gallery in Victoria, and who has superb access to Ferries officials when he has questions — tossed this line into a column yesterday that was mostly about the financial challenges ahead for the company:

“Of course, four “hard” landings so far this year seems excessive,” Baldrey wrote. “But BC Ferries responds that its fleet sails more than 187,000 times a year and averages about a dozen hard landings (of various degrees) a year, which seems to put things in perspective.”

And I finally thought, good god, if we’re going to keep repeating that company line, could we at least help the public decide whether those figures actually put things into perspective or not?

Maybe we really should look on 10 crashes a year as reasonable. But how would we decide that?

Well, one rough measure might be to make a quick call to the Department of Transport in Washington State, which runs the ferry system there. And ask them how their “hard-landing” picture looks.

I waited for a reporter to do that. But I didn’t see any sign that they had. So I called WSF myself to ask.

The answer, from the polite folks in the communications department, who could easily have ignored a call that was not coming from a major newspaper or TV station, or even from the U.S., was as follows:

“Regarding the number of hard landings that Washington State Ferries have experienced in 2010 and 2011 – the answer is two.”

That would be two. On a system that makes more than 150,000 sailings per year.

BC Ferries makes 185,000 sailings.

I’m not great at math. Maybe someone could do the calculations for me that would factor in the difference in sailing numbers, and then indicate which system is in the hard-landing lead: the one with two out of 150,000 or 10 out of 185,000.

I’m guessing that it’s BC Ferries.

Make what you want of that. And of how professional, or reassuring, it is for our provincial ferry company to explain away  an accident by offering the odds of a dock crash on any given year.

For the record, at no time during the phone conversations I had with the Washington State Ferries spokeswomen, or in the email I was sent, did anyone refer to that company’s two hard landings as “only” two. Which, by comparison to BC Ferries’ “only” 10, felt more infinitely more appropriate than being told I really should remember that “sh*t happens” when you sail a lot…

* I wasn’t clear if the email from WSF meant they had a total of two hard landings over 2010-11, or two each year. Until I heard back, to be fair to BCFS in comparing, I assumed it meant two per year.

WSF has now clarified. It was two in total, both in 2010, none in 2011.

Someone is reminding us all that BC Ferries had a design choice when it built its pricey new Super Cs, and that when it made its choice, it took a gamble. This week, it lost. The propulsion system it chose — over the warnings of experts — failed. Spectacularly.

Thank you to Tidal Station for the latest reminder. And for explaining it in such readable language.

(And thank you to reader Ann who left an alternative interpretation of the issue below, in the comments section. It indicates that I may not be entirely right, and as this is an engineering issue, that’s possible. Take my post here with the grain of salt it always deserves.)

I’m glad to see the debate spread. It’s important that citizens understand the stuff they own, and the people who are planning for it, buying it, running it and looking after it on our behalf. You can never have too much clarity or too much information on public services that provide such critical transportation and cost so much money.

I’ve been pretty unhappy with the level of public debate, aka major media reports, on the mess that the Coastal Inspiration made of the ramp at Duke Point in Nanaimo when it blew in at more than five knots without any apparent control over its landing speed.

I’m unhappy not because reporters (*see note below)  haven’t pried loose a definitive answer on the cause of the crash; that’s the detailed work that’s being left to the Transportation Safety Board, and they don’t weigh in until they’ve got all the loose ends tied up. I’m more concerned about the laziness, or general lack of curiosity, in asking questions and getting answers about aspects of the crash that we CAN talk about now.

Being really interested means things like stepping up and calling the “hard landing” a crash, which is what it was. It means asking about the fact there have been four alarming crashes this year. It means that when the company responds by noting there have been fewer crashes than last year and it’s only four out of 185,00 sailings that have gone bad, a reporter says: “I’m sorry, you must have misunderstood my question. I wasn’t checking the odds, I was asking about the pattern of problems during departures and arrivals, and what the company is doing to assess and remedy the matter.”

(It was worse than that. The company actually said, almost cheerfully, that there were a full 10 “hard landings” this year, and only four of them caused major inconvenience. And that because 10 is less than the 12 they average, it’s all good.)

If news outlets were doing their jobs, here’s one of the things that might have surfaced in the Globe or the Sun or on CBC or some other news outlet that citizens watch or read in common, and that might have helped people think through the problem, and debate it, and it might have forced the company and the government that owns it to do some explaining.

Reporters might have asked about this, which has been sitting on BC Ferries’ website since early April. It was posted in response to an FOI request from The Tyee, which has done a lot of good reporting on design issues on the Super Cs right from the beginning, including their huge fuel consumption. The documents were posted as part of the FOI process that mainstream reporters celebrate with such enthusiasm, and were so excited about when it was extended to the secretive body that Ferries had become. The thing about information? It doesn’t mean much til you use it.

Reporters might have asked about the fact that Ferries knew years ago it was making a design choice that might lead to just the crash that it experienced this week.

They might have asked why Ferries chose to ignore expert concerns, including those from FSG, the shipyard that built the Super Cs, and chose instead to go with an older, slightly less expensive design that it was more familiar with.

They might have asked why BC Ferries chose to gamble with its propulsion system.

Because it lost.

And that matters. It matters for the present fleet and how it’s operated, and for all the ferries we have yet to build or buy and how they’re operated.

The way managers and executives run a company is what really matters. In the end, it isn’t whether it’s a Crown corporation, or whether the subsidy is big enough, that matters most. Those things matter, but not most.

