Sea Trial

SEA TRIAL

Captain Donald E. Bodron

Copyright © 2018 by Captain Donald E. Bodron.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2018904295

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-9845-1964-1

                            Softcover                          978-1-9845-1963-4

                            eBook                               978-1-9845-1962-7

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Rev. date: 04/24/2018

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CONTENTS

Preface

Terms Used In This Book:

Introduction

Acapulco

Houston

New York

Houston

Seattle

Starlight

Badger State

Houston

California

Houston

San Juan

Houston

Alaska

Houston

Brownsville

Houston

Mona Island

Gulf Of Mexico

Buenos Aires

Houston

Charlotte Amalie

Houston

En La Orilla Del Mar

Prince William Sound

Bahrain

The Russians

Aviation

Panama

Final

About the Author

PREFACE

If you ever have a chance to look through any official Coast Guard newsletters, bulletins, or documents, you can find messages from the senior officer who sponsored the work. These messages are easy to find. They come under headings like Captain’s Corner, A View from the Bridge, or even something as pretentiously Oz-like as Flag Voice! SEA TRIAL is not one of these publications. It doesn’t provide any deep message or strategy or prescription for the way to conduct business. It is not meant to be a comprehensive history of United States government or U.S. Coast Guard efforts to regulate and achieve safety in the U.S. flag merchant fleet. SEA TRIAL will be a disappointment to those who will feel it should have spent more time on new initiatives such as Maritime Regulatory Reform. The jury is still out on how effective these measures will be in improving maritime safety. There are no long passages analyzing activities at the International Maritime Organization meetings. There is no major section concerned with Flag State, Port State issues. Although it might have been fascinating to some people, there is no chapter dealing with the Coast Guard’s relationships with the various congressional oversight committees with which it has to deal. As you can see, the book is not a view from the bridge. It was never meant to be that. It only was written to provide an introduction to the many facets of the Marine Safety Program through one person’s experiences in it over time. It’s just a look; a quick glance. The point of view is not from the bridge. It’s more like a comment from the deck plates.

Cerro de Ancon, Balboa, Republica de Panama, Mayo 1995

TERMS USED IN THIS BOOK:

46 CFR 90.10-21 Marine Inspector or Inspector

These terms mean any person from the civilian or military branch of the Coast Guard assigned under the superintendence and direction of an officer in charge, marine inspection, or any other person as may be designated for the performance of duties with respect to the inspection, enforcement, and administration of Title 52, Revised Statutes, and acts amendatory thereof or supplementary thereto, and rules and regulations thereunder.

46 CFR 1.01-20 Officer in Charge, Marine Inspection

Final authority is vested in the officer in charge, marine inspection, for the performance, within the area of his jurisdiction, of the following functions: inspection of vessels to determine that they comply with the applicable laws, rules, and regulations relating to safe construction, equipment, manning, and operation and that they are in a seaworthy condition for the services in which they are operated; shipyard and factory inspections; the investigation of marine casualties and accidents; the licensing, certificating, shipment, and discharge of seamen; the investigating and initiating of action in cases of misconduct, negligence, or incompetence of merchant marine officers or seamen; and the enforcement of vessel inspection, navigation, and seamen’s laws in general.

46 CFR 1.01-30 Captains of the Port

Captains of the port and their representatives enforce within their respective areas port safety and security and marine environmental protection regulations, including, without limitation, regulations for the protection and security of vessels, harbors, and waterfront facilities; anchorages; security of vessels; waterfront facilities; security zones; safety zones; regulated navigation areas; deepwater ports; water pollution; and ports and waterways safety.

46 CFR 1.01-15(a)(1) Chiefs, Marine Safety Divisions

The chiefs, Marine Safety Divisions, in the district offices, under the supervision of their respective district commanders, direct the activities in their district relative to vessel, factory, and shipyard inspections; reports and investigations of marine casualties and accidents; processing of violations of navigation and vessel inspection laws; the licensing, certificating, shipment, and discharge of seamen; the investigation and institution of proceedings looking to suspension and revocation under 46 USC chapter 77 of licenses, certificates, and documents held by persons; and all other marine safety regulatory activities.

46 CFR 167.05-15 Coast Guard District Commander

This term means an officer of the Coast Guard designated as such by the commandant to command all Coast Guard activities within his district, which include the inspections, enforcement, and administration of Title 52, RS and acts amendatory thereof or supplemental thereto, and rules and regulations thereunder.

INTRODUCTION

Upstream from its junction with the Potomac, the Anacostia River flows southwest through the city of Washington DC. It goes by the National Arboretum and the Washington Navy Yard. A little before it joins with the Potomac, it passes a piece of land known as Buzzard’s Point. The bulk of the landmass at Buzzard’s Point is covered with low-income housing and apartments. The southern half of the peninsula is taken up by the U.S. Army’s Fort McNair. At the very tip of Buzzard’s Point, there is a rather drab gray government office building. The address of this unimposing edifice is 2100 Second Street SW. For many years, the building contained the headquarters of the United States Coast Guard.

Within the building, almost 2,400 officers, warrant officers, enlisted men, civilians of the senior executive service, and general schedule employees performed the duties required to run a worldwide organization of people, ships, and aircraft dedicated to the humanitarian and law enforcement missions for which the United States Coast Guard has become well known and respected around the globe.

On August 4, 1790, the first Congress of the United States authorized the construction of ten boats to be used to regulate the collection of duties on imported goods. These revenue cutters were the idea of Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, as the newly formed United States of America was plagued by smuggling. Today, as then, Coast Guard cutters, the descendants of Alexander Hamilton’s small fleet, continue the battle against the smuggling of drugs and illegal aliens on all of the coasts of the United States.

