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Bad boat fire off of LA


Beau Vine

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Crew not only didn't go down with ship, they might have been only survivors...

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A Santa Barbara-based commercial dive boat caught fire and sank early Monday near Santa Cruz Island, and nearly three dozen people are missing and feared dead, according to the Santa Barbara County Fire Department.

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department confirmed there were fatalities, but was unable to provide details.

The vessel was identified as the 75-foot Conception, and reportedly was on a three-day scuba diving trip to the island with 39 people aboard, said Mike Eliason, a Fire Department spokesman.

 

The Conception’s crew put out a distress call at about 3:30 a.m., reporting the vessel was engulfed in flames, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The boat, which was anchored about 20 yards offshore, eventually sank in some 65 feet of water, Eliason said. The vessel was anchored in Platts Harbor on the mainland side of the island, about 28 miles south of Santa Barbara.

The Coast Guard said a portion of the bow is currently sticking out of the water.

The burned-out hull of the Santa Barbara-based Conception dive boatClick to view larger
The burned-out hull of the Santa Barbara-based Conception dive boat shortly before it sank Monday near Santa Cruz Island. (Ventura County Fire Department photo)

Five crew members reportedly were awake and on deck when the fire broke out, and were able to jump into the water to escape the flames.

The five were rescued, at least one with injuries, by a nearby good Samaritan pleasure craft, the Grape Escape, while 34 others aboard remained missing, according to the Coast Guard.

“We know that there are fatalities, but we don’t know how many,” sheriff’s Lt. Erik Raney told Noozhawk.

The Associated Press was reporting that four bodies have been recovered, but that could not immediately be confirmed.

At a 9 a.m. news media briefing at Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, Coast Guard Capt. Monica Rochester said she did not know the cause of the fire.

She added that shoreline searches were continuing for possible survivors.

A firefighters sprays water on the Conception dive boat, which caught fire and sank.Click to view larger
A firefighter sprays water on the Conception dive boat, which caught fire and sank Monday near Santa Cruz Island. (Ventura County Fire Department photo)

Reports said the crew members were on an upper deck while the passengers were down below, but that could not be confirmed.

The Coast Guard responded with multiple vessels and two helicopters, Eliason said.

Firefighters from the Ventura County Fire Department also were transported to the burning boat in two vessels.

The Conception is one of three vessels — along with the Truth and the Vision — operated by Truth Aquatics out of Sea Landing at the Santa Barbara Harbor.

It has a capacity of 46 passengers, and life rafts and jackets for 110 people, according to the company’s website.

The passenger bunking area is on the lower deck, according to a diagram on the website.

The vessel left port at 4 a.m. Saturday and was scheduled to return Monday afternoon.

Bob Hansen, the owner of Grape Escape, told The Daily Beast that he and his wife were anchored in a cove on Santa Cruz Island when they heard pounding on their boat.

“I put on some shorts and walked outside and opened the door, and here’s five guys in a little rubber boat and a 75-foot commercial boat on fire," Hansen told the Daily Beast. "It was really on fire... the whole thing engulfed in flames.

“The flames were shooting up 25 feet. I felt so helpless. It’s just burning. There were five tanks that were blowing up — or we thought there were — these big pops.”

Hansen brought the five crew members on board and radioed the Coast Guard.

Santa Cruz Island is part of Santa Barbara County, so presumably any fatalities would be under the jurisdiction of the county sheriff’s Coroner’s Bureau.

However, according to Eliason, a mass-casualty incident of this magnitude is beyond the resources of the local coroner, and assistance has been requested from Los Angeles County, Raney said.

Any bodies recovered from the boat will be brought to the Coroner’s Bureau in Santa Barbara, Raney said, adding that portable storage containers for remains have been requested from Los Angeles County.

“The coroner’s investigation is going to be a big part of what we do,” he added.

 

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4 minutes ago, NowThis said:

dumb question amnesty --- if only 20 yards offshore, why not swim for it? Or were they burned alive inside?

Possibly dumb answer amnesty, but if they were asleep in their bunks and it broke out at 3 am they would not be able to see nor probably breathe by the time they figured out what was going on. 