What matters is that the right decisions about what boats to buy or build, and how to run them, get made. And the only way that happens is by hiring people who know what they’re doing, who have real life, real world ferry experience.

What matters is that the way the boats are run is safe and efficient. There has been some hint that the speed at which Ferries conducts its arrivals and departures maybe an issue, for example. It sure didn’t give the captain of the ferry approaching Duke Point this week any wiggle room when, as I’ve been told, he ordered the propellers to be set to astern and got no response. And then tried to use the emergency override, and still got no response. We’ll see if any of that’s true, and what it means.

More on all that business of experienced managers later this week.

For now, we’re waiting for answers on this week’s crash, and to the immediate questions that those answers will give rise to:

For example, given the concerns that academics and outside experts expressed (and you really should read that stuff I linked to, and what The Tyee has written over the past several years), did Ferries just decide to stick with what was familiar? None of the other new ferries of that size built in the past five years use the design that Ferries chose, none of them have that propulsion system. Why? Was that not some kind of hint? Was there an overriding reason why Ferries’ needs were different and unique?

Was the person in charge of making these design choices for Ferries capable of doing so intelligently?

I don’t know why Ferries vetoed the suggestions they were given.

I don’t know as it was all about cost.

I do know they picked what they liked, and that they were used to.

Costly decision, in the end.

* I don’t really fault most reporters as individuals. I was one, for decades, and I know what they’re up against, especially these days. You work at 1,000 different assignments, each in a new area, you’re rarely given a beat any more (quaint idea, a reporter who developed expertise), and you are moved on to the next issue too fast to even think through the questions you might have about the one in front of you. The odd reporter is given the time, budget and freedom to follow the news where it goes, and if they screw up, well then, shame on them. But in general, this apparent laziness and lack of curiosity is the fault of news outlets and their owners, the folks who don’t seem to understand the responsibility that should come with ownership of the press or airwaves and worse, don’t seem to understand their own nominal product and the eagerness with which the public would consume it, given a change. Ok. Rant over…

Kind of hard to see much of what went wrong, but if you haven’t been in to Duke Point, it gives you a decent idea of what the approach looks like and the size of the structure that the ferry hit.

You can also get a tiny sense of the holiday traffic headaches that Nanaimo is suffering as all vehicles from the Duke Point run are funnelled through town to Departure Bay.

You can find the footage here.

Thanks to the CBC TV for asking for the information.

You can find it here.

Feel free to discuss among yourselves.

Me, I’m just reading through it now. Checking to see if there’s a penalty clause for interference, tripping, boarding … or hard landing.

Oh. Found a few clauses right away. Two years’ severance pay if he is asked to leave for anything other than cause — on a compensation package of  $563,000 (you do the math). Seven weeks’ vacation. Two pensions. Good til 2018.

Merry Christmas, boss.

I was musing about that because the bow door of the Coastal Inspiration got whacked this week when the ferry hit the loading ramp on an approach to Duke Point in Nanaimo. And then the company announced that there would be a month-long delay while what was described as a hinge was manufactured in Germany and then flown over.

I couldn’t figure out why a company would install a complicated system that required expensive parts and repair somewhere else, if they had a choice.

I understand, for example, that you might choose to install a Rolls Royce engine in your ship. And that when you make such a decision, you know you’re signing on for the Rolls parts and service system.

But I didn’t understand whether Ferries had any choice in their bow door system — and if they did, why they would choose this route.

Welcome to the inside of my head. This is the kind of conversation I have with myself all the time. I hear things, I see things, I read things. I talk to people. I think about what they say. And the questions that arise in all of that, I take those to people who have answers.

Sorry to inflict it all on you mid-stream. I’ve got the answers now, more or less, and it’s time to move on to the rest of the party that’s still going on between my ears — and right now, that’s mostly about what caused the crash in the first place. Investigations by the company and the Transportation Safety Board started in earnest today. So there will be answers.

Meantime, on the door front, thanks to everyone across so many time zones who helped me out. Get back to the holiday gin and tonics now, friends.

Here’s the “why” on the doors, more or less:

• The doors on the Super Cs are patented MacGregor doors. BC Ferries is required by its insurance company — as are most of the world’s ferry operators by their insurance companies — to use approved parts. The patent for the doors rests with MacGregor, and FSG, the German shipyard that built the Coastals,  is licensed to manufacture the doors it installed and to provide approved repair parts. Friends elsewhere in commercial shipping say this is true across the world’s fleets.
• The independent surveyors and certification groups known as classification societies would require this too, in order to sign off on repairs. And without that sign off, the insurance is voided.

In short, as my clever reader Dave politely points out, BC Ferries did what all companies do, and did it appropriately, and it is now following the normal course of events in having the repairs done.

Case closed. Move along. There really is nothing to see here, folks.

Back to musing about the cause of the crash that necessitated the repair, right?

I stand corrected if I’ve been asking the wrong questions. Thanks to both of the gents who answered. I’ll keep asking around on this one, but I’m guessing they’re right. Maybe I’ll just put them on permanent speed dial … Seriously, thank you to them.

Meantime, I’m still not clear if it’s possible to order a simpler door system on a foreign-build, one that you can fix more easily here. Maybe not. I’ll continue to harass my acquaintances who order ferries elsewhere in the world and see what they say. I understand that if you buy a Rolls engine, for example, you’re signing on for a lifetime of Rolls parts. The question is: where there other simpler door systems, or was this it if you picked the German yard? Anyone know?)

I posted an item earlier about the cost of this week’s ferry crash at Nanaimo.

