What’s rude is accusing the crew of gross negligence without knowing any of the facts. I am one degree of separation from those guys. As if they just swam away when a small fire started.
Local blogs are reporting that there was a fast moving fire/explosion and then a few more booms afterwards which are speculated to be oxygen tanks.
Compressed air. Not oxygen tanks.
The boat was powered by diesel.
From an eyewitness:
"Bob Hansen, the owner of Grape Escape, told The Daily Beast that he and his wife were anchored in a cove on Santa Cruz Island when they heard pounding on their boat.
“I put on some shorts and walked outside and opened the door, and here’s five guys in a little rubber boat and a 75-foot commercial boat on fire," Hansen told the Daily Beast. "It was really on fire… the whole thing engulfed in flames.
“The flames were shooting up 25 feet. I felt so helpless. It’s just burning. There were five tanks that were blowing up — or we thought there were — these big pops.”
For what it’s worth, I know a number of local people in the dive and charter boat community. From what they are saying on social media, the outfit that owns this boat (and two other similar boats) are very well respected and not known for cutting corners with safety. They have been operating for decades.
I’m so sorry for everyone involved. What a terrible tragedy.
Their boat blew up killing thirty of their clients. Rudeness at a minimum is warranted towards the vessel operator and crew. Are you suggesting it was an Act of God that killed those people? Or that it was unforeseeable that letting the operator of a vessel, with a grossly inadequate means of exiting a confined lodging space, charter said vessel to the public might result in a tragedy?
Yes, inferring the crew and or operators were negligent sounds appropriate.
Nice try but I haven’t said anything about the initial cause of the fire. I have no idea about that and it may well have been a result of negligence or an unfortunate accident or something stupid that one of the passengers did or something else. I was responding specifically to the post below:
This post is about what happened after the fire started and it’s a load of shit. It’s accusing the crew of cowardice or gross negligence with regards to saving the passengers once the event happened. If there was negligence with regards to the origins of the fire, it might not have even involved them.
Dumb question, but it looks like Santa Cruz Island is an hour or two from the mainland, so why have people spend the night on-board, rather than returning to shore and sleeping there?
And one way out of the berthing area was clearly not enough. Would a boat built today for this sort of thing have a second means of egress?
It appears our neighbor’s daughter is one of the missing. Not good. So not good.
More time diving and exploring the island and less time commuting.
I agree. It may be that that boat was grandfathered in. It’s been around for quite a while.
I am so sorry. Early reports were that the boat was chartered by one big group from Santa Cruz. Is she from that area?
I don’t care if you know the crew or not. I don’t care if you’re offended by the preceding posts. I don’t even know any of these people and your attitude on screen—that someone might actually dare to question the actions of the crew—is still beginning to piss me off.
Thirty people placed their lives in the crew’s hands at sea and are now dead, in a particularly nightmarish way. The crew managed to save their own asses, (At least the crew on the upper decks. God help any in the engineering spaces.) yet were unable to save any of the clients, or even rouse them, it appears. Explosion and widespread conflagration normally doesn’t happen on a US flagged diesel-fuelled motor vessel absent intentional action or gross negligence.
Sunny made a perfectly reasonable set of questions wondering where the crew was while the fire started and proceeded through the structure, and you proceeded to insult him/her because you have some connection to the operation.
I value my posting privileges, and so I’m done responding to you. I mourn the victims and I await the Coast Guard’s determination of what happened.
She’s one of the owners of the tour operation, and was leading the tour on that boat, from what I understand. And no reports of female survivors are yet seen.
Everything’s a bit garbled here at the moment.
You’re not going to lose your posting privileges anytime soon, bro. But first you misstated the entire premise of my post. Once I showed the reasoning, you decided to read my mind as to the intent and then you flounce.
Not withstanding my post last night (just a couple hours before this boat fire) in the What is obvious in your profession that others may not know? thread in IMHO, there is a slight possibility that oxygen could have contributed to this fire.
The boat involved was equipped with oxygen cylinders for first aid purposes, not for diving. That is standard first aid equipment on dive boats.
And while divers do not use pure oxygen underwater for the overwhelming majority of dives they do sometimes use a blend of gas that is elevated in oxygen above the 21% found in air. I have seen references that the boat in this incident did offer a nitrox 32% fill. To do that they could have used a membrane system that basically filters out some of the nitrogen as it goes into the compressor or they could have had one or more tanks of pure oxygen on board to supplement the oxygen level in air as it enters the compressor. I do not know which system the Conception had.
But more likely any exploding sounds were scuba cylinders filled with air venting when the pressure relief mechanism was triggered. Valve systems for scuba tanks have a burst disk designed to fail and vent the cylinder if the pressure gets too high. That allows for depressurization in order to keep the tanks from exploding like giant grenades.
All I’m going to say is that this just sounds like a horrible thing, and I hope Qadgop’s neighbor isn’t checking in because she wasn’t on the boat and is off the grid for whatever reason.
My FB feed is abuzz with stories and rumors at this point. If you take at face value the assertions of some of the posters who have been on and/or involved with this boat, the stories are consistent with a galley propane leak and subsequent explosion. Regardless of whether the propane theory is true, given that the fire is reported to have started with an explosion, no one but Superman could have have successfully gone down that ladder. Those crew had friends and significant others down below and did not just blithely swim away.
Assuming that was the cause, propane is one of the most expansive fuels when it explodes, meaning the fireball will expand faster & farther than with other flammable liquids like gasoline. Below is a surveillance camera video of a food truck propane canister exploding. This is outside, not a confined space like a boat galley & you can see the fireball goes across multiple lanes of traffic. It’s not going to expand any less in a confined space but it will blow out more windows/doors/walls, etc. If it was a propane explosion, it’s amazing that they got a “Mayday” out before abandoning ship.
Spoilered only for graphic content (two people died in this explosion, though you can’t see them in this video)
You just saved me a lot of typing. I coincidentally had plans to spend time this afternoon with a good friend of mine who is a local charter boat captain and he told me the same thing. Plus you explained it way better than I would have.
Yeah. He and the other people in the boating community are furious about the speculation that the crew could have done more once the fire/explosion started. The consensus is some kind of galley fire but that is speculation at this point. The reports that it was a group from the city of Santa Cruz may have been wrong and just early confusion with Santa Cruz Island. There were apparently locals who were killed too.
That was not my intention. I was answering the question about what the crew might have done - what a boat crew might do in an emergency situation involving fire. The circumstances of this particular fire could certainly have made those actions impossible. Candidly though, we don’t know enough about this fire to say one way or the other about whether their was crew negligence. It wasn’t my intention to address that point, however.