Tugboat sinks at Seattle dock.
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One of the commenters about half way down says he was there. Here's his account:
I was there last night when it happened. I saw it all go down. I work on a bunker barge and actual tug boat. The boat that sank was 36' long, an Oil Spill Response Vessel, not a tug boat. The wind was calm and the water at terminal five was almost perfectly flat, although it was raining heavily.
The driver of the OSRV was an exceptionally timid boat handler, and the rope with which he was towing the oil boom wrapped around his propeller. He opened the hatch in the stern deck to reach down and cut the tangle. Apparently this hatch also leads to the miniature engine room beneath the after deck.
While the weather was perfectly benign, the after deck of the OSRV is very low to the water, and a small, ity bity little wave did wash into the open hatch and into the engine room. With so little freeboard, the boat had practically no reserve stability or buoyancy, and progressively increasing flooding resulted.
The timid driver jumped/fell into the water when the boat upended and twisted on its longitudinal axis. From my perspective, it looked as though the boat rolled right onto him, but his partner in the skiff said it missed him by inches.
We were casting off our barge, having finished bunkering the Westwood Rainier, so we had to tie it back up in order to use our actual tug boat to rescue the timid driver. He and his partner were on board our boat for a couple hours while we waited for their co-workers to retrieve them and the one boat that was still floating. The timid driver had a minor cut on the inside of his left forearm and refused medical treatment from us on the boat. He was also shivering, though we provided him with warm dry clothes, and dried his wet clothes in our dryer.
Indeed, a chain of events proceeded unbroken which led to this minor marine casualty. Had proper risk assessment been adequately performed, the chain of events may have been broken. This sinking was the direct result of poor boat handling and a series of poor decisions stacked one upon another.
Originally Posted by CMA_Decky
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