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LA Times story has more info.

https://apple.news/AWwe51RQoSROBXFCZBIQdqg

In a garbled mayday call, a man says there are 39 people aboard.

"I can't breathe," the man frantically says.

The five crew members were rescued by a good Samaritan boat, the Grape Escape, according to the agency. Two of them sustained leg injuries.”

—-

 

The crew was distraught, some wearing only underwear, she said. One man told the Hansens that his girlfriend was still below deck on the Conception. Another man cried, describing how they had celebrated three passengers’ birthdays hours earlier, including that of a 17-year-old girl who was on the diving trip with her parents.

One crewman's leg was injured, Shirley Hansen said, and another had visible ankle injuries. She could see the Conception ablaze from her boat and said there was so much smoke that she had to use an inhaler.

As the Hansens handed out blankets and clothes to the crew, two of the men got back into the dinghy to see if anyone else had jumped overboard.

“But they came back and said there was no one,” Shirley Hansen said.

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2 hours ago, thestud said:

Wasn't it in Italy a few years ago the Captain abandoned ship and rowed to a bar on shore and got shithoused while his crew and passengers died? I'd hope these crew members suffer the same legal fate

just going off what’s been reported it sounds like the crew had one choice, burn alive or hop into the water.  though I’m sure you’d have stood there and cooked you fucking dipshit. 

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31 minutes ago, futureman said:

just going off what’s been reported it sounds like the crew had one choice, burn alive or hop into the water.  though I’m sure you’d have stood there and cooked you fucking dipshit. 

This is what sounds like what happened. However, the crew's primary order is to take care of the passenger safety. They should have been hauling people out of their bunks, raging fire or not.

 

This will not end well for the crew or the dive company.

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Overnight dive trips?  I’m confused as to the business venture. 



You get on a boat and they take you to diving destinations to dive.

During your surface intervals (the breaks between scuba dives when your body recovers from breathing compressed air under the pressure of the sea depths), they feed you meals, travel to new destinations, and provide you with accommodations for sleep.

Then when the time comes, you dive again.

I’m sure someone does this out of generosity but in my experience it is generally done for monetary compensation.



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1 hour ago, NowThis said:

dumb question amnesty --- if only 20 yards offshore, why not swim for it? Or were they burned alive inside?

 

1 hour ago, pops said:

Possibly dumb answer amnesty, but if they were asleep in their bunks and it broke out at 3 am they would not be able to see nor probably breathe by the time they figured out what was going on. 

Yeah more than likely they were dead from inhalation before they burned ... not that that really helps much.

Horrible.

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26 minutes ago, RPM said:

This is what sounds like what happened. However, the crew's primary order is to take care of the passenger safety. They should have been hauling people out of their bunks, raging fire or not.

 

This will not end well for the crew or the dive company.

It doesn't really work that way. Fire+heat+poisonous smoke, esp in a the lower decks of a boat = an environment that's just going to knock an unprotected person down & out in seconds, even if they somehow manage to make themselves go in. People typically can't stand the heat, no matter how hard they try, & the smoke will typically knock a person unconscious unbelievably quickly. That's why you see people jumping to their deaths from skyscraper fires, knowing they won't survive, because the heat is just forcing them out.

From the sound of it, these guys stayed as long as they could, imho, and we don't know that the crew did anything negligent that would lead to a fire. Could be that they were victims here as well.

Edited by wood
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24 minutes ago, CoTex said:

 

 


You get on a boat and they take you to diving destinations to dive.

During your surface intervals (the breaks between scuba dives when your body recovers from breathing compressed air under the pressure of the sea depths), they feed you meals, travel to new destinations, and provide you with accommodations for sleep.

Then when the time comes, you dive again.

I’m sure someone does this out of generosity but in my experience it is generally done for monetary compensation.


 

 

 

The Channel Islands have some of the best diving in the world.  It’s where I learned.  Absolutely spectacular kelp forests.  Yes, it appears the boat was engulfed quickly and the crew just happened to be on deck or in the wheelhouse, where they wouldn’t be trapped.  Just an awful situation and one that will haunt the entire crew for the rest of their lives.

