Coast Guard is faulted in Lady D sinking

The National Transportation Safety Board concluded yesterday that a cascading series of errors by the Coast Guard permitted the water taxi Lady D to carry too much weight to withstand wind and waves when it capsized in Baltimore Harbor in March 2004.

Five people died in the accident, and a girl, now 10, suffered what could be permanent brain damage.

NTSB officials questioned yesterday whether the Coast Guard is moving fast enough to remedy its errors. A top investigator told the board that it might take "another accident" to get the Coast Guard to move quickly to correct an outdated passenger weight standard that contributed to the overloading.

Rob Henry, associate director of the Office of Marine Safety, made his comment as the NTSB met to approve its findings regarding the factors that contributed to the accident, which dumped 25 passengers and crew members into the frigid harbor as the water taxi made its run between Fort McHenry and Fells Point.

The findings also include criticism of the National Weather Service for its failure to give mariners a timely warning of the line of thunderstorms approaching the harbor on March 6, 2004. But the board found that the weather service has taken steps to address the shortcomings that delayed its warning until about seven minutes after the Lady D capsized.

During the five-hour hearing, the board was critical of the Coast Guard for failing to act on some of its previously released findings about the accident, including its December 2004 warning that the average body-weight standards used by marine inspectors to determine vessel capacity are still decades out of date.

The average weight of those aboard the Lady D was 168 pounds, but the standards assume an average weight of 140, a figure investigators traced back to 1942.

The Coast Guard has yet to revise those standards, saying it needs to study the issue and determine the economic impact on the marine industry.

Henry told the NTSB members that the board's staff is concerned "that the Coast Guard is not taking immediate action to address this out-of-date standard."

"What will it take for them to move a bit more expeditiously?" acting Chairman Mark V. Rosenker asked Henry.

"What will it take? Another accident," Henry replied.

Rosenker replied that waiting for another accident would be "unacceptable."

Angela McArdle, a Coast Guard spokeswoman, said yesterday that the weight standard has not been officially changed and that she could not give a timetable for the agency's rulemaking process.

McArdle said the Coast Guard always takes the NTSB's recommendations into account. "We'll be looking at those seriously as we decide how to move forward," she said.

The board found that the probable cause of the Lady D accident was a lack of stability that left it unable to remain upright amid the gusts and waves that struck it in the Northwest Harbor just before 4 p.m. that Saturday.

It said the pontoon boat's instability was caused by overloading resulting from a combination of mistakes, noting that:

In the early 1990s, the Coast Guard performed a stability test on the pontoon boat Fells Point Princess using criteria appropriate only for monohull boats, resulting in an inflated capacity rating permitting 25 people to be aboard that boat.

The Coast Guard inappropriately treated the Lady D and two other pontoon boats as "sister" vessels to the Fells Point Princess, even though it was built by a different maker and had a significantly different design. Because of its sister status, the Lady D's capacity rating was based on the original boat's capacity, waiving the requirement for an independent stability test.

"They weren't sisters. They didn't even have the same parents," said board member Deborah A.P. Hersman. She said the improper certification of the Fells Point Princess as a sister to other vessels allowed mistakes to be repeated.