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Thirty-four dead. A furious instant fire on the high seas in the dark of the night.
This happened in the early morning hours of Monday, September 2nd, Labor Day, all 20 meters from the island of Santa Cruz.
Five crew members managed to escape from their lives. They slept upstairs on the upper deck.
All the others slept in bunks at the lowest of the three levels of the boat. This is where the rocking of the sea hinders as little as possible a good night's sleep.
The fire was so hot that it cut sharply across the anchor line. Without the intervention of TowBoatUS, aka Vessel Assist, a private company offering "roadside assistance", the boat, the Design, would have drifted.
After just under 24 hours, the search for survivors had been canceled; the search for bodies began.
Among the victims we do not know much: a family of five from Stockton. A couple of children – and their accompanying parents – from a charter school in Santa Cruz. The 41-year-old co-owner of Worldwide Diving Adventures, the Santa Cruz-based company that chartered the boat. And a 26-year-old woman who had only recently started working for Truth Aquatics, the charter boat charter company in Santa Barbara, who built and built the boat Design. They were all aboard for a three-day dive trip to discover the waters of the Channel Islands.
We do not know most of their identities. Their stories – and their names – will be gradually published in the coming days. It is at this time that the authorities will begin to match DNA samples taken from bodies marked by what Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown described as "extreme thermal damage" with the same genetic material provided by parents concerned with those whose names appear on the manifest of the vessel. To date, 30 families have contacted the sheriff's office in Santa Barbara.
Thirty-four dead.
According to Santa Barbara's disaster standards, 34 dead are the worst of all time. Thomas Fire and the combined debris flow killed 25 people. The 1925 earthquake killed 13 people.
Exactly what triggered this fire, no one knows. Every government agency with enough initials to contribute to an alphabet soup studies this issue. Even the FBI is aware of it, although there is no evidence to suggest anything "criminal or harmful," as Lieutenant Erik Raney of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office said. Tuesday, the first of the 16 agents of the National Transportation Safety Board went to Santa Barbara. They designated the Design disaster a "major maritime incident."
They are here, they said at a press conference on Tuesday, to determine what was wrong and how to make sure it does not happen again. To this end, they will interview the five surviving crewmembers, the companies involved, the first responders and the Good Samaritan couple, Bob and Shirley Hansen, who offered a safe haven to the surviving crew on their boat, the Grape Escape. They will also assimilate each report written on the incident by the more than 12 government agencies engaged to date. According to them, the final report could take two years. But they should know what happened within 10 days. That's when they expect to be able to publish a preliminary report.
For people familiar with Truth Aquatics, this makes absolutely no sense. Truth Aquatics is a chartered dive boat company founded 35 years ago. She has long enjoyed a reputation for her scrupulous, ruthless and equal concern for safety. His clients praise the company, as does Jerry Boylan, captain of the company. Design– one of the three chartered vessels that Truth Aquatics owns and operates. The longtime fisherman Nick Voss, familiar with the boat, the company and the captain, paid tribute to the operation. "It's so well run, so clean, so tight," he said. "Their boats are so immaculate. You could eat the engine. "
What we know comes from Sheriff Brown and Captain Monica Rochester from the US Coast Guard. The boat had passed its annual fire safety inspections. It was equipped with working fire extinguishers and smoke detectors. Similarly, there were two working escape hatches leading to the bridge from the bottom, where passengers slept in three-story bunk beds. And no, they both pointed out, there were no locked doors keeping passengers trapped in their downstairs bunks. In fact, there is no locked door on the boat.
The first Mayday alert was reported at 3:30 am on September 2nd. The message was confused and frantic; the boat was completely engulfed by the flames. The second Mayday alert came from the Hansen on the Grape Escape, who reportedly said that he heard explosions. The five crew members who managed to escape in a rubber boat attached to the stern of the ship Design on board Hansen's boat, which was a few hundred yards from their burning ship. Several of them are then returned to the Design search for survivors, but none has been found. The Coast Guard, along with the Ventura and Santa Barbara firefighters, were within reach within 40 minutes. But at 7:20, the Design had sunk.
To date, 33 bodies have been found. the Design would have capsized 30 meters below the surface of the ocean on the north side of Santa Cruz Island; trying to get it out of the water will be a major engineering test. With the ship overturned, the heavy equipment on board could detach, making recovery efforts unsafe, especially for divers searching for missing bodies around the sunken vessel. What's also alarming – for a host of environmental reasons – is the 1500 gallons of diesel fuel Designhad worn. It is not known how much time remains in the damaged vessel, but the potential for fuel to start flowing into the waters surrounding the sensitive marine habitat is a source of serious concern.
Whether the explosions cause fire or the fire is at the origin of the explosions, Sheriff Brown strives to stress, no one knows. It is not even certain that there is irrefutable evidence of an explosion. Almost everyone on the Santa Barbara waterfront – currently busy with a multitude of TV report trucks – has a theory. Some suggest a generator failure. Others, more intriguing, wonder if the lithium-ion batteries that were probably recharging DesignThe main bridge office could have provided both the detonator and the dynamite needed to ignite the fierce conflagration. Such batteries are now commonly used to power photo and video equipment. Most airlines do not want lithium-ion batteries to be registered with their luggage. In 2017, the Federal Aviation Administration was aware of 46 "incidents" involving lithium-ion equipment. While the cans of oxygen and nitrox – a combination of nitrogen and oxygen used by divers – are neither flammable nor explosive in themselves, their contents could help quickly turn a small flame in a big fire.
What we do know is that to get out of the bunk room, the passengers would have had to climb the stairs and go through the galley to reach the open deck. But according to Sheriff Brown, smoke and flames had blocked the escape route and the escape hatch. The crew would apparently only have thrills on the passengers. As Senator Dianne Feinstein pointed out by calling for a federal inquiry, the boats – even the best – are poorly designed and new rules might prove necessary.
In the meantime, crew members keep their distance from media requests for a host of legal and emotional reasons that seem self-evident.
The coroner's office in Santa Barbara, which has received the recovered bodies, has now reached maximum capacity. Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner dispatched two or three mobile cooling units and staff to help determine the identity of the victims and the causes of their deaths. Lieutenant Raney said that the condition of the bodies of the victims was variable. All do not need DNA analysis to determine the identity, he added.
Teams of divers from at least four different law enforcement agencies have searched the bottom of the ocean in search of the remains of the passengers, and search continues for the 34th.
"It's probably the worst case scenario," said Sheriff Bill Brown.
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