The trawler Gaul

Legalistic trumpery

2012-01-22T23:29:00.000Z

We have recently been told that the Trident families, who never got a fair and impartial outcome from the Trident Re-opened Investigation, applied for legal aid to fund a judicial review, which, if successful, could have opened up avenues for them to overturn the findings of the RFI.

The families’ application for legal aid was refused and, to add insult to injury, the legal body overseeing this matter have produced the most ludicrous and insensitive justifications possible for their negative response.

It was said that the Trident families’ request did not pass the ‘reasonableness’ test.

If we understood the legal logic correctly, it seems that concerns were raised that, having spent ₤6m to organise a whitewash, the Department for Transport may find it wasteful to spend extra money on defending themselves in a legal process that could expose the sham.

Other reasons for refusing legal aid appear to be the applicant’s age, the time that has passed since the loss of the Trident and the question of whether the costs involved in pursuing compensation would be justified by the level of compensation to be obtained, whose value the lawyers seemed unable to ballpark, despite all the statutory guidelines in existence.

Another reason put forward was that old cherry – a favourite with the DfT – i.e.:

“there is nothing to demonstrate that, had the Trident been constructed in a manner compliant with best practice at the time, the accident would not have occurred.”

Well, actually, there is a lot to demonstrate that the vessel’s compliance with the standards applicable at the time would have saved the lives of its men.

The body of evidence is overwhelming (otherwise every time there was a bit of a stiff breeze at sea, large numbers of fishing boats would suddenly capsize). The reason they don’t capsize (then and now) is because they comply with a standard that assures their safety:

- No other seagoing 25m fishing vessel, constructed to the standards that applied in the early seventies (including full compliance with IMCO stability standards), has capsized solely as a result of Beaufort 7/8 waves

- MARIN were unable to replicate this mode of capsize in the series of tests carried out on a model of Trident in Holland

Standards are not aleatory; they are based on the technical expertise and real-life experience of the most informed men in the industry and the accretions of knowledge in the field. The many trials and tests carried out and the validation of time have demonstrated that, invariably, a vessel built in full compliance with the standards that Trident should have met would survive the moderate weather and seas that are thought to have turned her over in 1974.

The whole purpose of standards is – to prevent accidents and loss of life

Strangely, however, considerations as to the public interest and value to society were not part of the reasonableness test.

But of course, this latest injustice was again politically driven, for, of late, the justice system in Britain has become a market place for political favours and compromise.

Update

2012-01-08T18:15:00.003Z

Our post of 06/12/2011 has been updated - - and Mr Cameron has started pulling the strings harder.

The the authorities' inaction in this matter makes Mr Cameron and all those who know about it accomplices to serious criminal acts. (The skin up there must be very thick.)

Shameless!

2012 - New Year and New Surprises, no doubt

2011-12-26T13:56:00.001Z

Christmas 2011

2011-12-23T22:40:00.000Z

More ordinary abuses

2011-12-06T12:03:00.012Z

A few weeks ago we read reports that Her Majesty the Queen had signed the amendment “to ensure that the UK’s justice system can no longer be abused for political reasons” and Israeli politicians do no longer stand the risk of being welcome with an arrest warrant when visiting Britain.

Fair enough, but we cannot help wonder why Her Majesty cannot also ensure that the UK's justice system is no longer abused (and not only abused, but made a mockery of) for party political reasons by Her Majesty’s government, when the abuses do not affect foreign dignitaries, but her Majesty’s more ordinary subjects. The sovereign is deemed, after all, to be the fount of justice, in whose name justice is delivered by the British courts.