In 1831, the cutters of the U.S. Revenue Service began winter cruising to assist and provide rescue service to sailing ships when they were most likely to run into trouble offshore. In 1848, the federal government began to establish a system of shore-based lifesaving stations. The stations were to be administered by the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service. These early lifeboat stations in New Jersey and Massachusetts were the forerunners of the present-day Coast Guard stations and the genesis of the present-day Coast Guard search and rescue program. The United States Coast Guard is well known around the world with recognized expertise in search and rescue and law enforcement. Safety of navigation is also a Coast Guard mission. The service maintains over forty-seven thousand aids to navigation such as buoys, lighthouses, ranges, and day marks. Before the days of satellites and GPS, the Coast Guard operated the long-range radio navigation system LORAN C. The AMVER Center in Martinsburg, Virginia, relocated from its longtime home in New York City, provides computerized information concerning merchant shipping on all of the world’s oceans to be used in search and rescue. Nearly 40 percent of the world’s merchant fleet, around twelve thousand ships, are AMVER participants. On any given day, about 2,700 of these are available on the AMVER plot to be diverted for search and rescue. When AMVER was created in 1958, the acronym stood for Atlantic Merchant Vessel Emergency Reporting system. In 1971, the computer system was expanded to track ships worldwide, and the name changed to Automated Mutual Assistance Vessel Rescue System. Today, ships that have filed their sail plans with the AMVER center can be quickly contacted and requested to provide assistance to other vessels in distress worldwide.

The Coast Guard finds itself frequently in the public eye. It could be for intercepting and rescuing Haitians attempting to flee their country in unseaworthy boats. It might be for the rescue of all of the passengers and crew from a burning cruise ship like the PRINSENDAM in the Gulf of Alaska. It could be for a big drug bust in the Caribbean. The Coast Guard certainly played the largest role in ensuring the safety of the two hundred thousand persons who fled Cuba during the Mariel boat lift in 1980. The grounding and oil spill from the tank ship EXXON VALDEZ also brought the Coast Guard’s responsibilities in pollution response to the nation’s attention.

On April 1, 1967, after 177 years with the Treasury Department, the Coast Guard was transferred to the newly formed Department of Transportation. Even so, by law, the Coast Guard is still one of the five U.S. Armed Services. It operates as a part of the Navy in time of war when the president so directs. The Continental Navy was disbanded between 1790 and 1798. Since the Revenue Marine Service was started with the construction of Alexander Hamilton’s ten boats in 1790, the Coast Guard has been able to lay claim to the title of the nation’s oldest continuous seagoing service. Coasties like to say that they are the hard core around which the navy forms in time of war. It is a fact that the Coast Guard or its predecessor services have served with distinction in all of the great military campaigns in which the United States has been engaged starting with the Quasi War with France in 1798–1799 and most recently with the wars to liberate Kuwait from Iraq in January and February 1991, and the war to topple the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq starting in 2003, and the continuing operations in Afghanistan, which commenced in 2001.

Besides the high-visibility search and rescue, drug interdiction, and anti-alien smuggling operations, there are other Coast Guard programs that neither are well known nor receive the publicity the other missions seem to attract. The second floor of that building at Buzzard’s Point in Washington DC contained the Office of Marine Safety, Security, and Environmental Protection. That part of the Coast Guard was very much in the public eye after the EXXON VALDEZ oil spill. Several branches of that office were involved generating the regulations that came from the passage of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. This controversial legislation came as a result of the grounding of the tank ship EXXON VALDEZ. The legislation required a phase in period for tank ships calling in U.S. ports to have double bottoms. The law calls for higher insurance coverage for damages caused by oil spills, expanded contingency planning, industry-sponsored pollution response exercises, certification of oil spill response organizations, more-strict requirements for the renewal of merchant marine documents and licenses, and many other provisions. All were designed to protect the nation’s environment against the ravages of another oil spill like the one that swept through Prince William Sound that Easter weekend in 1989. This type of legislation, passed in the wake of a disaster, is exactly the type of legislation that gave birth to the Marine Safety Program in the early days of the nation. The Coast Guard’s commercial vessel safety program is designed to prevent or minimize deaths and casualties from occurring on board United States flagships anywhere in the world and on board foreign ships in United States ports. The program had its beginnings in 1824 when Congress directed the secretary of the Treasury to investigate causes of a tremendous number of disasters caused by boiler explosions on river steamers. The compilation of this data was the first step in the federal government’s involvement with merchant marine safety.

In 1837, a steamer called the PULASKI exploded in North Carolina, killing over one hundred persons. This was the latest in a series of disastrous steam boiler explosions starting with the HELEN MCGREGOR and CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL in 1830, the BRANDYWINE in 1832, the ST. MARTIN in 1833, and the BEN SHERROD in 1837. Records kept by the Army Corps of Engineers show that there were some 295 steamboat disasters on the Missouri River alone between 1819 and 1897.

In those days, it was common for the paddle wheel steamers to race each other up the nation’s rivers. The higher the steam pressure in the boiler, the faster the walking beam engine could be made to rotate the buckets or paddles on the wheels on the stern or the sides of these river steamers. The boilers were fitted with very rudimentary lever-operated safety valves. If the pressure approached the maximum allowable limit, the valve was designed to lift and relieve the pressure in the boiler. Unfortunately, because of their design, it was a simple matter for the early steamboat engineers to defeat the purpose of the safety valves by lashing them closed. The pressure in the boiler could be raised over the safe limit by the burning of more fuel in the furnace. The science of metallurgy was not so far advanced as it is today. The properties of the metal in the early boilers were not too well understood. The methods of construction and designs were extremely crude. Nobody could really be sure when one of these boilers was likely to blow apart at the seams. When the metal in these early boilers did fail, the large volumes of water they carried instantly flashed into steam. The eruptions of these early power plants were extremely violent. They resulted in horrendous damage to the ships on which they took place. Since most of the unlucky ships were carrying passengers, the suffering of the innocent victims served to focus public and official attention upon the problem.