One of the items I pointed to was the cost of sending back to Germany for parts for the bow door that was damaged when the Coastal Inspiration rammed the loading ramp at Duke Point.

I don’t know why the repairs have to be done there, or the new parts made and sent from there. I’ve been told that it’s a contractual/patent type issue that means fleet engineers or local suppliers can’t do the work, but I don’t know for sure, and I don’t know what those contracts might have looked like.

One reader left a comment on the door issue, and I responded.

I’m moving the exchange up here so you can read it. I think it’s an important issue for lots of reasons, the main one for me being the light an answer would shed on what we agreed to as part of the German contract, and what that says about how well BC Ferries management bargained on our behalf — because we’re not done building new boats, right?

You can find my original post here.

This was the comment:

But it really does have interesting fallout for the ferry world. So here goes.

The story, which is American, deals with the fact that people are getting fatter. And so they’re heavier. And so at some point, you have to take that into account and allow fewer of them on any given ferry. Because ferries have a maximum capacity, and you can only divide it so many ways.

The story says that Washington State Ferries isn’t about to start banning heavy folks, but it is reducing the passenger capacity in the fleet.

BC Ferries is now saying that an “electronic failure in a control system” was to blame when the Coastal Inspiration, one of the three new Super Cs, rammed into a loading ramp. The company is also confirming that the damage was extensive: the terminal and the berthing wall, including the apron, ramp, wing wall and tower, and the concrete structure underneath it.

The ferry itself took damage to the portside door, which means having a replacement part made and flown in from Germany.

The ferry is out of commission for a month while the part is made, and the single-berth terminal, which is on the edge of Nanaimo, will be out of  out of service for months, not weeks. Traffic will be diverted to Departure Bay downtown.

So that was one pricey accident.

That’s a huge amount of damage to the terminal and ramp.

And the mention of the door part, that’s not only expensive but a good indication of the way that Ferries does business, and the difference that having some more real-world maritime experience in management would make.

It’s really odd that the company finds itself in the position of having to have door parts made abroad.

Crew tell me the new ferries “cost us a lot” in parts and maintenance. They say the deal made for the vessels with the German yard was kind of like buying a Porsche, where you can’t go out later and buy parts of your choice. You have to get them flown in, at whatever price the seller chooses, and you can’t make them yourself, because you haven’t negotiated any patents. So for some other ships in the fleet, engineers can machine new parts. On the Coastals, the bow doors are a different design that lifts the door and then slides it on a roller. When it works, it’s really slick. But when it gets hit, the damage is huge. It’s a heavy door but a fairly light track system, and that and the cylinders that lift the door are what gets ruined when the door gets whacked, the engineers say. That’s when you get stuck with a month-long wait and a big bill for parts.

And that’s where you find yourself when you go for the kind of contract Ferries signed for the German newbuilds. Great on the front end: good price, lots to brag about, on time and on budget. The bills come in later.

Meantime, the reference to an electronic failure is interesting too. What exactly that will turn out to mean, and the actual reason behind the failure on a boat where there have been a number of pre- and post-warranty problems, will surface eventually.

An unfortunate incident, all the way around. I hope if there is a lesson to be learned, it’s identified. And put to use.

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.

A reader appears to have solved the ferry mystery that I have been poking at, with great frustration and clearly with way too few brains.

I’ll just post Dave’s comment up and let it go at that. I’m guessing it’s accurate. This being Saturday morning and Swansea and Newcastle still being tied 0-0 on the pitch, I’ll turn the debate over foreignbuilds and Canadian expertise over to you for now. (For anyone too tired to click the links to my earlier posts, this was a question about which Canadian company had ordered a new ro-ro ferry from FSG, the same German shipyard that came to the public’s attention when it build three big ferries for BC Ferries. My question was why the purchaser wasn’t being named.)

Dave, you’re a prince. In so many ways.

Dave wrote:

I give you OCEANEX. ShipPax in Sweden (paid membership required for access) announced on their news-ticker on 14 Dec 11 that “OCEANEX ro-ro ordered at Flensburger”.

This is the second ship OCEANEX will have built in Germany. The Oceanex Avalon was built at J.J. Seitas in Hamburg. Then Hynes paid the 25% duty.

Problem now, of course, is that making a big splash about getting merchantmen built offshore while the Harper gesellschaft is making bold announcements about multi-billion dollar outlays to Canadian yards for government vessels is a little embarrassing… for the government. It will start to highlight the gross inadequacies of the Canadian shipbuilding industry and the fact that there will be at least a 10 year ramp up to modernize the yards and develop a qualified workforce.

I have no doubt that there was no Canadian yard with the design engineering capability to develop the type of ship needed for a high capacity short sea line through the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the east coast of NFLD. In short, there isn’t a Canadian yard yet capable of building a 210 meter anything, much less a versadeck ro-ro.

Flensburger otoh, has been building a batch of ro-ros (for the British navy’s strategic reserve no less) and has the design engineering capability to make the adaptations necessary. And then there’s the issue of cheap financing.

If you want and example of how poor Canadian ship design capability really is just watch the navy. The combat support ships (once cancelled) have been reborn. Only now they are looking at something like the German Berlin-class replenishment vessel. The goal is to get the German design altered to Canadian requirements and then have them sell the adapted design to a Canadian yard for building.

Pass the popcorn. This is going to be fun to watch.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about a mysterious Canadian company that had placed an order for a container/vehicle ferry with the same German shipyard that built BC Ferries’ big new vessels a few years ago.

My main point was that it was very odd for such a big contract to be announced without naming the party that was doing the buying.