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12 minutes ago, wood said:

It doesn't really work that way. Fire+heat+poisonous smoke, esp in a the lower decks of a boat = an environment that's just going to knock an unprotected person down & out in seconds, even if they somehow manage to make themselves go in. People typically can't stand the heat, no matter how hard they try, & the smoke will typically knock a person unconscious unbelievably quickly. That's why you see people jumping to their deaths from skyscraper fires, knowing they won't survive, because the heat is just forcing them out.

From the sound of it, these guys stayed as long as they could, imho, and we don't know that the crew did anything negligent that would lead to a fire. Could be that they were victims here as well.

I'm a USCG vet. It absolutely works that way.

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19 minutes ago, RPM said:

I'm a USCG vet. It absolutely works that way.

OK,  and I'm a 26 year firefighter. And as ConferenceRoom mentioned, thank you very much for your service!  Sure, you can go in and collapse and die in seconds, if your bravery can push your brain through the door. But the fire & smoke have zero fucks to give about how badly you wanna save those people. When the shit gets really bad, even FF in full gear aren't gonna survive. In the bowels of a boat, with intense heat and smoke from burning fiberglass, and probably fuel and lots of other nasty shit, it's extremely unlikely that anybody's gonna last long without protection.  

Bottom line for me is that we just don't know how bad it was, 'cause we weren't there. The reports make it sound pretty fucking  bad, though.

Edited by wood
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1 minute ago, RPM said:

Ship fire and shore be fire are very different.

Absolutely. Ship/boat fire is often very intense and moves very quickly, making rescue attempts much more difficult. Not sure I'd lump shore fires into one category though. Some can be just as bad & just as dangerous, esp these days.

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Here is an account via Wash. Post.  Not sure what the crew member was supposed to do.  

Anchored in a harbor just 20 yards from the shore of Santa Cruz Island, three of the 33 guests aboard had celebrated their birthdays at dinner that night, and a crew member went to bed late after doing the dishes. He woke up just a few hours later to the sound of a pop in the dark, thinking someone was up and stumbling around. Instead, he opened a door to find the ship around him bathed in an intense orange glow, completely aflame, he recounted to a nearby boater after fleeing the ship.

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3 hours ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

Yeah I don't know if we should throw the crew to the sharks yet. Belowdecks might have been an inferno by the time they found out there was a problem. 

Bunch of oxygen tanks on board probably didn't help...

Wapo article says there were 6 crew members, with one missing.

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17 minutes ago, bolverk said:

So far as I know, the reports don't say what sort of lower leg injuries the two crew members had, but if it turns out they were burns, then I'd guess the deck was already ablaze from below and they didn't have much chance to save anyone but themselves.

Hansen said that one of the men had a broken leg after jumping from the ship’s bridge to the deck as he fled.

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8 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

either compressed oxygen or a nitrogen/oxygen mix

Dive air is typically just compressed air ... the air we breathe every day ... which is about 21% O2 and about 78% Nitrogen. There are more exotic mixes, but regular old air is overwhelmingly what is used.

Of course if those bottles were being impinged upon by the fire, they could pose a hazard as they heat up as any compressed gas would as it heats in a closed container, but not so much as O2 bottles would. Even then, though, if they got too hot, they would probably just vent.

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The four bodies plucked from the ocean about 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles all had injuries consistent with drowning, said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Kroll.

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Reid said divers sleep overnight in an open bunk room on the vessel’s lowest deck.

Coming up to the top deck to get off the boat requires navigating a narrow stairway with only one exit.

If the fire was fast-moving, he said, it’s very likely divers couldn’t escape and the crew couldn’t get to them.

The sleeping area is also near the bow, engine and where diving gear is kept, adding to the difficulty of getting out quickly, he said.

‘If there was an explosion in the engine area that could have gone right into the sleeping area,’ he said.

dailymail.com

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A theory on reddit seems to be gaining traction  ...  that there may have been a galley fire that prevented the people in the bunk room from escaping because the emergency exit hatch from the bunk room opens into the middle of the dining room, under a countertop.