The early legislation passed by Congress required the installation of lifesaving and firefighting gear on ships. The first federal legislation required certification inspections of hulls and boilers and provision of lifeboats, signal lights, and firefighting equipment. The first inspectors were appointed by U.S. district judges and compensated by the ship owners at fixed rates. In spite of these efforts, in 1851 and 1852, seven more disasters took place, resulting in over seven hundred more deaths.

On Good Friday, April 9, 1852, while attempting to stem the spring flood of the Missouri River near Lexington, Missouri, the side wheel steamer SALUDA had been held up for two days trying to round a bend in the river at this point. Impatient with the strong river currents and mindful of the complaints of his passengers, the owner and master asked the second engineer how much more boiler pressure he could supply than what he had provided on the two previous attempts. The second replied that the boilers could not provide one more pound of steam pressure. The owner ordered the water injection valve closed and the safety valves tied down as well. After casting off and moving away from the shore, the SALUDA’s paddles made just two revolutions before the burning wood roaring in the furnaces caused the rising steam pressure in the SALUDA’s boilers to rip the machinery asunder. The resulting destruction was graphically described in the Time-Life Books series THE OLD WEST, THE RIVERMEN, 123 years after the disaster as follows:

The hull disintegrated forward of the engine room and half the upperworks went skyward—accompanied by tumbling human bodies and the two iron chimneys—in a great, concussive blossoming of steam, bales, splinters, boiling water and wreckage from the cabins. The captain’s lacerated corpse took a high, parabolic course inland with the ship’s bell on which he had placed one elbow in the second before death; both landed high on a bluff above the river and rolled downhill together, the bell clanging wildly. A 600 pound iron safe, the boat’s watchdog (which had been chained to its door) and a second clerk were flung high in the air; they came to rest near one another 200 yards from the river. A local butcher, ashore, was dismembered by a flying boiler flue. A brick house nearby collapsed under the impact of another chunk of boiler iron. The two pilots were blown into the river with pieces of the wheelhouse and never seen again. A curious silence followed the deafening roar of the explosion. But a sound of screaming soon began under piles of wreckage on the after portion of the hull—which sank rapidly near the bank. Townspeople, rushing to the river, found—as the St. Joseph Gazette reported—the mangled remains of other human beings scattered over the wharf, and mingling with the water of the Missouri River. Groans, shrieks and sobs, mingled with the plaintive wailings of helpless babes, carried grief and desolation to the hearts of those who were exerting themselves to relieve the sufferers. One wounded child called, ‘Mother! Father!’ but they had gone to the land of the spirits and it was left alone in the world a helpless orphan. More than 100 bodies were recovered and about the same number were believed to have washed down the river. Only about 50 people who had been aboard the SALUDA survived.

These disasters resulted in the Steamboat Inspection Act of 1852. This act divided the country into nine districts, each one of which had its own supervising inspector. These gentlemen directly supervised the local inspectors and attempted to provide technical advice. They also met annually to discuss mutual problems and try to see that the program was administered in a uniform manner. In the 1990s, the chiefs of the ten Marine Safety Divisions of the ten Coast Guard districts supervise the officers in charge, marine inspection, in the local ports in much the same way. The regional supervising inspectors and the local inspectors were paid salaries by the federal government, and fees collected were paid to the Treasury. Permits to carry certain dangerous or inflammable cargoes were required. Licensing for pilots and engineers was also provided for under the new law. One of the most famous licenses ever issued by this government body reads as follows:

In accordance with the act of Congress approved August 30, 1852, the undersigned inspectors for the District of St. Louis certify that SAMUEL CLEMENS having been by them this day duly examined finding his qualifications as pilot of steamboats, is a suitable and safe person to be entrusted with the powers and duties of Pilot of Steam Boats, and do hereby license him to act as such for one year from this date, on the following rivers, to wit Greater Mississippi River to and from St. Louis and New Orleans. Given under our hands this 9th day of April 1859.

The early efforts at regulating marine safety had some positive effects, but travel on these river steamers still had not reached anywhere near the degree of safety that was desirable. After the civil war, fifteen hundred persons, many of whom were recently released Union prisoners of war, died when a boiler exploded on board the steamer SULTANA between Memphis, Tennessee, and Cairo, Illinois. The SULTANA was heavily overloaded with passengers, cargo, and ex-prisoners of war. Originally built as a freighter, the SULTANA normally was only permitted to carry 376 passengers. In the chaos of the prisoner of war evacuation process, rival steamship companies squabbled over profitable government contracts. The agent in charge of the evacuation in Vicksburg allowed the SULTANA to load as many passengers as she dared. It was estimated that the SULTANA may have had as many as 2,500 persons aboard. The explosion of the boiler resulted in the steamer being engulfed in flames. The people who were not killed outright by the blast or burned to death in the fire met their deaths by drowning as they struggled to reach the nearby shore. The sound of the explosion was so loud that it was heard in Memphis. Rescue ships were immediately sent to the SULTANA as she lay burning on the river. In the next few days, about 1,450 bodies were recovered. Almost a thousand others had disappeared downstream or had been incinerated in the fire.

The SULTANA disaster is not well known, as it received very little publicity in the press. There were just no records of how many or who had actually been on board the ship. Many northern families never knew or could not even guess that their relatives had died in the Mississippi River rather than in a Confederate prison camp. The loss of the SULTANA occurred just as the Confederacy was falling apart and coincided with the news of the shooting of President Lincoln and the hunt for and shooting of John Wilkes Booth.

An investigation determined that the explosion on the SULTANA was the result of an unauthorized repair made by the Sultana’s engineer in Memphis after the steamer had been through an inspection in St. Louis on her previous voyage. There was a section of the boiler plate that was found to be bulged so badly out of shape that it needed to be replaced. The distorted plate was removed. The engineer installed a patch that was of lesser thickness than the original boiler plate. The investigation also revealed that the maximum allowable boiler pressure in the SULTANA was exceeded trying to make headway against the spring river current. With the boiler pressure raised above normal, the improperly sized patch plate failed, causing the explosion.