The German shipyard should have been boasting all over the place, not just in quiet interviews, given the dismal state of the European economy and of shipbuilding in general right now. And boasting aside, these are normally just straightforward announcements made through the industry press.

If it was a Canadian government purchase, or an order placed by a public-type agency like a provincial ferry service on either coast, it would have gone to tender. So the process would have been quite public — and so would the fact that the ferry company would have had to get its board to approve the spending.

(I really appreciated the enthusiasm behind the theory that David Hahn, the departing CEO of BC Ferries, had somehow secretly ordered one last German ferry as a parting shot, but that’s pretty much impossible.)

Anyway, after a night of sifting around through emails and industry data, I’m putting my money on either the FedNav Group as the likely buyer, or on Oceanex.

(Note: FedNave has just confirmed to me via email that it isn’t the buyer. I’ll be posting again on that later today, and leaving this post stand for now.)

FedNav is based in Montreal, and already has a lot of ice-class vessels, which is what has been ordered.  And they’ve expanded a fair bit in the past five years. Looks like they won a number of government contract northern routes in Canada. And, if I’m looking at correct information, contracts with the government of Newfoundland.

Oceanex, headquartered in St. John’s, is owned by Sid Hynes, former chair of Marine Atlantic. It hauls freight for Costco, Zellers and Wal-Mart. And they’ve recently picked up a big deal to ship new autos from the car port in Dartmouth into Newfoundland. Hynes is owns a piece of Canship Ugland, which manages the shuttle tankers that bring crude oil in from the offshore fields in Newfoundland.

As many of my clever readers helpfully pointed out, there’s a news story written in German that deals with the contract announcement (but doesn’t name the buyer either). Roughly translated, part of the piece points out the new ferry is intended for use between Montreal and Newfoundland. So again, FedNav fits the bill. And so does Oceanex.

In any case, that still doesn’t explain the secrecy.

Unless it was mostly about Canadian sensibilities over the past year, when Ottawa was busy cancelling the import duty on imported vessels — including ferries over 129 metres. This new one is planned for 210 metres.

Because at the same time that was going on, the country was beginning to hear about the billions of dollars worth of shipbuilding money that Ottawa was about to sprinkle around the country.

Maybe as all of those very political headlines were being written, it just seemed smarter to fly under the radar.

Or maybe it was, and still is, come kind of commercial consideration.

As always, your thoughts and theories are welcome, either in the public comments box below, or to my email address, onthewaterfrontblog@gmail.com.

The German yard that built BC Ferries‘ three Super Cs  a few years back has apparently nailed another Canadian order, this time for a ferry being billed as “the world’s most eco-friendly con-ro ship”.

(A con-ro is a hybrid ship, somewhere between a container ship and a ro/ro – or “roll on/ roll off ” — vehicle carrier, and is designed to carry container cargo and vehicles including cars, trucks and trailers.)

According to headlines in the maritime press today, Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft has announced that it beat out the international competition for an order from an unidentified Canadian buyer.

Motorship‘s story quotes FSG managing director Peter Sierk as saying it took two years to custom-design the concept for the vessel, which will roll out of the yard in 2013 at a reported 210 metres (Ferries’ Coastal Renaissance is 160 metres), complete with “ramps and clear deck heights for containers of different sizes as well as trucks, trailers and cars.”

Not exactly waterfront news, but the folks at West Coast Environmental Law are the same folks who argue over all kinds of environmental issues, including the battle over the Kitimat pipelines and the waters around those parts.

So I thought I’d push the envelope and pass along a new idea they’ve cooked up. I can’t figure out yet if it’s really great or just really gimmicky, but I do know that it’s really making me smile.

On Feb. 21 of next year, the group is holding what they’re billing as “the world’s first ever” Twitter moot. What’s that mean? Well, as the law group helpfully explains, “a moot is a legal debate held in a courtroom setting … where teams of counsel attempt to persuade a judge of the strength of their case by reference to legal authority.”

This being 2011 and lawyers being the kind of people who can afford groovy smartphones and fancy tech gear, they’ll be doing it in the court of Twitter instead of a real courtroom.

The case will be a mock appeal of an actual ruling. Teams from law schools across the country (including UVic and UBC) will compete to be crowned “the world’s first Twitter Moot champions”.

I’ll just assume they were under oath when they testified that their real goal is to “bring environmental law issues, West Coast Environmental Law and the students who participate to the attention of a world-wide audience” — and that it’s not about doing this because they couldn’t cut it in a real beauty contest with one of those real tiara crown things.

Anyway, you can read all about it here, complete with details of the case, the teams, the judges and how you can participate. It’s really pretty interesting.

And then maybe you can send me your ideas for the maritime issue you’d most like to see settled in the Court of 140.

I know there’s always work under way on shipwrecks — mapping the ones that have been found, searching for the ones we still wonder about. Celebrating the ones we come across by chance.

But I’d never really thought about the “finding” part: how many, how often, how many left to go.

There was a great post over at marinesight.com this fall that provided a quick list of the six latest finds, along with some photos. It’s an eye-opening reminder for the non-underwater archeologists among us of how widely shipwrecks range in age and geographic spread.

One of the big finds on the list isn’t really one shipwreck, but a set of about 30 ships, probably trading ships that were working the Maritime Silk Road and all sank at different times, that was found off the coast of China in December of 2010.

It was a big find by China’s State Oceanic Administration, and came at the end of a five-year project spread across almost  700,000 square kilometres of inland waters and territorial seas.