Her Majesty has known (even better than us) about these abuses for at least four years and knows very well what the families of the sea tragedies' victims and we have gone through all this time - about the continual harassment, intimidation and the systematic destruction of our lives. Yet, for as many years, we've been left to fend ourselves against revenge-seeking criminals. It is true that the Royal Family have shown us their support from time to time, and we are deeply grateful for their encouragement, especially during the hostile Labour regime, and for the hope that when the Tories returned to power our troubles would end. [*]

However, so far, no amendment has been signed or word has been delivered in our favour, and things for all concerned have gone from bad to worse. (We understand that, at the same time, the phone-hacking saga and other associated political pressures have caused Her Majesty’s government a lot of discomfiture and that, therefore, promises cannot be honoured on time.) Yet, we would very much like to know why such outrageous abuses can get ignored for so long and the rules of morality kept so long in suspense.

Of course, our Head of State is now very old; so, perhaps in asking such questions now there’s hardly any point - if there’s ever been one.

UPDATE 1: We have been offered wonderful career prospects in Scotland to shut up.

UPDATE 2: Well, it appears that Her Majesty is quite happy for the UK’s justice system to be abused for political reasons, when the reasons suit Her Majesty's Tory Party. Blair and the New Labour Party have been condemned for their opportunistic, 'ends justify the means' methods, only for the same methods to be now embraced by the Royals themselves (and without any honourable ends). What a shame!

CONCLUSION: If Her Majesty told the truth openly to her Majesty's servants, rather than only in secret, a lot of harm done to a lot of people could be repaired and further harm prevented.
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[*] We did not quite understand what the US administration had to do with the cover-up of all this wrongdoing, but we can easily venture a guess.

The whole extensive mess

2011-12-05T14:55:00.005Z

Having reviewed materials related to the matters published here, I was reminded once again of the bigger and much more detailed picture than the one sketched on this blog. I felt taken aback at the sight of all the sordid details behind the series of maritime investigations and official dealings of the recent past.

The cynicism permeating some of this evidence is breathtaking. Such details may be too crude for this site, or for me personally to delve into. The significant facts are there, unalterable, and, I hope, able to convey the truth while sparing you the most debasing aspects.

And there is still much to tell. The corruption of the legal process and formality has gone on for a while and on what you may call an industrial scale. A consistent committment to deception and fraud has been the only solid thing in the fluid mess of unethical and unprincipled conduct.

Having suffered too many humiliations, justice is now too frail to be of much use to those finally finding out that they have been deprived of their rights; the various forms of legalistic chicanery that are in operation today serve merely as weapons in the warfare between rival sections of the elite. And, furthermore, there is no political will to reinstate the rule of law when those at the top would be likely to fall on the wrong side of it. The public has to take this task upon itself.

Another whistleblower

2011-11-24T10:37:00.001Z

Apart from the naval architect whose disclosures have been published on this blog over the last five years, the Department for Transport, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency more precisely, were blessed with another whistleblower. The latter, Mr Jayan Pillai, an article in the Private Eye (see below) informs us, raised concerns about the MCA’s flexible approach towards the registration of ships with fire-fighting arrangements that fell short of the international seagoing safety standards.

The Department has not owned up to anything yet and has decided to fight them both - a move, which, we suspect, is going to be associated with a lot of mess.

(article c/o Private Eye, No.1300, 28 October 2011)

The DfT/MCA, it seems, have made rather a hobby of plastering over the cracks, and, although in a small MCA branch there once existed two whistleblowers, within the organisation itself, there is certainly scope for many more.

Remembrance Day

2011-11-11T01:40:00.000Z

Bailout

2011-11-03T17:15:00.003Z

"A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free," N. Kazantzakis

Trident re-visited

2011-10-31T02:30:00.001Z

A few days ago, it was announced in the press that relatives of the Trident tragedy victims received the backing of Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond in their fight to have the findings of Trident RFI overturned.

We wish them success; there are undoubtedly strong grounds for a review of the RFI, which, in terms of blatancy, was an even worse miscarriage of justice than the 2004 Gaul investigation.

We shall see what we shall see.

Export Goods

2011-10-25T12:51:00.003+01:00

Nobody enjoys reminiscing about an old acquaintance as much as I do – especially when the acquaintance in question played an important role in the Department for Transport under the last Labour regime.