One of the results of the SULTANA catastrophe was the invention of locked safety valves, which could not have their pressure settings adjusted without being noticed. Even to this day, the safety valves on the boilers on inspected merchant ships are set with steam right at or just below the maximum allowable pressure. The inspector then strings copper sealing wire through the cheek plates and key cotter pins, allowing access to the pressure adjusting spring and screw. The wire is strung through the valve parts and then squeezed and fused through a lead seal with a numbered die so that the pressure may not be adjusted without breaking the seal. Coast Guard Regulations concerning safety valves read in part as follows: It shall be the duty of the chief engineer when he assumes charge of the boilers and machinery of a vessel to examine them thoroughly. If any parts thereof are in bad condition, or if the safety valve seals are broken, the fact shall immediately be reported to the master, owner or agent, and the Officer in Charge, Marine Inspection. It shall be the duty of the master and the engineer in charge of the boilers of any vessel to require that a steam pressure is not carried in excess of that allowed by the certificate of inspection, and to require that the safety valves, once set and sealed by the inspector, are in no way tampered with or made inoperative. If at any time it is necessary to break the seal on a safety valve for any purpose, the chief engineer shall advise the Officer in Charge, Marine Inspection, at the next port of call, giving the reason for breaking the seal and requesting that the valve be examined and adjusted by an inspector.

The years following the civil war brought so many disasters, and the program was in such disarray that the Congress completely repealed all of the marine safety statutes in effect at the time and passed what was to become Title 52 of the Revised Statutes, which forms the basis for the laws of the United States pertaining to maritime safety even to this day.

Despite the passage of well-meaning legislation, the carnage continued. In November 1865, Harper’s Weekly carried an article that described an explosion that had taken place on board the Hudson River steamer ST. JOHN the previous month. The article reads in part as follows:

The steamer ST. JOHN is one of the finest river boats in the world and plies between Albany and New York. On the morning of Sunday the 29th ult., as she had arrived opposite Thirtieth Street on the way to her landing at Canal Street in this city, her boiler burst, and thirty tons of scalding water with an immense volume of steam rushed through the huge fissure in the boiler into the stateroom hall, carrying destruction in its track. Almost instantly nine persons were killed. The staterooms in the immediate vicinity of the boiler were completely destroyed and their inmates were killed. The boiler on one side being empty, the vessel careened over on her other side and the pool of scalding water followed the motion of the boat toward the opposite staterooms. At the moment of the accident many fell victims to the destroying current by opening the doors of their staterooms to discover what was the matter and were stifled and scalded by the steam. The scene in the main salon was heart rending. Frightened passengers leaped barefoot into the hot water. Poor struggling creatures lay helpless and bruised, tossing in unutterable agony. Among the fatally injured were the captain and his wife. When the explosion took place they both rushed into the stateroom hall. At that time the hall was full of steam and both were fearfully scalded. They had been married only three days and were returning from their wedding trip to Albany only to be buried in the church of St. Luke’s where they had been married. Besides those killed fifteen were severely injured. One of the firemen rushed overboard when the explosion took place and was drowned. One of the passengers and his child were providentially saved, having left their stateroom just before the accident. The wife and mother, however, was left behind, and was among the killed. The Hoboken ferry MORRISTOWN, seeing the signal of distress flying, went to the assistance of the unfortunate passengers, and succeeded in taking a large number of them off the steamer and landing them safely; while those on shore did all in their power to alleviate the sufferings of the scalded, and tried to make the others as comfortable as circumstances would permit.

By 1871, administration of the inspection laws was reorganized under an office of supervising inspector general, who was a presidential appointee reporting to the secretary of the Treasury. All steamboats except public and foreign ships were now required to be inspected, and their masters, chief mates, engineers, and pilots were required to be licensed. Security for the lives of both passengers and crews was sought. Supervising inspectors were authorized to establish rules of the road for safe navigation.

In 1872, a beginning was made toward creating a special service for the enforcement of navigation laws. The new organization was known as the Steamboat Inspection Service. The Act of June 7, 1872, provided for the appointment of shipping commissioners at the larger ports. These officers were to administer those portions of the navigation laws having to do with the shipping, discharge, and care of seamen on American merchant ships. These officers were appointed by judges of the circuit courts, and their compensation was by payment to them of fees by the owners of the ships.

In 1882, the Passenger Act of 1882 superseded all prior acts regulating the transportation of persons. In 1883, there was an attempt to take over the Steamboat Inspection Service by the secretary of the navy. Upon his recommendation, a bill was introduced in Congress to transfer the Steamboat Inspection Service to the navy. This was rejected in part because it was considered undesirable to have armed forces enforce civil law.

Even though new legislation made improvements and better organization was bringing order to the program, the disasters on the nation’s rivers and at sea continued. In the first week of January 1884, a steamer called the CITY OF COLUMBUS of the Boston and Savannah Line departed Boston carrying forty-five crew members and eighty-two passengers. The wind was blowing so hard, the ship had to reduce speed in heavy winter seas. She ran aground in Vineyard Sound near the island of Martha’s Vineyard at three o’clock in the morning. A light from the ship was seen by the Gay Head lighthouse keeper. He raised the alarm at the Gay Head Indian Reservation. A lifeboat manned by the Indian surfmen managed to reach the wreck in vicious winds and pounding seas. This crew rescued eleven people from the water.