In a move that might have been related, a month before the finds were announced, the oceanic agency signed a deal with the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (another government agency) agreeing that they’d work closely on things like underwater relics and archaeology and management of underwater relics, the China Daily reported.

Roy Lester is now 61, but has been defending his right to modest work gear for years. A bankruptcy lawyer in real life, he started working as a weekend lifeguard more than 40 years ago because he liked the lifestyle and the camaraderie, the story says.

Apparently the dress code was more conservative then.

One of the funniest parts of the story is the lengths that Lester went through to try to get through a new rehire test the department had devised. He didn’t want to take it in the tiny briefs he was ordered to wear, and he didn’t like the alternative they offered of boxers or boarder shorts, because of the drag factor during the timed swim tests. Lester says men “his age” mostly like jammers, or tighter thigh-length shorts — and he figures the public prefers them on his age group too.

Lester’s problem is that the briefs aren’t just for the tests. They’re the new working uniform now that ”they want the lifeguards to look young and attractive,” he says.

At the time of the dispute, nearly a third of the its lifeguards were between the ages of 40 and 80, the story says. Eighty? Hmmm.

The first year of the new test, Lester refused to wear the briefs, wasn’t hired, sued and lost.

The next year, he offered to wear the briefs  over his jammers. Alas, the department declined.

Lester, who is described as a “barrel-chested man” who still competes in triathalons, says he can easily do the speed test of 100 yards in 75 seconds — with or without baggy boarder shorts. The real issue, he insists, is modesty.

His new lawsuit has just been given the green light.

You can read the details here.

And since you’ve made it this far, here’s a bit of video of some news footage of Lester. Although I have to say when I watch it, I wonder what his problem is… nice man. Very nice.

Finally, those unfamiliar with the briefs concept and unwilling to face the video footage might mull over the fact they are somewhat skimpier than this:

The company took serious heat about the million dollars or so in profit that it pocketed, and customers threatened legal action. CEO David Hahn, who is uncharacteristically quiet these days, leapt into the thick of things to insist the move was legal and the passengers could suck wind.

CBC says refunds on the unused tickets will be offered until Oct. 24.

I’m not sure what this one is about. I’m guessing someone in the legal department ran the numbers on the potential cost and headache of a legal action and suggested they cut their losses. Maybe it was just a good public relations decision at a bad time for the company.

Or maybe it was just the right thing to do. Which is what Hahn has now admitted.

You can find the story of the refund here.

Dix, who presented his demand in a letter co-signed by NDP ferries critic Gary Coons, also demanded release of a copy of the consultant’s report used by the board of directors to make its decision.

Their argument? “Disclosing the agreements will allow the official opposition and others to test the premier’s claim that a review of Hahn and other executives’ supplementary pension agreements is not possible. The information will also shed light on what factors the board felt were relevant in determining supplementary bonuses. “

At one level, all you can really say is: You go, girls.

BC Ferries is set up as a private company, and it has one shareholder: the province. Which is to say, us. So I can’t do much but applaud any call for release of reports that explain why we’re spending so much on executive benefits. There’s either a good reason or there isn’t. We either bought some good advice from consultants or we didn’t. Either way, in the real world where Ferries pretends to operate, shareholders are actually entitled to information.

But I had another thought when I heard about Dix’s demand, and that’s that he already has a couple of other parties to tap if he really wants information about how the board makes its decisions. And they’re a lot closer to home.

The board of directors for the BC Ferry Authority, which oversees the company on behalf of we the shareholders, includes Dan Miller. Miller is a former NDP premier of the province. He should, even given his fiduciary responsibilities to the board, have some glimmer of conscience about the party that elected him and gave him a large portion of the gloss and the cred that bagged him the job on the board.

Dix should call him. And Miller should talk.

In addition to Miller, both the company’s board of directors and the ferry authority’s board have nominees pulled directly and officially from organized labour.

In the case of the operating board, it’s Gord Larkin. If I’m not mistaken, Larkin is a longtime NDP party member, and a very active one in past years. He got his gig, which pays nicely, off the back of his labour credentials, and if there’s information to be explained about a decision by the company board — even one he might not have had an active hand in — then Larkin should be helping shine some light on it in every way he can.

So Dix should call him too. And Larkin should talk.

The labour nominee on the ferry authority board is John Radosevic, who more directly represents us and our interests as his board oversees the operation of the company on our behalf. Radosevic has a really big responsibility in that regard. The privatization of the running of the ferry system was thrust on us by then-Liberal premier Gordon Campbell, who made us all reluctant shareholders. As we all know, deputy premier at the time was Christy Clark. We’re in this odd hybrid public/private mess because of them, and making sure that their experiment is going as well as possible requires that directors grow a pair when need be. Especially the ones who got the jobs because of their reputation for representing working families.

Dix should call Radosevic too. And Radosevic should talk.

Dix is right to make demands of the premier. But as appropriate and politically rewarding as it might be to fire off demands to her, there are two boards who owe us some answers too. We pay them for, and trust them with, an enormously important job: ensuring our public ferry fleet is run safely and efficiently.

If they can’t explain why they chose to reward their CEO so handsomely for his efforts, there’s something wrong.

And if they can’t give the party that made them what they are a hand, there’s really something wrong.

You can find the official version of the latest letter to Clark from Dix and Coons here. An earlier letter, written on July 6 to the premier, can be found here.

Other news outlets referred to completion of repairs that were required to both the ferry and the “berthing structure” that she hit. Some reported that the temporary backups created in Gulf Islands traffic were expected to ease.