The legal proceedings that we started against the government – referred to in our previous posts – came to a stage when witness testimonies were called for and, as the whole action hinged upon our disclosures about the Gaul, the Derbyshire and the Trident investigations, we thought it beneficial to ask the Head of Shipping Policy in the DfT, Mrs Theresa Crossley, to contribute her inside knowledge to the case. (You will remember Mrs Crossley as the official who answered our more recent Freedom of Information requests in respect of the Derbyshire RFI.)

Well, to our disappointment and surprise, when we looked for her, we found that she was no longer there - she had been exported to Lisbon. Yes, as the March 2010 copy of the European Maritime Safety Agency’s newsletter informs us, on 16 February 2010, Theresa Crossley was amply rewarded with an appointment as head of the Department ‘B’, ‘Implementation’, in EMSA. That made our witness, from the UK legal action point of view, out of reach. We offered to pay her costs to either come to the UK or give a sworn statement from Lisbon, but were refused point blank. This was really a pity, given her tenure of the DfT key management post all through the turbulent years of the Gaul and the Trident RFIs. Just like us, Mrs Crossley knows very well where the whitened bones of the murdered formal investigations lay buried. Amongst other similarly serious matters. Unlike us, she's not going to make a full disclosure.

It seems that EMSA has a penchant for collecting UK personnel with knowledge about the miscarriages of justice perpetrated under Labour. Is this pure coincidence or is it something akin to a collector’s fascination with artefacts of the past?

(More to come)

Voting in Parliament

2011-10-24T20:39:00.000+01:00

HM Courts and Tribunals - part 2

2011-09-30T16:31:00.001+01:00

Broken Government

2011-09-09T23:46:00.012+01:00

I have written before on this blog about the campaign to have the results of past formal inquiries (starting with the one held into the loss of the trawler Gaul) into several maritime casualties reviewed. These inquiries resulted in miscarriages of justice, which were the handiwork of the past labour government.

Years ago, I received the most credible and respectable assurances that the Conservative administration would sort these things out.

Well, that has certainly not been the case. Cameron’s government shows no appetite in upholding the law. Rioters on the streets of London were fair game, Establishment figures are, however, a completely different matter – especially when their crimes lead to the powerful Mr Blair and his allies.

Having been persecuted by officialdom for blowing the whistle about the FV Gaul farce, we have taken the government to court. We hope that the information which we will bring to light will do some good in restoring justice in this case as well as in others.

But it is not going to be easy. Mr Cameron, so willing before the 2010 election to attack Labour and be indignant about what we exposed - in fact, mercenarily, Cameron’s Conservatives even considered using the Gaul scandal as electoral ammunition in 2010 [*] - has now been mollified. Recently his government has even started to raise obstacles and put pressure on us so as to make us abandon the court case, which harms the prime minister’s current interests. All done to protect Murdoch.

Mr Cameron is in no mind to address the wrongdoing committed by Labour … he has the phone-hacking saga to worry about right now. (And he seems determined to cover that one up, no matter the costs.) The appalling miscarriages of justice that took place under Labour and the misery of those who have been affected by the maritime tragedies referred to on this blog are being used by Cameron’s government to parry attacks from Labour - thus trading misfortune for short-term political gain.

Yes, it is as squalid as that, and there is still more to add. However, what is most shocking is that all this is going on with the acquiescence (and any recent appearance to the contrary is nothing but theatre) of the very top of the British Establishment. There is, at the moment, no public authority that one can trust or that deserves to be trusted.