You can see the emergency exit in this pic, under the counter of the island, just inside the door. Of course, this all just speculation by what are mostly just a bunch of guys like us, and apparently 0315 is an hour or more before the cook starts making breakfast. But then, fryers & the like get left on accidentally all the time.

Who knows ... When they recover the boat, it might not be too hard to see where the fire started.

rNp2zPD.jpg

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I thought some rebreather systems had O2 and N2 tanks that mixed in system, but even if that’s right I doubt an outfit like this would be using those instead of traditional scuba. 

Firefighters wear compressed air, but their tank is carbon fiber and at much higher pressures (the MSA tanks we used when I was on the plant fire rescue were charged to 4000 psi, I don’t think scuba runs at those levels). If it was much of an explosion, combustion, or accelerant hazard they probably would find something safer. 

Can’t tell from what I’ve read on here or from pictures, but if the boat was engulfed in flame there was no chance, even bunker gear can only survive about 10 seconds of direct flame impingement before it deteriorates. Nobody is going into that if it’s fire or very hot. Smoke, guys might try to go in but wouldn’t get far. 

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The four bodies plucked from the ocean about 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles all had injuries consistent with drowning, said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Kroll.

Reid said divers sleep overnight in an open bunk room on the vessel’s lowest deck.

Coming up to the top deck to get off the boat requires navigating a narrow stairway with only one exit.

If the fire was fast-moving, he said, it’s very likely divers couldn’t escape and the crew couldn’t get to them.

The sleeping area is also near the bow, engine and where diving gear is kept, adding to the difficulty of getting out quickly, he said.

‘If there was an explosion in the engine area that could have gone right into the sleeping area,’ he said.

dailymail.com


A boat is designed to...




Float and not sink. So there aren’t a lot of fire escapes and it’s designed so the openings that might allow in water are few, far between, and narrow.


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9 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

The four bodies plucked from the ocean about 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles all had injuries consistent with drowning, said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Kroll.

I’m no medical expert, so would death by smoke inhalation also have similar initial appearance? I mean, it would  probably a normal assumption that pulling a lifeless body from the water with no other obvious injuries is a drowning. 

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15 minutes ago, Casual Encounter said:

I’m no medical expert, so would death by smoke inhalation also have similar initial appearance? I mean, it would  probably a normal assumption that pulling a lifeless body from the water with no other obvious injuries is a drowning. 

Drowning = water in lungs

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I would think a boat that size and set up for that many passengers would have some sort of smoke alarm system that would go off at the first hint of smoke in the galley and engine room at a minimum. 

I’m sure all of the details will come out in court at some point in the future.

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Good video interview of the Grape Escape captain. He says that the moment he came topside and found the guys in the dinghy, the Conception was already fully engulfed with 30 foot flames, bow to stern. He says the guys tried to go in through the galley, but there was too much fire.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/25-confirmed-dead-after-boat-catches-fire-near-santa-cruz-n1049016

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I'm falling on the side that it's too early to put blame on anyone until  more fact are known.

Out of curiosity, would an excursion like this have someone awake standing watch? It would seem like from a safety and customer service point of view you would want one person always awake in case there is any type of trouble or customer issue.

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11 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

Do boats that size have sprinkler systems?  

What a horrible tragedy for so many people.  I can't imagine how the crew are going to live with this.  Very likely they tried to do what they could but sounds like the entire ship was quickly engulfed in flames.

There will be a fixed extinguishing system in the engine room and one above certain galley cooking systems, but that’s it for a boat this size.

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I'm falling on the side that it's too early to put blame on anyone until  more fact are known.
Out of curiosity, would an excursion like this have someone awake standing watch? It would seem like from a safety and customer service point of view you would want one person always awake in case there is any type of trouble or customer issue.


Heard another dive boat operator who knows this operator on CNN yesterday and he said there would always be somebody awake on board the boat.
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2 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I'm falling on the side that it's too early to put blame on anyone until  more fact are known.

Out of curiosity, would an excursion like this have someone awake standing watch? It would seem like from a safety and customer service point of view you would want one person always awake in case there is any type of trouble or customer issue.

One person should have been on watch.

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