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27th May 2019, 09:37 PM
#1
Tugboat captain and pilot at fault in Sunshine Bridge crash
Marquette Transportation's president and other company officials on Saturday placed blame for the Sunshine Bridge crash squarely on the tugboat captain and pilot, saying they failed to follow the company's internal safety and voyage planning policies. Capt. Harvey Mabile, one of the "go-to" field managers for a group of Marquette Transportation tugboat captains on the lower Mississippi River, said he got a call from the KRISTIN ALEXIS tugboat about the crash at 2 a.m. on Oct. 12. Capt. Desmond Smith, then the vessel's master captain, told Mabile that a large crane barge that the tug had been pushing upriver from Convent to Darrow was stuck under the Sunshine Bridge near Donaldsonville. The bridge has a wide and tall center span, also known as a channel span, that's able to accommodate even the tallest cranes on most days, Mabile said. He told a federal panel investigating the crash Saturday that he didn't understand initially how that the crane could be stuck. "I went, 'How can you be stuck the under the bridge?' And he said he went through the alternate span," Mabile said Smith told him. "'I know we should have went under the channel span, Harvey, but we are stuck under the Sunshine Bridge.'" The company's policies call for mariners to know the crane's and the span's dimensions to ensure vessels like the Mr. Ervin have room to fit under the bridge. But chief among those policies, Marquette officials said Saturday, is the authority each employee is given to stop if something seems dangerous or makes them uncomfortable. According to their testimony, both Smith and his pilot, Capt. Eugene Picquet III, said they had concerns about limited visibility pushing the huge Cooper Consolidated crane. However, they never actually calculated the height of the lower alternate span or the crane. Smith said he relied on a word-of-mouth figure that was 6 feet short of the crane's actual height. Mabile, a port captain who mostly oversees Marquette's "fleet" tugs ferrying cranes and other equipment along the river, told investigators he would have been the one to receive a call if either man had aired misgivings. Marquette tug ran different crane into another Mississippi River bridge before Sunshine Bridge crash "It frustrates me that it wasn't done because that telephone call would have eliminated all of this from happening," said Mabile, who knew Picquet and Smith and helped recruit Picquet back to Marquette as a pilot only a month before the crash Both Smith and Picquet have been fired since the incident. A joint panel of the U.S. Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board has been taking testimony since Monday at Lamar-Dixon Expo Center about the crash that shut the bridge for a month and a half. Saturday marked the last day of the testimony in Gonzales. A public report on the findings of the hearing is not expected until late this year, at the earliest. Crews spent several hours the morning of Oct. 12 adding water ballast to the crane so it could be lowered and removed from the bridge. A state highway official told the panel last week that the bridge, on paper, should have come down because of the damage to key support beams. Repairs have cost upward of $6.5 million. Source : The Advocate
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28th May 2019, 07:17 PM
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