(More to come)
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[*] But more about what happened at that time, in a different post

Memorial service at sea

2011-09-06T20:42:00.011+01:00

Relatives of Trident fishermen killed after trawler sunk hold memorial service at sea

Sufficient for the DfT

2011-08-21T22:16:00.003+01:00

Following on from our post of 1 August 2011, which referred to the Trident families’ FOI request addressed to the DfT, the search for the missing video footage of the NMI model tests on FV Trident continues [LINK]. However, the DfT, as solicitous as ever, appear to think that a couple of blurred snapshots taken from the 1976 cine film should be sufficient to satisfy anyone who has the audacity to be interested in that research:

Part of the DfT letter dated 19 August 2011

We beg to differ and consider that the comments made by Professor Dahle, in the written discussion that followed the formal presentation of this research at RINA in 1979, show both the importance and the relevance of this research to the investigation into the loss of the Trident:

Comments by Professor Dahle cited in Tony Morrall’s 1979 paper

(More to come)

Lessons from the street

2011-08-12T16:36:00.006+01:00

Suddenly, though not quite unpredictably, infernal images of mayhem and rampant law breaking, pouring out from all of the media channels, have shocked our senses. The young generation out of control – the product of 13 years of Labour regime were out on the streets, ready to devour their elders and burn down everything in their path. The moral relativism of the New Labour era and their overarching ‘the ends justify the means’ philosophy have come home to roost.

Was it not Labour who told the poor that neither academic achievement nor a better upbringing exempted one from ‘equality’ with the rest? Were they not promised that there would be no losers? The biggest sin of the Labour dogma was that it prevented its believers from knowing themselves. This led to unfulfilled expectations and, then, the self-hatred trying to cure itself through self-destruction and the destruction of others.

Yet, the moral decay has not been confined to deprived areas or to the periphery of large and affluent urban centres, where upmarket glamour and fashion collapse into vulgarity; it has infiltrated many other quarters.

The rabble recently seen flooding the streets of London has its matches at other levels of society, for the reckless cruelty and irresponsibility of a teenage looter is not unrelated to that within the less riotous social layers.

Is there any difference between an illiterate thug robbing the injured and a government minister or other Establishment figure cheating a defenceless widow out of her rights? Have we not seen the callous irresponsibility of some of our public servants who would consciously put human lives at risk just to please a political master and secure a promotion or some advantage for themselves?

Young people, deprived of a humanist education, have learned that getting what you want means bending the law. The notion that playing by the rules is only for losers has, however, been established by today’s elite.

If we are to become a more responsible nation and accept the consequences of our actions, which we must, then that should necessarily start from the top. If authority is to be respected, that authority has to be made respectable first.

So, now that we, at last, have a sane government in power, we should ask them the question: when are those hardened criminals amongst the elite going to be rounded up and held to account for their actions?

Confirmation bias

2011-08-01T21:29:00.006+01:00

In 1975 in the aftermath of the Gaul and Trident disasters the Department of Trade decided to sponsor a program of research at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), to try and discover why two well found fishing vessels had suddenly capsized and sank with significant loss of life. This research would focus on stability issues and would be carried out by the ship division of the NPL (subsequently renamed the National Maritime Institute, NMI), one of the world’s leading maritime test establishments at that time.

Scale models of the Gaul and the Trident hulls were then built and subjected to a program of sea keeping tests in waves of varying magnitude; their behaviour in different conditions was filmed, documented and analysed. Unfortunately, the outcome from this research was initially kept under wraps by the DOT, until, in 1979-80, Dr Tony Morrall (NMI) was allowed to publish two brief technical papers, through the Royal Institution of Naval Architects. The two papers gave an edited overview of the NMI’s research/conclusions for the two vessels and video footage from the NMI tests was shown, although the identity of the Trident was concealed:

‘Capsizing of small trawlers’ published at a RINA meeting in Glasgow on February 20 1979 (N.B. The Trident was not identified within this report; it was merely referred to as ‘trawler A’)

‘The Gaul disaster: an investigation into the loss of a Large Stern Trawler’ - published at a RINA meeting in London on April 15 1980

In brief, the conclusion from the NMI research about the loss of the Trident was that she had capsized in moderate sea conditions because she had insufficient stability, while the conclusion about the loss of the Gaul was that she had capsized because of severe weather conditions in conjunction with some unknown circumstance such as internal flooding, which had degraded her inherent stability reserves. [1]

