Sailing into rocky shores

by Craig McInnes

On land or sea, dumb mistakes can undermine the smartest machines

When the keel slammed into the bottom, our sailboat bounced hard then floated free. My wife and children and I were all thrown forward, shocked by the unexpected impact but not seriously hurt.

The rock I hit was hidden two metres below the surface, invisible but it was clearly marked on the chart. The sun was high and the water was flat calm. Perfect conditions, no excuses.

Fifteen years ago, I didn't have the navigation equipment that was on the bridge of the Costa Concordia when it sliced open its bottom on a reef in the Mediterranean, but what I had should have been enough to persuade me to give the hazard wider berth. We escaped with some scrapes, my badly bruised ego and a few thousand dollars in damage.

I was lulled into complacency by the beautiful day and a false confidence in my ability to judge distance with-out doing the necessary calculations needed to confirm our position.

What happened on the Costa Concordia is harder to imagine.

The Global Positioning System, or GPS, has revolutionized navigation especially when combined with charting systems, offering the kind of leap forward achieved in the past with the invention of the compass.

With a few minutes of training and a good GPS, any amateur off the streets can more accurately tell where a ship is and what direction it should be heading than could the most experienced master mariners of the past.

What training and experience still bring are an understanding of the hazards that are always close at hand on the water and the judgment required to safely command a boat or ship of any size.

From what we've heard so far, it sounds like an amateur from off the docks would have done a better job of keeping the Costa Concordia safe than whoever ordered the crew to deviate from the usual route and cut what turned out to be too close to Giglio Island.


While the international media are drawing comparisons to the fate of the Titanic, for British Columbians it sounds more like the sad end of the Queen of the North, the B.C. ferry that sank after running into Gil Island in the middle of the night six years ago when the crew lost track of where they were.

The question of what happened to the Costa Concordia also sails into the controversy over the increase in oil tanker traffic on our coast that would be associated with the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline.

Critics say it's a matter of when a major spill would occur, not whether it would happen.

Enbridge argues that modern double-hulled tankers and tug escorts will render that risk all but insignificant. It estimates the chance of a large spill as once in 2,800 years.

The Costa Concordia was a modern ship with state-of-the-art navigation equipment. Its owners say the only way it could have got so far off course without alarms going off is if its crew deliberately set a new, unauthorized course through more dangerous waters.

Even without knowing all of the facts, the lesson in this might be taken as a cautionary tale, that advanced technology can make it less likely that increased tanker traffic will lead to an ecological disaster, but that no amount of electronic or mechanical wizardry can completely eliminate the risk of human error.

What I take from this is that just as with technology that is used in critical applications, any human links in a safety chain have to be based on redundancy.

No single person can be in a position where their failure alone, or the failure of anyone who is directly in their command, can lead to a catastrophic result.

We'll always be building better ships and better systems, while to err will always be human.


Vancouver Sun

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