One of the consequences of a decision by local news outlets not to assign reporters to the maritime beat with any consistency is that they don’t know how to translate these announcements, and sometimes aren’t even clear on the questions that should be asked.

That “hard landing”? It means the skipper blew the landing and whacked the “berthing structure,” as BC Ferries’ spokesman called it. That “structure” was actually a dolphin, or one of those massive upright pilings you see on each side of the slip that the ferry motors in to as it docks.

There are lots of reasons a ferry might blow a landing, everything from mechanical error to human error, with a range of contributing factors like training and unfamiliar equipment and weather and current and so on. BC Ferries has already said that the cause of this crash was not mechanical.

Besides what wasn’t to blame, all we know is that the whack damaged the ferry, which required a bunch of welding, and the dolphin, which I gather some work was done to as well.

So what will be interesting now is what the investigation turns up — and whether those answers will be made public. In the era of Freedom of Information and company transparency, I guess in the end someone will be able to request the investigation report, someone who either has the money to pay for it or the media entitlement to ask for a fee waiver. BC Ferries has in the past committed to post its major accident reports (the ones they call “divisional inquiries”) online. It would be nice if the new era of transparency led it to post them all. Including this one, as soon as it’s complete.

Meantime, you have to hope the “hard landing” was due to something reasonable, and not some inexcusable kind of human error. Considering the Queen of Nanaimo‘s age, two hard landings in a year  – which she’s had –
is cause for concern, and care and attention must be a priority. But we’ll see what turns up.

You can find the Sun story here. And you can find CBC’s short, sweet take on the story here.

Sing along to this.

While reading this.

And munching on this.

Happy Canada Day, mates. Long may we rock.

The Australian news site news.com.au posted a good selection of the photos tonight. They really do give you pause, even if you’re not quite the Titanic freak that my son has become. I listen to him talk about the ship and the wreck all the time and have kind of grown numb to the whole thing. But I found it really hard to look away, for example, from the photo of the captain’s bathtub, complete with alternating plumbing that apparently allowed him to bathe in a choice of fresh or salt water.

The pictures have surfaced as part of a suit over a salvage claim for the wreck and the millions of dollars worth of artifacts still aboard, and around, it.

You can read all about it, and see the photos, here.

The new deadline is June 21.

Two of the eligible bidders — neither of them was Seaspan, BC’s lone contestant — had asked for a late September deadline to get together submissions for the $35-billion contract Ottawa is issuing for new navy ships, coast guard cutters and other vessels. The majority of the work will be split between two bidders over 20 years.

BC Premier Christy Clark, who has pulled several rabbits out of her election-mode hat in order to support Seaspan’s bid, has said she opposed the extension, saying it would “send the wrong message.”

Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter, who is backing a bid from Irving Shipyards in his province, agreed with Clark.

Ontario’s Seaway Marine and Quebec’s Davie Yards are the other bidders.

Two weeks is an interesting period of time for an extension … Makes you wonder if the feds already have a favourite pair of bidders, or if the move really is meant to allow for fair competition, or if it’s a sop for appearance sake?

More on this over the weekend. Now that the players have mostly come out of the woodwork in this hotly contested contest, there are some interesting questions to ask.

Meantime, you can read the CBC story here.

Dead is 57-year-old Cpl. Paul Voisine. He was reportedly diving with the wreck of the HMCS Saskatchewan Wednesday when he was pulled unconscious from the deck of the sunken vessel shortly before noon.

A grim story all around. No official explanation has been released as of Thursday night. An autopsy has been scheduled.

Condolences to his wife, family and friends.

The Nanaimo Daily News and the Vancouver Sun both have stories posted.

For everyone who showed interest, or who caught my conversation about the sale with Ryan Price on CFAX this week, I thought I’d offer you a few further thoughts. (And for those who didn’t, in a nutshell, my post listed a number of oddities about the sale of the Esquimalt, including the fact that it sold for about 10 times its apparent value, was immediately registered in Cambodia, not China, and was then abandoned in Port Alberni for years.)

On the issue of the Jacqueline being reflagged right after she was sold, I didn’t write much about it in the post, because I thought the item was getting a bit long. But I did talk about it with Ryan, and got some response afterward. My point was that if a Chinese buyer had bought the ferry for use as a small coastal vessel in China (an oddity itself, a ro-ro ferry being converted to a cargo ship!), it would have been flipped to the Chinese registry — not Cambodia’s, which the buyer chose. China is like Canada: it flies home flags for coastal trade. For its international vessels, it mostly uses the Hong Kong registry for ships working nearby waters, and the Panama registry for vessels working farther away. But Cambodia? As one international shipping expert told me, that registry is the “bottom of the barrel” and “no sensible businessman would go anywhere near it”. News stories, including some in the Asian press, around the time of the Jacqueline‘s sale in 2008, confirm that the registry was a troubled one.

But that was just one of the oddities surrounding the sale that made me wonder what was up when the ferry fetched so much over value, and was then promptly abandoned.

There’s more.

One of the notes I got this week was from an expert whose work includes ferry operations in southern Europe and Asia. I had asked him before I wrote the post about the rules surrounding ferry purchases elsewhere, and if this kind of potential scam was possible outside of Canada. He got back to me yesterday with thoughts including these:

“Christina, you asked about whether it was possible that the Chinese operative tried this possible scam on another ferry company here. We looked at records going back from 2005 through 2008, the ones in which ferry companies produced brochures for the worldwide brokers’ network. The big players in Europe only had a few vessels for sale and they were all traded locally in the European market, it turns out.

