The Queen of Oak Bay sits idle after slamming into boat docks at Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver, British Columbia, Thursday, June 30, 2005. Several smaller boats were crushed by the ferry. There is no report of injuries. (AP PHOTO/CP, Chuck Stoody)
Posted on 06/30/2005 3:45:51 PM PDT by Murtyo
Divers found no victims as they searched the water around a grounded B.C. ferry that missed the West Vancouver terminal and plowed through a crowded marina on Thursday.
The operator, BC Ferries, promised a full investigation to determine why the 7,000-tonne vessel smashed through the marina beside the Horseshoe Bay terminal at about 10:10 a.m. local time. The 7,000-tonne ferry missed the Horseshoe Bay terminal and smashed through a marina.
Witnesses said the Queen of Oak Bay seemed to have lost power before it veered into Sewell's Marina. But David Hahn, the president of BC Ferries, said it was too early to say what caused the crash.
"It's very clear that something went wrong, probably on the mechanical side, but beyond that I can not speculate," Hahn told a news conference on Thursday afternoon.
Canadian Coast Guard divers searched the water around the ferry for two hours before wrapping up at about 1:30 p.m. without finding any victims.
They also checked the hull of the ferry, to ensure that it was safe to move to the dock, so that 544 passengers who had been stuck on board all day could disembark.
"I'm just extremely grateful there was no loss of life or no injuries," Hahn said.
Although initial reports suggested that as many as 20 boats were hit by the ferry, closer inspections revealed that only about six appeared to have been damaged.
Witnesses said the ferry, which left Nanaimo for Horseshoe Bay at 8:30 a.m., was blowing its horn as it crashed into the marina.
"It kept coming and coming," Gus Tsogaf, who owns the Bay Moorings Restaurant, told CBC News. "A low speed, but it just kept coming. It just couldn't stop."
As the ferry approached, people who were in the boats or on the docks ran for shore.
Bruce Munroe, who manages the Boat Centre, said he was inside a customer's boat doing repairs and couldn't see the ferry when he heard its horn blow. People line the shore to view the British Columbia ferry Queen of Oak Bay. (CP photo)
At first, he assumed it was a normal warning for a smaller vessel to get out of the way. But when he heard a second, longer blast, he began to move.
"I quickly got out of the boat and started walking away from the ferry toward the main dock," he told CBC News.
"And as I started to walk, you could see the employees of BC Ferries yelling and waving their hands and saying, 'Run! Run! Run!' So I started running." 'As I started to walk, you could see the employees of BC Ferries yelling and waving their hands and saying, "Run! Run! Run!" So I started running.'
The ferry's passengers said they were told to brace themselves shortly before the impact.
Reached by cellphone while he waited to disembark, passenger Chris Hulsen said he and his family followed the instructions on the loudspeaker.
They raced to their car and fastened their seatbelts, then waited tensely as alarms blared for about a minute before the collision occurred.
"The actual impact itself was really pretty uneventful," Hulsen told CBC News. "If we hadn't been told we were going to crash, we would have thought it was just a normal docking."
The accident forced BC Ferries to suspend service at the Horseshoe Bay terminal just as the long Canada Day weekend began.
However, at the afternoon news conference, Hahn said the company would be adding extra runs to handle the extra passengers.
The Queen of Oak Bay, which was first launched in 1981, recently underwent $35 million in upgrades and had only returned to service two weeks earlier.
BC Ferries was transformed from a provincially operated Crown corporation into an independent, commercial organization in April of 2003. It is now operated at arm's length from the government of British Columbia.
It's unclear whether the province will be ultimately liable for damages arising from this accident.
The Queen of Oak Bay sits idle after slamming into boat docks at Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver, British Columbia, Thursday, June 30, 2005. Several smaller boats were crushed by the ferry. There is no report of injuries. (AP PHOTO/CP, Chuck Stoody)
Thank God no one was hurt! I'm glad that the captain gave plenty of warning to passengers and those in the marina.
BC Ferries is a class operation. I got a large breakfast on the Queen for a pittance and a fine seat in the bow as we crossed the Georgia Strait on a straight line. (No pun intended.)
I took the Washington State ferry from Sidney to Anacortes to get back to the states, and the ferry was a 1968 rust-bucket with no food service. What made the trip interesting though was the route the ferry took dodging through the San Juan Islands. It wasn't a straight line.
The problem sounds like a loss of power.
It appears that there is not even a scratch on that boat.
Belted in my car is NOT where I would want to be if the ferry was in trouble. You would find me near a supply of life vests with quick access to the life boats.
Too bad Vancouver just voted against Walmart. Some crew members might need a new job.
The B.C. ferries fleet is actually larger in terms of number of ships than the entire Canadian navy.
Seems like a mechanical failure. The crew members acted properly, it's the maintainence engineers who'll be answering questions.
Those are fake pictures of a different accident.
Keep that crap off the Free Republic pages - you are starting to make it look like a Democrat website with those lies.
But it makes it so much easier for them to find the bodies!
Excellent point. I had not thought of that. I was so myopically focused on self preservation that I failed to see the greater benefit to society which would come with following orders.
How does any vessel in Canada get certified without a pair of anchors?
definitely. seems from reports that the ferry captain made the right call when things started going bad.
I've been on both and the BC system seemed more up to date. Our ferries here in WA are certainly on the basic side in terms of facilities. But I think that the lack of private enterprise in the BC system may have been an indirect contribution to this accident??
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