Fire on dive boat Conception in CA
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KevinNM
Contributor
Flashover is when essentially everything organic in the room ignites at once, accompanied by a huge spike in temperature. If you are in a room at flashover you are in horrible danger, even if you are a firefighter in bunker gear. You can also get ignition from the heat radiated from a fire without flashover.
Ojai Diver
Contributor
Those on this thread who have compared the Conception to a death trap, and Truth Aquatics as their greedy owners, are being disrespectful to both, and displaying remarkable 20/20 hindsight.
I will reiterate that I have dove on the Conception and the Truth, and both boats exemplified maintenance and money spent. Their crews were good. They were not trying to get every nickel out of operation, as some have suggested. I recall specifically that these boats would routinely leave on trips half full, and therefore less profitable, something many other operators would cringe at.
When I think of this, as I do a lot, I can't help but recall the Titanic--and I mean no disrespect or glibness in this comparison. Like Truth Aquatics, the White Star Line of 1912 had a very good reputation. The Titanic, later regarded as synonymous with disaster, actually exceeded the safety standards it was only required to meet, most relevantly, the number of lifeboats. The newspapers called it "unsinkable" and even the the more sober minded recognized it as far safer than the majority of ships on the water. In those days it was unthinkable that a large multi compartmented ship could sink, so it was envisioned that the lifeboats were chiefly to be used in moving passengers from a stricken ship to a rescuing ship, which was the rationale behind the number of lifeboats required.
The practice of maintaining speed through known ice fields was common.
There were, of course, elements of bad luck: the binoculars missing from the crows nest, the complete calm of the water, which made it harder to spot the bergs, as no water broke at their bases.
The rest, of course, we know.
The Conception tragedy is one of the horrible coincidences of events that, like the Titanic, with terrible human cost, has or will hopefully raise our collective understanding of what can go wrong, and make us think about what we can do better in the future.
I will reiterate that I have dove on the Conception and the Truth, and both boats exemplified maintenance and money spent. Their crews were good. They were not trying to get every nickel out of operation, as some have suggested. I recall specifically that these boats would routinely leave on trips half full, and therefore less profitable, something many other operators would cringe at.
When I think of this, as I do a lot, I can't help but recall the Titanic--and I mean no disrespect or glibness in this comparison. Like Truth Aquatics, the White Star Line of 1912 had a very good reputation. The Titanic, later regarded as synonymous with disaster, actually exceeded the safety standards it was only required to meet, most relevantly, the number of lifeboats. The newspapers called it "unsinkable" and even the the more sober minded recognized it as far safer than the majority of ships on the water. In those days it was unthinkable that a large multi compartmented ship could sink, so it was envisioned that the lifeboats were chiefly to be used in moving passengers from a stricken ship to a rescuing ship, which was the rationale behind the number of lifeboats required.
The practice of maintaining speed through known ice fields was common.
There were, of course, elements of bad luck: the binoculars missing from the crows nest, the complete calm of the water, which made it harder to spot the bergs, as no water broke at their bases.
The rest, of course, we know.
The Conception tragedy is one of the horrible coincidences of events that, like the Titanic, with terrible human cost, has or will hopefully raise our collective understanding of what can go wrong, and make us think about what we can do better in the future.
KevinNM
Contributor
Almost no major accident has only a single cause. It's typically the culmination of behavior shifts due to a long period of nothing bad happening, policies that are not really followed because they are seen as outdated, maintenance that isn't done as soon as it could be done, maybe some economizing in what are thought to be unimportant places and other such things that one terrible day interact to produce disaster.
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- Messages
- 17,334
- Reaction score
- 13,743
- # of dives
- 100 - 199
Ken Kurtis
Contributor
I have been saying for a number of days now that this is our Titanic. The sinking of the Titanic resulted in re-thinking and re-designing how boats were built, and safety issues (like how many lifeboats to have) were re-thought and improved as well. As I've said almost every time I've been interviewed, hopefully something good can come out of this in that type of form.
And the thing to remember is that this affects more than just dive boats. Fishing boats, and maybe 95% of the commercial passenger vessels of this same general size (say, 50-200 feet long) that deal in overnight trips have this type of 3-deck design: main deck central, bunkrooms below, wheelhouse above. Any suggestions/changes/modifications are going to have HUGE worldwide implications. (And that's a good thing.)
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