“They were fairly new vessels, though; that’s one difference. There is very little chatter about the Chinese buying older ferries in Europe.

“We asked around and it looks like — although we are not 100% sure — that the same move has been attempted in the south, in Malta and Greece.

“The Italians pretty much own and run Malta’s ferry system, and they had an approach for one of their vessels, a small  RO/RO ferry, only 100 vehicles,  250 pax [passengers]. The reason they remembered it was that the Chinese buyers didn’t speak English, and when the translator was asked the “guide price” (ie what the buyers were willing to pay), he added a zero on to the generally accepted value. The sellers became suspicious as to why the buyers would pay so much over the clear valuation, and assumed that the translator was on the take. Through backdoor channels, they found out who employed the translator and put the “finger” to him. He claimed that he was told the figure he quoted and that he translated exactly  what was being said. To double check, they got another translator and when the guide price came up, the same offer was made. But it was so high they though they were being set up (there was a big government corruption trial just about to start), so they walked away from the deal.

“The Greek ferry operator was just about to do its deal, but backed out at the last minute. He also thought he was being set up, as the buyers wanted to pay well over book value for an old rust bucket that would never make it to China. The Greek operator put a high price on the ferry, thinking the Chinese would bargain down the deal to its real value, but when they accepted it right away, he said he smelled a rat.

“These two companies are good operators, but not really in the big leagues for ferries in Europe. They shut down a lot of their services during the winter months. We don’t know if any of the big players were approached, but the Chinese were definitely in Europe looking for old vessels. It didn’t make too much sense because they were talking about big sums of money, and if they knew the market, they could have got some great deals on newer ferries, but they seemed to target smaller operators who maybe looked a little desperate for the cash.

“I think the Chinese have tried the game in a number of different countries, and right now not many people are openly talking about it — maybe they’re fearful of the long arm of the Chinese law, and the fact that China does have major investment in most of these countries, and could use that as leverage to have some of the overpayment returned to them. It is a good scam, one that worked in Russia back in the old days. You can only pull it off maybe a few times, and then it is dead.”

Later in the note, he added:

“We do think they [the Chinese] have been looking, and may have talked to a few ferry companies, but given the laws here [in Europe], people backed away, as the word is they thought they were being set up.

“If they had handled it better, then we think the Chinese could have pulled off a number of these scams. They just used the wrong people to front it.

“I am a little perplexed as to how your Canada was on the target list, although we have seen that confirmed in the news stories recently. I do think now that it is because of the banking system we have in the EU. We have massive overkill in the rules on opening a bank account, for example — if you don’t use it, the bank suspends it. The same with mobile phones. After six months, they kill the number if it hasn’t been used.”

So there you go. It’s not just me whose antennae are twitching.

Grim news tonight in stories about an alarming, just-released  report on the state of the ocean. Or oceans.

The environmental report described in the stories was embargoed until today and articles about it are just starting to appear; London’s The Independent has one of the best so far.

I’m mindful of the inappropriateness of pasting and copying large amounts of type from commercial sites, but there really isn’t any better way to sum up the nasty picture that the study paints than to pass along the headline, deck and opening paragraph of  The Independent‘s story. I’ve only just started to dig in to the report itself, but this seems like a beautiful summary:

Oceans on brink of catastrophe

Marine life facing mass extinction ‘within one human generation’ / State of seas ‘much worse than we thought’, says global panel of scientists

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

You can find the entire Independent story here. You can find the report itself here.

The study was done by 27 marine scientists assembled in Oxford this year by the International Program on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Their conclusion? “A combination of stressors is creating the conditions associated with every previous major extinction of species in Earth’s history”.

The study is detailed, clear and specific in both its findings and its recommendations. Read it and weep.

(Those of you who can’t make it to the meeting should feel free to leave the questions you’d like to have asked in the comment box below…)

Here are the details, straight from the Port Metro Vancouver communications folks (and here’s where you can find more info on the port):

“Join us on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 for our 2011 Annual General Meeting. This meeting is open to the public and no RSVP is required.

Date:     Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Time:     3 p.m.

Venue:   Segal Graduate School of Business at Simon Fraser University,  Room 1300, 500 Granville Street, Vancouver, B.C.

At this meeting we will be releasing our first-ever Sustainability Report, as well as our 2010 Annual Report.”

Copies of the Audited Financial Statements are available at Port Metro Vancouver’s office:

The  Jacqueline  is, of course, the former west coast ferry Queen of Esquimalt, sold by BC Ferries in mid-2008 to a Chinese company for a reported $1.7 million. She was one of four older ferries being turfed as part of the company’s replacement program, and the sale drew much attention — and raised many eyebrows abroad — for the high price paid for the 45-year-old ferry. She contained asbestos, didn’t conform international standards and was unlikely to be usable as a passenger ferry elsewhere without considerable work. BC Ferries CEO David Hahn said after the sale that she was destined for use as a cargo ship “off the coast of China”.

At the time, I thought the price was unbelievably high. So did a number of business folks who work in the maritime industry outside of BC, some of them outside of Canada. Their emails to me in 2008 and 2009 all boiled down to the same essential question: “What the heck?”

In the words of one writer, it “smelled bad.”

But sale was made, and as near as I can tell from BC Ferries’ published accounts, the company got its money. (Anyone who knows any different is most welcome to contact me at onthewaterfrontblog@gmail.com.)

The sale price did seem to be a one-off, though. The other ferries up for sale at the time — the Queens of Tsawwassen, Saanich and Vancouver — didn’t fetch nearly that, as far as I know.

