Report: Crew member alone when ferry sank

VICTORIA, B.C. – Only one person – a trainee – was on the bridge when the ferry Queen of the North crashed last year, and as the ship sank off the British Columbia coast she told the others that shared her life raft: “It was not my fault; I was left alone,” B.C. Ferries says in a new report.

The information directly contradicts what the person told B.C. Ferries investigators in a report that was released earlier this year.

The report and new information given to the Canadian Transportation Safety Board means the release of its independent report will be further delayed.

The addendum to the Ferries report was released Wednesday after the company said it recently gained new information when two employees came forward and detailed what they’d overheard.

Four of the five members of the panel that examined the new information concluded it was credible. One dissented.

“I was sitting not far from (the quartermaster), I recall (the quartermaster) again saying: ‘It was not my fault; I was alone,’ ” one of the employees told the investigators in a sworn statement.

“When we watched the Queen of the North disappear under the water, I heard (the quartermaster) say again: ‘It was not my fault’ and repeat it.”

A second employee told B.C. Ferries the quartermaster was desperately talking to herself while in the life raft with others who had abandoned ship.

“Once our raft was away, it started to drift towards the stern of the vessel and at that point I could hear (the quartermaster) talking to herself saying ‘It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault. Oh my God.’ “

The report said the employee didn’t come forward because, at the time, the employee didn’t know the quartermaster was part of the bridge crew.

Ferries CEO David Hahn said the two workers stepped forward because they thought the original report had missed crucial information.

“I think it takes a bit of courage to do this, you know, to step forward and make these kind of statements, but they felt it was appropriate, important and pointed it out to the company,” Hahn said in an interview.

Richard Goode, spokesman for the B.C. Ferry and Marine Workers’ Union, said the union wouldn’t comment on the latest report until the Transportation Safety Board issues its report.

“We’d like it over and done with because it’s very traumatic for everybody concerned, whether it’s the public, whether it’s the people that travel, whether it’s the union members that were directly affected that were on that ship, the ones that were on that bridge, and the union,” Goode said.

The Queen of the North was on an overnight voyage March 22, 2006, between Prince Rupert and Port Hardy on Vancouver Island when it crashed into a rocky island and sank.

The original Ferries report, released in March, concluded the three members of the bridge crew had failed to make an important course correction and had lost “situational awareness.”

The three refused to talk to Ferries investigators. The quartermaster answered some questions, but none about the crucial 14-minute period just before the crash.

The quartermaster originally told investigators that just before the crash, the ship’s fourth officer barked an order for her to switch off the autopilot and make a radical course correction.

She said for a split second she questioned the order – until she saw the trees. She said she searched for the switch to turn off the autopilot and couldn’t find it.

She said as she fled the bridge deck to alert the ship’s master of the emergency, she told investigators she heard the fourth officer tell the second officer: “I’m sorry. I was trying to go around a fishing boat.”

Ninety-nine passengers and crew made it off the ferry safely, but passengers Shirley Rosette and Gerald Foisy, a British Columbia couple, were never found.

The quartermaster is not identified in either Ferries report, but Wednesday’s report said she had worked as a deck hand since 2005 and was considered a “person under training” for the bridge. Her supervisors considered her a competent member of the bridge crew, it said.

The quartermaster has been identified as Karen Bricker in court documents filed by passengers suing B.C. Ferries. Karl Lilgert was the fourth officer that night, while Keven Hilton was the second officer.

The three were fired, though their union is grieving the dismissals.

B.C. Ferries said the new information doesn’t change its original conclusion that the deck watch failed to maintain a proper lookout.

But it also says: “If the statements attributed to the quartermaster are true, the absence from the bridge of the other members of the bridge watch would be a significant contributing factor in the failure to recognize the deviation from the intended route.”

The addition to the original report came after B.C. Ferries said this summer it had obtained new information, as well as information from the ship’s electronic chart system, which was recovered by a submersible sent to the wreck site.