Hi Tom,
Doug, prudent yes, hasty maybe. When the cause is known, it would be appropriate to take another look.
I accept that this may be a prudent decision on your part, yet I wonder: After an aviation accident of unknown cause, do you take to the train--only to be surprised by an Amtrak incident? ???
The report out of Prince Rupert offers a few (speculative?) observations.
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PRINCE RUPERT, B.C. (CP) - Passengers on an overnight B.C. ferry were
torn from their sleep Wednesday morning and thrown into a living
nightmare, evacuating onto lifeboats that tossed and swayed on stormy
seas for more than an hour as the Queen of the North disappeared "like
the Titanic."
Ninety-nine passengers and crew were accounted for, saved by the
efficiency of coast guard rescuers and the reckless heroics of a local
aboriginal band. But B.C. Ferries was unable to find two passengers.
George Foisy of Terrace, B.C., said his brother Gerald Foisy and
Gerald's common-law wife Shirley Rosette remain unaccounted for.
Ferry officials insist everyone got off the ship and speculate Foisy and
Rosette returned to Prince Rupert from Hartley Bay on their own,
although the village is inaccessible except by air and boat.
George Foisy said the passenger head count at Hartley Bay numbered 63 -
two short - despite a fellow traveller's initial claim he saw the
middle-aged couple in the village.
"He thought he got a glimpse of them and just thought 'Wow, they're
OK,' " said Foisy, who saw the couple board the ferry for their holiday
trip south. "Now he's not so sure."
Ferries handed the file over to the RCMP as a missing persons case,
saying Gerald Foisy and Shirley Rosette may have attempted to find their
own way back to Prince Rupert from the remote aboriginal community of
Hartley Bay.
It was an even stranger twist in a day that began for those aboard with
a crashing noise, then another, then sirens.
"Within an hour, the ship actually tilted to the side, levelled out and
it sunk down to the sixth deck, came back up like the Titanic, dipped
and then it went under," said passenger Lawrence Papineau.
Another passenger reported the ship split in half.
Douglas Rice, 74, was on the ship with his wife on a vacation from
London. An alarm went off and "we were all just sort of pulled out of
the cabins."
He and his wife clambered into a life raft with a female crew member and
a retired Qantas flight attendant.
"It was very, very wobbly and it was very dark."
"It was fairly rough, the sea, but the worst part was the rain. There
was quite heavy rain."
Rice and the others bobbed in the life boats for more than an hour.
But fishermen and members of the Gitk'a'ata in Hartley Bay, alerted to
the disaster by radio phone, charged into their boats in their
shirtsleeves and pushed off into the inky storm waters, sometimes
without running lights.
They scooped Rice and many other passengers into their vessels,
returning over and over again for more.
In shock and shivering, the passengers were bundled into blankets by the
rescuers and served coffee in the hall of the tiny community on B.C.'s
rugged and remote Inside Passage.
"Everybody in Hartley Bay was involved in this one, literally everybody
from small children to the elders, including some elders that couldn't
even walk," said Ernie Westgarth, housing co-ordinator for the village.
"To see all these people coming off the rescue boats onto the docks was
a sight in itself - the young and old, the scared, shocked look on their
faces, young children with no shoes."
James Bolton had been getting ready for a game of poker when his group
got a call from a friend at 1 a.m.
The gillnetter took to his boat and helped pull 13 people off the
lifeboats.
He saw the ship go down, watching the massive vessel bend as it headed
deep.
"The lights were still on until about halfway down. It sort of popped
back up and then went straight down."
Another rescuer said he heard the 16 vehicles inside the ferry crash
together like roughly handled toys.
Westgarth said the entire Hartley Bay community of 200 helped to give
the passengers hot coffee, tea, pastries and hot chocolate.
"It's got to be said: the people of Hartley Bay are heroes. I've seen
them do this before but not on this scale. People (residents) are still
walking around in a daze, like tired, they haven't slept at all. They
want to make sure everybody is safe and fed."
Rice, who was taken to hospital by helicopter due to his high blood
pressure, said the people in Hartley Bay were tremendous.
As he spoke to a reporter in a Prince Rupert hotel, he shifted in his
borrowed clothes. A stranger pressed money into his wife's hand. Someone
else had bought them both new underwear.
Health officials in Prince Rupert said 11 people had been treated in
hospital for cuts and scrapes.
Suzanne Johnston of the Northern Health Authority said the passengers
walked into the hospital on their own, but were obviously stressed.
"Mostly, they just wanted to connect with people."
After daybreak, the rest of the passengers were shepherded onto the Sir
Wilfrid Laurier, a coast guard icebreaker. They set sail again to make
the three-hour-plus voyage back to Prince Rupert.
It was just over 12 hours after the Queen of the North had left Prince
Rupert for its routine 8 p.m. overnight sailing.
By then, there was nothing visible at all of the ship.
Environment officials mobilized a spill response team as an oil slick
spread over the water. Life jackets, cafeteria trays and paper floated
within it.
The Queen of the North hit a rock just after 12:30 a.m PST off Gil
Island in Wright Sound. It sank within an hour.
Hahn said the hit would have had to have been major to sink the ship so
quickly, but he wouldn't speculate on the cause of the accident.
"It was clearly off course. There's no other way to look at it. The
question is, how did it get to be where it was?"
The captain was not on the bridge at the time, but Hahn would not say
who was. B.C. Ferries regulations require the captain have a backup for
a the 15 hour voyage.
Investigators from the Transportation Safety Board were expected to
arrive in Prince Rupert late Wednesday afternoon.
A "shocked" Premier Gordon Campbell travelled to Prince Rupert and said
counsellors will be on hand to help the passengers, as will officials
from the Insurance Corp. of B.C., the province's auto insurer.
"It's frightening," said Campbell.
"I've heard this morning that some of the passengers were awakened in
their nightgowns and I imagine it's pretty darn scary. . . Thank God
that we've got all these people apparently safe (but we have to)
recognize that these things last for people for some time."
Although B.C.'s ferries are considered an extension of the province's
highways, the death toll on those waterways is significantly less: only
four people have died in accidents with the formerly Crown-owned ferry
fleet in the last 20 years.
The Queen of the North was sailing south on a 450-kilometre overnight
trip from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy along B.C.'s Inside Passage, a
strikingly beautiful stretch of coast immortalized in some of Emily
Carr's paintings.
Seas were reported to be choppy and winds were blowing at about 75
kilometres an hour.
According to the B.C. Ferries website, the ship was built in Germany in
1969 and refitted in 2001. It can hold up to 700 people and 115 cars.
Campbell said the Transportation Safety Board approved the ferry for use
on that route.
Coincidentally, though, the legislature was to consider Wednesday a
proposal for funding to replace the three northern ferries. B.C. Ferries
has been negotiating the move for two years.
The proposal passed.
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Ciao,
Doug