Following the discovery of both wrecks and the decision to re-open both formal investigations (RFI), the DfT’s experts dusted down and sifted through the NMI’s research folders and decided that:

The NMI research data on the loss of the Gaul, had yielded the ‘right’ answers, as far as the DfT was concerned, and therefore could be utilised as evidence during the Gaul RFI. In fact in their marine accident report no. 4/99, the MAIB went as far as praising the NMI’s research as being “a comprehensive and ambitious project lasting two and a half years”. Video footage of the NMI tests together with the Morrall research paper were considered to be new and important evidence for the purposes of the Gaul RFI hearings in 2004

Unfortunately, the NMI research data on the loss of the Trident (which had an identical pedigree to that of the Gaul) had yielded the ‘wrong’ answers, as far as the DfT was concerned, and was therefore deemed to be unsuitable for a public airing or disclosure during the Trident RFI.

Thereafter, in 2005 the DfT allegedly shredded the Trident research folders and in the RFI hearings of 2010, the Advocate General and her experts together with the Aberdeen Sheriff summarily dismissed the NMI research data (see below):

Pages 188-90 Trident RFI - transcripts of evidence 12/7/2010:

The above exchanges between Mr Thomson, the counsel for the Trident families, and Sheriff Young, where rational argument is being summarily dismissed by ridicule, do not cast the Sheriff in a favourable light.

While the DfT and its associates have been keen to disregard and discard the Trident’s NMI research data with its inconvenient conclusion regarding stability, the Trident families have not, as yet, been convinced [LINK] by this official obfuscation.

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[1] In our posts of 1 January 2010 and 8 February 2010 we revealed that the DOT/Owners had estimated the Gaul’s stability reserves for her last voyage to be greater than was reasonably justifiable. This ‘enhanced’ level of stability was also specified by the DOT for the model used in the Gaul NMI tests, the test results would undoubtedly have been influenced by this factor.

Stability standards for scallop dredgers - Solway Harvester and Olivia Jean

2011-07-23T22:33:00.003+01:00

On 10 October 2009, a crewmember onboard the scallop dredger Olivia Jean was injured when a trawl wire parted and he was hit by a falling bridle. The fisherman sustained chest injuries and was subsequently airlifted to hospital

Following that accident the MAIB carried out a detailed safety audit onboard the Olivia Jean and a number of regulatory non-compliances, including stability deficiencies, were identified,

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) were notified and they also inspected the vessel; however, they subsequently permitted the Olivia Jean to continue fishing even though the official limits in her trim and stability book were regularly being exceeded [1].

As a consequence, the MAIB issued Safety Bulletin No 1/2010, which called on the Olivia Jean’s owner to cease fishing operations immediately and on the MCA to:

Ensure that the stability of Olivia Jean (TN 35) is verified and all safety critical limitations are applied before allowing further fishing operations to take place

The release of this safety bulletin, critical of MCA, was an unusual action for the MAIB to take as generally both MAIB and MCA worked together and supported one another (both being part of the maritime section of the Department for Transport).

Perhaps the MAIB were remembering previous scallop dredger losses – the Pescado in 1991 (where six men died) and the Solway Harvester in 2000 (where seven men died) and were concerned that stability deficiencies on yet another scallop dredger could lead to another tragedy.

The MAIB would also have been mindful of the fact that in 2006 when they had published the Solway Harvester report they had been obliged, once again [2], to tidy up a mess left for them by MCA, which they did by skipping over the Solway Harvester’s stability deficiencies.

Stability Standards

Extracts from the MAIB’s casualty reports for the Olivia Jean and the Solway Harvester are reproduced below, where the stability of each vessel has been assessed by MAIB for compliance with minimum stability standards.

Olivia Jean

MAIB’s stability assessment - they compared Olivia Jean’s actual stability reserves against the official stability minima (ringed in purple); these minimum criteria include the 20% stability enhancement that is required for scallop dredgers. In the example shown here, the Olivia Jean fails to meet the required stability standard in the ‘depart grounds’ sailing condition.