The Vancouver went to Coast Marine for use as a camp barge at Woodfibre, up Howe Sound. (And, if this Craigslist posting is legitimate, she is now for sale again for $725,000, with an advertised scrap value of $2 million. I say advertised because given the weight of the steel on her, and the value of scrap at the moment, I think the real figure is somewhere just north of $80,000. And that’s before the cost of the tow to the scrapyard.)

The Saanich, reborn as the Owen Belle, sailed off for similar use and was last spotted up for sale. Ditto the Tsawwassen.

But back to the Princess J.  

She didn’t make it to China. She was stripped of some of her valuable and historic bits and moved as far as Port Alberni, where she was initially said to be holding for bad weather. Over time, it became clear that the ferry had been abandoned and that her port berthing bills were not going to be paid. The ferry sat in Alberni for two years and was finally sold this spring, under court order, for enough to cover back moorage, insurance and legal costs. Diane Ward, spokeswoman for Bluewave Marine Surveyors, which tended the abandoned vessel, was still being quoted this month as saying the ship would have been sound for service in China, but was simply not up to the ocean voyage to get her there. I can’t find any record of an explanation about why a company would pay $1.7 million for a ferry it intended to move to China without checking that the vessel could actually make the trip.

Anyway, at the beginning of the month,  the Jacqueline was towed south.

And that was going to be that, I thought. The ferry would arrive in Mexico, and eventually we’d see if she was scrapped (Mexico does have steel mills on the coast near  Ensenada, the announced destination) or put back into service (odder things have happened.) We’d never really know what that original sale was all about, I thought.

Then late last week, I ran across an intriguing Associated Press news article that might have connected some of the mysterious dots surrounding the Princess J, I thought.  The Globe and Mail, the BBC and assorted international news outlets featured the article fairly prominently.

The story says that China’s central bank was reporting that officials have stolen as much as $120 billion US in assorted crooked deals over the past decade, and then fled the country — mainly to the United States. (The study was initially posted on the People’s Bank of China website this week but has since been removed, the story says.)

The Chinese report said most of the money disappeared between the mid-1990s and 2008 and that the deals involved “thousands of corrupt government officials”  – between 16,000 and 18,000 employees of state-owned companies — who used offshore bank accounts to smuggle the funds out into Canada, the U.S., Australia and Holland through offshore bank accounts or investments “like property or collectables”. The deals were disguised as business transactions, according to the article.

So here’s a funny thought. What if BC Ferries was used unknowingly to move funds out of China? What if the buyers back in China thought they were getting one of our newer ferries and got a loan from a state bank for, oh, maybe $10 million? But only part of it was used to pay out the purchase here? Maybe by some middleman official who has since disappeared (and he appears to have, according to my sources)?

BC doesn’t have really tough money laundering laws like they do in other parts of the world. BC Ferries — maybe as a result of that, or maybe as a result of its lack of real-world, commercial maritime expertise — apparently never questioned why a company would pay so much over the value for a 45-year-old boat. We did hear a lot of crowing about the great deal, but not a word about how odd it was.

One of the more interesting emails I got from Europe suggested that if an inappropriate sale had happened there, laws are so strict that the directors of the company could be charged with profiteering under their anti-money laundering laws, and possibly face jail time. That’s of course if the purchase was made for false purposes. And we don’t know if this sale was one of those.

One person in the banking industry wrote to suggest to me that “in Europe, they would have looked at the directors and done background research into their bank accounts to make sure they didn’t profit in any way from an extremely over-the-top deal.”

“An old V-class ferry more than 45 years old was really only worth around $125,000 to $150,000 at best. Everyone thinks if they even got close to $250,000 for her, then here in Europe eyebrows would have been raised and a lot of questions asked. So for BCFS to get the $1m for her, then you really have to wonder what was going on. “

When I wrote back this weekend to that person about the article I had read on the Chinese frauds, he said: “So now we are starting to see and hear about money been ripped off from the Chinese state, and Canada being mentioned in the newspaper reports. A lot of people (here) suspect that there were problems in China, but it is a tight country to get info out of, or confirmed by. Still, we are now starting to see some info flow out of China that is confirming what a lot of people had suspected years ago.”

It would be interesting if the original Chinese sale had been a false one. It be equally interesting to know if anyone — anyone at all — inside BC Ferries scratched their heads at all at the time. Or, you know, stuck their head in their desk drawer and screamed a very loud “thank you, Jesus” when the Chinese offered was tabled. And another one when the cheque cleared.

I don’t know for sure. Maybe the Jacqueline was worth the $1.7 million. Maybe she was really meant to sail for China and things went wrong. Maybe all the other ferries sold for a similar price, and my theories are crazy.

I don’t know. To quote my pals in the ‘hood where I grew up, I’m just sayin’….

Anyone with any thoughts on the topic is welcome to comment below. I love to get your emails, but a lively group discussion would be nice too. The shy folks can still feel free to email me, though. I’m always in at onthewaterfrontblog@gmail.com. Especially if you have any reliable, documented  information on any of these sales….

One thought until then: I always figured that I had an oddly eclectic set of maritime interests. Then some of you sailed into my life. Did I actually just get an email in which the author offered thoughts on her childhood memories of trout fishing as well as the state of the Greek shipping fleet? All in one note? Yes, I did. And it made me smile.

Talk to you soon. Like most of you, I’ve been following the news about BC’s public ferry fleet, and about Washington Marine Group’s shipbuilding prospects on the west coast, and have some thoughts on both fronts.