At first light the next day, the revenue cutter DEXTER found the ship lying heeled over on the shoal and being pounded to pieces by the seas. The remaining survivors of the grounding were clinging to the rigging of the CITY OF COLUMBUS. The ship was disintegrating below them. The sea was tearing at them, while the freezing winter winds zapped what remained of their strength. The DEXTER launched a boat into incredible conditions. The master of the DEXTER said, The wind was blowing very hard, and the sea rolled mountain high. The lieutenant in charge of the boat managed to get it near the stricken steamer. Thirteen men let go of the rigging and plunged into the sea. All were rescued by the DEXTER’s small boat. But the lieutenant saw that two more men remained in the CITY OF COLUMBUS’s rigging. They were too feeble to drop into the water. The lieutenant tied a line around his waist and threw himself into the frigid surging water. Immediately, he was struck by a piece of flotsam from the wreck. The boat crew hauled him back. After recovering a few minutes, he went back into the raging water, swam to the steamer, and rescued two men who were left in the rigging. Brought to the DEXTER, the two men who had been rescued last died of exposure. Of the 127 persons who had sailed with the CITY OF COLUMBUS, 103 perished in the wreck. The lieutenant who risked his life to rescue the last two men received a gold medal from the Humane Society of Massachusetts. The president of the United States advanced him to the head of his grade for selection for promotion. The secretary of the Treasury ordered that an account of the rescue be read at quarters for muster on board every revenue cutter in the service.

These types of disasters were all too common along the coasts and inland rivers of the country. The heroics of the DEXTER’s lieutenant were typical of hundreds of rescues performed by the Revenue Cutter Service and by the early lifeboat stations along the nation’s Atlantic coast.

In 1884, the secretary of the Treasury was empowered to appoint shipping commissioners, who were placed on a salary basis. That same year, the Bureau of Navigation was established in the Treasury Department.

In 1886, the collection of fees for inspection of American ships and licensing of officers was abolished. Interestingly, as this is written more than one hundred years later, the present-day U.S. Coast Guard has reinstituted exactly these types of fees over again. In 1894, the factory inspection of boiler plate was required. In 1896, the Steamboat Inspection Service employees were placed under Federal Civil Service.

In 1897, all motorboats of more than fifteen tons burden carrying freight or passengers for hire were made subject to inspection and regulation. Foreign ships admitted to American registry were made subject to inspection, as were sailing ships over seven hundred gross tons. The concept of reciprocal recognition of inspection by foreign countries having equivalent standards was introduced.

In 1903, the Steamboat Inspection Service and the Bureau of Navigation were transferred from the Treasury Department to the Department of Commerce and Labor. Right after that, on June 15, 1904, 957 lives were lost in a disastrous fire on the steamer GENERAL SLOCUM in the East River in New York City. Most of the victims were women and children.

Wreck of GENERAL SLOCUM in New York’s East River, June 1904.

The disaster that occurred on the GENERAL SLOCUM was incredibly horrifying and frustratingly needless. As the GENERAL SLOCUM steamed up the East River on that beautiful summer day, she had 1,360 passengers on board. A fire was discovered in a locked storeroom amidships. The fire was reported to the master in the pilothouse immediately. Instead of pulling into shore where the passengers might have been safely debarked, the master continued steaming up the river. He ordered no firefighting actions taken until passing ships observed the smoke trailing from the GENERAL SLOCUM and began sounding their whistles in alarm. When firefighting efforts were started, hoses were clogged or broken. Instead of sealing off the fire, the crew opened doors and portholes supplying oxygen, which fanned the flames even higher. Alerted by the raucous cacophony of steam whistle signals coming from the river and seeing the GENERAL SLOCUM spewing smoke and flame, the New York City Fire Department rushed to the 138th Street Pier to meet the GENERAL SLOCUM as she approached. To the firefighters’ amazement, the ship steamed past the pier and continued upriver. The master was intending to ground the ship at North Brother Island, a few miles upstream. The breeze created by the forward motion of the ship succeeded in fanning the flames even higher.

When the ship was finally grounded, the blazing inferno on the bow prevented the passengers from going ashore. They crowded on the stern about 250 feet from the safety of the beach. By this time, the GENERAL SLOCUM had been pursued upriver by a growing flotilla of would-be rescuers.

Before the rescuers could arrive, the terrified passengers on the GENERAL SLOCUM found that the lifeboats on the steamer were lashed in place with wire that could not be released with their bare hands. Some passengers found the life preservers and tried to jump to safety wearing these. Cruelly, powdered sawdust filler had been used for flotation material in the jackets. Scrap metal bars had been inserted in the jackets to achieve the regulation weight of solid cork. The life preservers dragged the people straight under the water. Those who remained afloat had to contend with the ship’s side paddle wheels, which kept on churning through all of this. The paddle wheels sucked in and maimed dozens who were so unfortunate as to have gone overboard in their vicinity. Although the burning hulk of the GENERAL SLOCUM lay within easy reach of the shore, almost a thousand people lost their lives. The master of the GENERAL SLOCUM did survive. He was prosecuted, convicted, and received a sentence of ten years in prison for criminal negligence.

This disaster resulted in further amendments to strengthen the existing inspection laws and improve the inspection service. A presidential commission that investigated the fire on the GENERAL SLOCUM reported that there was an inadequate corps of inspectors at the Port of New York. There was opposition from the public to delays for the purposes of reinspection causing personal inconvenience. The owners of the vessels were reluctant to maintain lifesaving and firefighting equipment in the proper condition, and there was inadequate supervision exercised by the supervising and local inspectors over the assistant inspectors who performed the work. In his approval of the report, the president ordered the dismissal from the Steamboat Inspection Service of all of the officers who were involved with the inspection and the supervision of the inspection of the GENERAL SLOCUM.

In 1910, the Motorboat Act applied inspection to boats under sixty-five feet in length propelled by machinery. In 1913, a separate Department of Labor was organized, and the Steamboat Inspection Service remained in the Department of Commerce. On March 4, 1915, the LaFollette Seaman’s Act provided for certification of able seamen and lifeboatmen. This Seaman’s Act was directly related to the enormous loss of life when the unsinkable steamship TITANIC struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912. The TITANIC, incredibly, in compliance with the rules in effect in that day, carried too few lifeboats to accommodate all of her passengers and crew. The United States Congress proposed an international conference to be held to ensure such a disaster could be prevented in the future. The requirements for the certification of able seamen and lifeboatmen were a result of the first International Conference on Safety of Life at Sea, which had been convened in London in 1914. This first SOLAS Convention provided passenger ships should have minimum standards of subdivision, minimum lifeboatage and lifesaving appliances; required the use of radio; established the International Ice Patrol; and recommended the use of fixed routes for steamships on the North Atlantic run.

