#gurl help i've been watching the Board of Investigation for too long

[jackalgirl]

Okay, back to being one day behind. I just caught up with yesterday's testimony. LCDR Duffett, from the Coast Guard, looks and sounds so much like Onmund from Skyrim that I think I've been sitting around listening to regulatory, guidance, and statutory discussions for way, way too long and my brain is starting to short-circuit.

Key moments: o The Chair announcing that the MBI's or Coast Guard's (I forget which) legal folks have made a determination as to whether OceanGate was operating an unnumbered, uninspected passenger-for-hire passenger submarine (Cyclops 1) in US territorial waters (the wreck of the Andrea Doria)* and will share that with the NTSB, but didn't state the determination for the record. You're killing me, Smalls!

* If you are a US owner of a vessel that is one of a number of types, and it's under a certain tonnage, you don't need a title or certificate, but it *does* need a number. If the submersible does not have a letter from the Coast Guard designating it as an Oceanographic Research Vessel and it carries one (1) passenger-for-hire (i.e, that person has paid money or some other form of consideration, including paying for gas or snax, and the passengers** in Cyclops 1 paid $35K each), it's required to be inspected. ** I think there were at least two: Scott Parazynski, mentioned in this article: https://oceannews.com/news/subsea-and-survey/oceangate-conducts-the-first-submersible-dives-to-the-legendary-andrea-doria-shipwreck-in-20-years/ and Renata Rojas, who testified to the hearing about that dive specifically, but even if it was just her, she would have met the "1 paying passenger" requirement. o Counsel for OceanGate tries to get Onmund LDCR Duffett to agree that if OceanGate notified the Coast Guard Sector that they were going to be diving on the wreck of the Andrea Doria, that it was the Coast Guard's responsibility to verify that the company and its vessel was compliant.

LDCR Duffett: By Talos, this can’t be happening.

No, I'm kidding, what he really said is no, it's the responsibility of the master/owner/operator of the vessel to ensure it is compliant.

One of the main takeaways from today is that there is a whole lot of confusing, and sometimes contradictory information, and a lot of this information is presumed by people to be regulatory where in fact it's just guidance. They've been talking about "Navigation and Vessel and Inspection Circulars" (NVICs) which have often been referred to (and repeatedly corrected by the Board) as "statute" or "regulation" when they are not either of those things; they are just, as LCDR Duffett explained, "equivalencies to statute: they are a way to comply, but not the only way".

Top this off with the fact that one very key NVIC (NVIC 5-93, released in 1993) has parts of it that have been changed by subsequent laws, but the NVIC itself (which has not been superseded or cancelled) has not been updated to reflect the changes. So if you're looking at this thing, which OceanGate clearly was, and it's telling you that submersibles carrying fewer than 6 passengers-for-hire don't need to be inspected, and you are not aware of the changes to the actual code, 46 CFR § 70.10-1, which changed this to "a submersible vessel carrying at least one passenger for hire" (which happened in 1994), you may not be aware that your vessel needs to be inspected.

Poor LCDR Duffett, when asked why, in the intervening thirty years, NVIC 5-93 hasn't been updated to reflect the changes, could only say "I don't know."

The Better Half: probably no one told them. Me: I am 100% sure that the various professional organizations that handle submersibles and submarine technology have been telling them about this for years.

What I'd recommend, though, is that anyone who wants this changed should just rewrite the NVIC with the changes and send it to the Coast Guard as a draft document. It's no guarantee that this will work, but in my experience, if you present busy people with a finished product that they just have to review and approve (rather than one they have to write themselves), it is vastly more likely to happen.

I don't know if you all are following this -- as a retired Sonar Technician, this kind of stuff interests me intently. Trigger warning: some really scary descriptions of stuff that should not have happened, including people dying.

The guy who’s testifying today, David Lochridge, is mad (I mean, justifiably so, I think). He is mad at Oceangate, he is made at OSHA, he is mad at the Coast Guard. He kept receipts and notes for everything. They keep having to stop the hearing to reorganize their documents because he has so much. The Oceangate lawyer does not have the letter that Oceangate’s previous lawyers sent to this guy after they’d been informed of his Whistleblower status that basically reads like they followed the things that Whistleblower protection tells you not to do like a checklist of things to do.

Basically, I think the point he is getting across without actually saying this is, “I worked my ass off in 2018 and 2019 after Oceangate fired me to give you (OSHA, Coast Guard) what you needed to prevent this from happening, and you did not stop them.”