Harbor Safety

You may remember the the accident, way back in June, 2021. A high-speed ferry carrying more than 100 passengers experienced a catastrophic malfunction under the Brooklyn Bridge and then somehow ran aground in tiny Bushwick Inlet, on the border of Greenpoint and Williamsburg.

Both the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board immediately launched investigations, and last fall–after nearly 17 months–the NTSB finally released their report. It says that when the ferry’s automated control system failed (after repeated error warnings that went unaddressed) the captain and mate were not sufficiently trained to switch to the backup control system or even hit the engines’ emergency stop button, with the result that they had very limited control of the vessel’s speed and trajectory and could not prevent it from plowing into the Brooklyn shoreline.

Put another way, it’s almost as if the crew of a jetliner, when confronted with the loss of their autopilot systems, did not know how to fly the plane manually. And the result was something like a plane wreck, albeit in slow motion. No one was killed or seriously hurt, but they easily could have been: Bushwick Inlet is a popular spot for recreational boating, and in fact just two hours before the accident a group of people in canoes were working on an oyster float that the ferry ran over.

Amazingly, nearly two years after the accident, the Coast Guard has still not released their own report. Thus some big questions remain unanswered. Does the agency have a substantially different view of what caused the accident? What has it done to prevent similar accidents from occurring in the future? Are any training or operational or policy changes under consideration? Does the agency believe that 38 knots (the speed the ferry was traveling when its primary control system failed) is a safe speed for  the most congested part of the harbor–and if not, what are they going to do about it? 

–Rob Buchanan