After the First World War, a second conference was proposed to continue the work of the first conference. After much preparatory work, the second International Conference on the Safety of Life at Sea was convened in London on April 16, 1929. The regulations generated by this conference concentrated on water-tight integrity, the use of radio, and some changes in the rules for the prevention of collisions at sea.

By 1932, the Steamboat Inspection Service and the Bureau of Navigation were merged in the Commerce Department into the Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection.

In 1934, 134 persons either drowned or burned to death as a result of a mysterious fire on the MORRO CASTLE off the New Jersey coast. A board of inquiry headed by the assistant director of the Bureau of Navigation and Steamship Inspection conducted an investigation into the fire and the actions taken by the crew to combat it. The company claimed that the fire was set by Communist labor agitators in the crew. The MORRO CASTLE had been carrying guns and ammunition to the support of a dictatorial government in Cuba, which had been resisting a Communist insurgency. Although never charged with the crime of arson, there was considerable information developed that the chief radio officer may have been involved in setting the actual fire. He may also have caused the death of the master less than seven hours before the fire broke out.

Firefighting efforts were completely ineffective. The master had refused to hold regular weekly fire drills. The interior fire stations all were capped, and no hoses were on station. Because of inadequate crew training, the crew abandoned the fire stations as the fire spread out of control. Such hoses, as they were able to connect, soon lost pressure because of problems in the engine room and too many fire station valves left open. The chief mate, who had assumed command after the death of the regular master, failed to send an SOS or even indicate that he had a problem on board until the fire was raging through the superstructure and many persons had already perished in the smoke and flame and had started abandoning ship of their own accord.

The inquiry found the company guilty of gross negligence. It found the acting master and chief engineer guilty of incompetence for delaying the reporting of the fire to the Coast Guard and for failing to stop the ship and to take effective measures to fight the fire. The chief mate had been in command of the ship for less than one day. Only seven hours had passed between the time of the death of the regular master and the outbreak of the fire. The chief mate was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. The chief engineer had failed to even report to his emergency fire station in the engine room. He had abandoned ship in a seventy-person capacity lifeboat, which held only six crew members and two passengers, while people were choking and burning to death nearby. He was sentenced to serve four years in prison. A vice president of the Ward Line, owners of the MORRO CASTLE, was fined $5,000 and given a one year’s suspended sentence. In April of 1937, the United States Circuit Court of Appeals set aside the convictions of the two former senior officers of the MORRO CASTLE.

Shortly after the MORRO CASTLE disaster, the Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection was reorganized. In 1936, it became known as the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation—BMIN for short. A technical staff was created in Washington DC. On February 28, 1942, all functions of the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation were transferred to the U.S. Coast Guard temporarily for the duration of World War II. This was accomplished by Executive Order 9083. Shortly after this transfer, the inspectors in the field, shipping commissioners, and certain administrative personnel in Washington were commissioned in the Coast Guard Reserve or Coast Guard Temporary Reserve. To inspect the tremendous number of ships built during the war, a large number of regular Coast Guard personnel were assigned to this duty.

When a startling number of tankers and Liberty ships suffered a series of destructive hull fractures during the war, the secretary of the navy appointed a board to investigate the design and methods of construction of welded steel merchant vessels to solve the problem of cracking in these ships. The engineer in chief of the Coast Guard along with the chief of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ships, the vice chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission, and the chief surveyor of the American Bureau of Shipping all worked together to discover the cause of the problem and find ways of curing it. The board’s research showed that almost all of the cracks originated in the presence of a notch or discontinuity such as a cutout in a plate for the corner of a hatch opening or a vent. Most fractures occurred in very cold seas. The design of cargo hatch corners on Liberty ships was modified. Reinforcing bands were attached along the deck just outboard of the cargo hatch or placed at the turn of the bilge below the waterline. Incidents of serious ship fracturing were reduced from 140 per month in 1944 to less than twenty per month in 1946. The board established by the secretary of the navy during World War II was the genesis of today’s Ship Structure Committee made up of representatives of the U.S. Coast Guard, the American Bureau of Shipping, the Naval Sea Systems Command, the Maritime Administration, and the Military Sealift Command. The Ship Structural Committee supervises research projects pertaining to marine structural engineering.

By 1946, the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation had been abolished. The duties of the director of the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation had been assumed by the commandant of the Coast Guard.

The language in the reorganization plan, which transferred the functions of the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation to the Coast Guard, gives a good indication of the complexity and variety of functions assumed by the service. The precise language reads as follows:

There are hereby transferred to the Commandant of the Coast Guard those functions of the bureau, offices, and boards specified in the first sentence of section 104 of this plan, and of the Secretary of Commerce, which pertain to approval of plans for the construction, repair and alteration of vessels; inspection of vessels and their equipment and appliances; issuance of certificates of inspection, and of permits indicating the approval of vessels for operations which may be hazardous to life or property; administration of load line requirements; enforcement of other provisions for the safety of life and property on vessels; licensing and certificating of officers, pilots and seamen; suspension and revocation of licenses and certificates; investigation of marine casualties; enforcement of manning requirements, citizenship requirements and requirements for the mustering and drilling of crews, control of logbooks; shipment, discharge, protection and welfare of merchant seamen; enforcement of duties of shipowners and officers after accidents; promulgation and enforcement of rules for lights, signals, speed, steering, sailing, passing, anchorage, movement, and towlines of vessels and lights and signals on bridges; numbering of undocumented vessels; prescription and enforcement of regulations for outfitting and operation of motorboats; licensing of motorboat operators; regulation of regattas and marine parades; all other functions of such bureau, offices, and boards which are not specified in section 102 of this plan, including the remission and mitigation of fines, penalties, and forfeitures incurred under the laws governing these functions and those incurred under the act of December 17, 1941, (55 Stat. 808) as amended (set out as a note under section 353 of Title 47).

Even while World War II was raging, plans were being made for holding another Safety of Life at Sea Conference. In November 1946, the United Kingdom officially invited the nations that had attended the 1929 Convention. The conference was again held in London and was finally convened in April 1948. The United States delegation was led by the commandant of the Coast Guard. It was deemed advantageous by the delegates that the meetings should take place on a regular basis rather than the hit-or-miss fashion in which they had been held in the past. At the same time that the 1948 SOLAS Convention was being held, the United Nations organized a Maritime Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. This conference resulted in a draft convention for an Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization—IMCO for short. The proposal to form IMCO and hold regular meetings was accepted by the delegates. The infrastructure and forum for international cooperation in maritime matters had been established.

Since those early conferences in London, there have been many more SOLAS Conventions in 1960, 1966, 1974, and 1990. There have been international agreements on the application of load lines to seagoing ships, agreements on regulations for preventing collisions at sea, regulations for the prevention of pollution from ships (the famous MARPOL 73/78 protocols), Standards of Training, Certification, and Watchkeeping for Seafarers, and many more. The United States Coast Guard has been a driving force at the IMCO meetings and at present in the International Maritime Organization (the successor to IMCO) committee work. Recently, the Marine Environmental Protection Committee of the IMO adopted major amendments to the regulations concerning the design and construction of both new and existing tankers. The amendments were to annex 1 of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, 1973, as modified by the Protocol of 1978 relating thereto (MARPOL 73/78). The regulations will require tankers to be fitted with double bottoms and wing tanks extending the full depth of the ship’s side. Mid-deck tankers with double-sided hulls, developed by Japanese and European shipbuilders, will also be allowed as alternatives. The impetus for these MARPOL Convention amendments was the EXXON VALDEZ grounding and the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by the president of the United States on August 18, 1990.

Just about a month after the EXXON VALDEZ tore her bottom out on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, the Coast Guard published a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register. This proposed rulemaking had to do with a complete revision of the lifesaving equipment regulations for tankers, cargo ships, mobile offshore drilling units, passenger ships, public nautical school ships, offshore supply boats, and oceanographic research ships. The proposed regulations would implement the provisions of the new chapter 3 of the Safety of Life at Sea Convention 1974. Once again, the regulations were meant to implement a number of recommendations that had arisen from major vessel casualties.

Under the new regulations, rescue boats would be required on most ships as a result of lessons learned from the abandonment of the BADGER STATE in 1969 and the PANOCEANIC FAITH in 1967. Because of the collision between the passenger vessel MISSISSIPPI QUEEN and the towboat CRIMSON GLORY in 1985, the rescue boats would be required to be motor propelled. Ocean and coastwise cargo ships were to be required to have inflatable life rafts for 100 percent of the persons on board as a result of the sinking of the tankship TEXACO OKLAHOMA. Lifeboats and life rafts were to be required to carry a seasickness kit for each person on board as a result of the loss of the SILVER DOVE. There were recommendations to improve onboard training and drill requirements made by the Marine Boards of Investigation on casualties involving the GLOMAR JAVA SEA, the CHESTER A. POLING, the OCEAN EXPRESS, the EDMUND FITZGERALD, the TRANSHURON, and the WILLIAM T. STEELE. There were to be requirements for fire-protected covered lifeboats as a result of the fires and losses of life coming from the collisions between the EDGAR M. QUEENY and the CORINTHOS and the containership SEA WITCH and the ESSO BRUSSELS. There were new requirements to retrofit ships with gravity davits and to remove or replace old-fashioned quadrantal davits on all merchant ships. These requirements stemmed from difficulties in abandoning ship in a whole series of casualties such as the MARINE ELECTRIC in 1983, the CARL D. BRADLEY in 1958, the CEDARVILLE in 1965, the DANIEL J. MORRELL in 1966, and the EDMUND FITZGERALD in 1975.

Many improvements have been made over the years, but most progress still comes from lessons learned from casualties. Some things just don’t seem to change.

In the late 1960s, the Coast Guard had an organization in place that was handling myriad duties in the marine safety field. The functions that had been transferred temporarily to the Coast Guard during World War II were still being performed. The Vietnam War was creating demands for inspection services for the ships involved with the sealift to Southeast Asia. Vessel inspection, licensing of merchant marine personnel, marine casualty investigations, suspension and revocation proceedings for licensed or documented seamen who were involved in displays of negligence or misconduct, shipping commissioner duties involving signing merchant seamen on and off vessels, and vessel documentation duties involving the registration of vessels under the U.S. flag, and the recordation of ship mortgages all were being handled by Coast Guard Marine Inspection Offices.

The importance of the Marine Safety Program is underappreciated and largely unknown to the general public. The importance of the program is certainly underappreciated within the Coast Guard. Most coastguardsmen today would rather make a glamorous rescue or an attention-grabbing drug bust. Not many are interested in enforcing regulations regarding marine toilets, oil pollution, the disposing of garbage and plastics, or even the life safety items, which are the heart of the program. The marine safety world takes its direction from a blizzard of laws, regulations, instructions, notices, circulars, policy letters, manuals, and guidebooks. Most of it is very technical. Certain portions could give new meaning to the word dry. Most Coast Guard officers find the work too bureaucratic for their taste. Some do not even consider the Marine Safety Program part of the real Coast Guard.

In a program where the desired results are that absolutely nothing unusual happens, it is difficult to measure or point out particular success stories. In the 1980s, it was found that more than 59 percent of the cracks and structural failures taking place in the hulls of the U.S. flag merchant fleet were being found in tankers engaged in carrying oil from the Trans Alaska Pipeline System. Some of these tankers fractured at sea, spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the ocean. One of them cracked at the dock in Valdez. An intense study of the problem was made by the technical divisions of Coast Guard headquarters. Particular tankers and classes of ships prone to cracking were identified. Letters were written and conferences held with the owners. The study determined that the structural failures were generally caused by inadequate design of the structural details, poor workmanship and quality control during construction, reduced scantlings because of the use of high-tensile steel, lack of maintenance of coatings and corrosion control systems, and the harsh environment of the Gulf of Alaska.

A plan to ensure that critical areas of these ships are examined by the company, classification societies, and the Coast Guard was evolved. Repair practices for the cracks were reconsidered. The problem of the TAPS trade tanker cracking has virtually been eliminated. This was a very large success story for the Marine Safety Program. It took several years of very difficult, extremely technical work and extensive dealings with the ship owners and classification societies to bring the solution to the cracked tankers on line. The success of this particular Marine Safety Program initiative is only noticeable by the absence of headlines concerning cracked and leaking tankships off our shores.

Marine inspection work takes place in shipyards stretching from Puerto Rico to Alaska and from Maine to Southern California. Inspectors are not immune to accidents on the job. In recent years, an inspector was killed in the explosion of a barge in Mississippi when a welder’s arc ignited explosive gases during repairs. Another inspector was overcome and suffocated by carbon dioxide from a fire extinguishing system in a shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia. Another officer was killed in a helicopter crash responding to an oil spill near San Francisco, California. And two others perished in another helicopter crash flying offshore of Galveston, Texas, in the process of performing safety inspections of ships involved in offshore lightering of crude oil. While the purpose of the work is to bring safety, the work itself is not without its risks.

The work of thousands of marine safety personnel in shipyards, in technical offices, and on board U.S. and foreign flag merchant ships has been recorded in the program’s specialized paperwork over the years. Inspection check off books contain the records in the Marine Safety Offices for a few years until they are shipped off to Federal Records Centers in accordance with the Coast Guard’s paperwork management manuals. After ten or so years in these repositories, the records are destroyed. More than seventy years of Coast Guard marine inspection work has taken place. At least sixty years of records have passed into oblivion. Some information now is preserved by computers, but the data is difficult to access and decipher even by those who have been initiated into the arcane mysteries of the Marine Safety Information System. There are thousands of Marine Safety personnel, both officer and enlisted, who have worked in the program over the years. Most performed so well that the only testament to their success is their anonymity. Their stories are not likely ever to be heard. SEA TRIAL does not presume to speak on their behalf. SEA TRIAL is only a look at what I saw during the time I had the privilege of being associated with the work.

ACAPULCO

En la orilla del mar. There is an expression in Spanish, a phrase actually, "en la orilla del mar, which means at the rim of the sea." I heard someone say it the first day I was in Acapulco, and it kept rolling around in my head all the time I was there. It had a delightful ring to it. I didn’t actually get to say it much or use it in normal conversation, but it was one of those phrases you can’t seem to shake.

I’d gone down to that Mexican port on vacation. There are plenty of places that are more in these days, but I had never been to Acapulco before, and I wanted to go at least once. We had a lovely time. The sun was hot. The jungle-topped hills surrounding the city and the bay were steamy green. I liked that. I liked the jungle and the palm trees and the elaborate tropical flowers.

I liked the town too. I liked the architecture; tropical breezy buildings, tall hotels fronting the bay, dimly lit cantinas where the odor of tequila and cut limes permeated the atmosphere, restaurants with adobe walls decorated with bullfight posters, discotheques with deafening music, blue lights, and outrageously priced drinks. I liked the pink jeeps at the Las Brisas resort and the flying Indians (Indios Voladores) at the Indian Cultural Center. (Here, four of the flying Indians would climb to the top of a very high pole, tie ropes around their feet, and fling themselves off the pole arms extended. The ropes would unwind themselves from the pole, and the Indians would whirl round and round the pole until they reached the ground.) I even liked the cliff divers at La Quebrada going over a hundred feet down into a roaring surf. I liked it all.

Then one morning, out by the pool, someone in the party suggested it might be fun to take a boat ride through the bay. We decided to flag down one of those little speed boats that zip up and down the beach towing water skiers or towing tourists in those parachute kites. We got a boat to stop, and we indicated that there were four of us who wanted to go for a ride. After some bargaining, a price was agreed to, and we waded out into the surf at the Playa La Condesa in front of the hotel. All of the people in the party climbed up into the launch. I waited until last and then handed up my camera. The trouble was about to start right there en la orilla del mar.

Then the wave hit. A large wave came up out of nowhere and knocked me down. Then the undertow caught me. Too late I remembered the signs they had posted all up and down the beach in English and Spanish.

DANGER

NO SWIMMING

DANGEROUS UNDERTOW

I hadn’t paid much attention to the signs. I had seen them, yes. I understood the Spanish word peligro, which meant danger. I’d watched the undercurrents and tide rips surging back and forth off the beach and figured that swimming probably would be hazardous in that location. But I wasn’t swimming; I was wading!

Now the undertow had me firmly in its grip. I was bounced down all the way to the bottom and was being dragged right along there slowly out to sea, feetfirst. I could feel the bottom roiling beneath me. The sand was very coarse, filling my suit, getting in my hair, generally annoying and a possible contributor to the first stages of panic. How bad was this going to be?

When the wave had knocked me down, I had managed to grab a good gulp of air before my head had gone under. I remembered a glimpse of the dry sand of the beach and the palm-fronded cabanas out on the beach. There was the retaining wall in front of the swimming pool and the glass-walled sides of the hotel soaring upward. Next came the roar of the wave and all the sounds you hear when your head goes underwater in surf.

I could hold my breath a fairly good while. I would have to do it until the receding backwash of the wave that had knocked me down would be lessened by the water mass of the next approaching wave. I could do it. It wasn’t a survival situation yet. No need to struggle; best to go with the flow. But I hated the