Solway Harvester – stability curve for the loss condition

The Solway Harvester’s marginal stability reserves and poor GZ values are clearly visible from this curve:

MAIB’s stability assessment – they compared the Solway Harvester’s estimated stability reserves against the minimum stability criteria ringed in purple above; however, these minimum stability criteria, chosen by the MAIB for comparison purposes, are different from the criteria they used for the Olivia Jean – they are the wrong criteria as they do not include the 20% stability enhancement that is required for scallop dredgers and beam trawlers. However, by comparing the Solway Harvester’s stability values against a lower stability standard, the MAIB were able to say that she ‘passed’ the requirements (the figures reveal a marginal pass of the lesser stability standard).

The MAIB were aware that they were on shaky ground here and, when they published their report on the Solway Harvester’s loss, the important part within their report - where the minimum stability criteria were identified - was barely legible as well as very carefully worded.

They talk about “compliance with regulations”, yet they do not identify which specific regulations the vessel allegedly ‘passed’.

It certainly didn’t meet the regulations applicable to scallop dredgers (i.e. Rule 16 of the Fishing Vessels Safety Provisions Rules 1975 with the 20% increase in stability for fishing vessels engaged in twin boom fishing).

Moreover, it is also highly likely that, given the number of questionable assumptions made by the MAIB in their calculations for the Solway Harvester’s loss condition, she did not even comply with the lesser stability standards either.

Solway Harvester

In the above image (c/o STV website), the Solway Harvester can be seen sailing in a deeply laden condition where her freeboard and stability reserves are clearly suspect. In the above image, the blue arrow indicates the position of her watertight main deck – only just above the sea-surface.

It should be noted that Solway Harvester’s design allowed seawater to freely enter the non-weathertight steel enclosures and wash across her decks.

If, as shown in the sketch below, the non-weathertight enclosures are removed, the watertight hull and three-weathertight superstructures become apparent. The main deck is only just above the sea-surface (arrowed) and thus, when the above photo was taken, the only things keeping the vessel afloat and upright at that time were the meagre buoyancy reserves provided by the small part of her hull above seawater and the three small superstructures.

MAIB report no. 1/2006

Concluding remarks

If, on 11 January 2000, the Solway Harvester had complied fully with official stability standards it is just possible that, she would not have succumbed to the weather and capsized with the loss of all onboard.

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[1] The MCA have sole responsibility for statutory surveys, stability approval and the issue of fishing vessel safety certification on UK fishing vessels.

[2] The MAIB have had to investigate and report on a number of fishing vessel casualties where the MCA’s ‘light regulatory touch’ has been an obvious factor in the loss.

Labour Party Hypermetropia

2011-07-18T12:03:00.001+01:00

In our post of 9 June 2011, we revealed the email sent to Mr Ed Miliband in relation to the miscarriages of justice and the ugly cover-ups, which took place while his party was in power.

Naturally, we have received no reply. The Labour leader, it seems, has been far too busy rising with virtuous indignation against the right-wing press and its terrible misdemeanours to be able to clean up his own backyard.

This is, of course, a well-known Labour affliction whose debilitating symptoms allow them only to see things, selectively, in the distance. And so, the greater the moral insalubrity within their own ranks, the greater and noisier the tenacity with which they follow and criticise others.

Today, Mr Miliband has made some grandiloquent statements; he condemned the irresponsibility of the powerful and their belief in being untouchable. All this sounds very nice, indeed, were it not meant to apply only to his political adversaries and their connections. Like his own party, Mr Miliband, alas, shows great difficulty in focusing on those rather more unpleasant matters that are right there under his nose.

The Solway Harvester

2011-07-14T00:37:00.004+01:00

The Solway Harvester was a scallop dredger that capsized and sank on 11 January 2000 with the tragic loss of her seven crew members.

The standards of stability that the Solway Harvester should have satisfied at the time of her loss are indicated in red in the following DOT letter:

Unfortunately, the Solway Harvester was unable to meet these official minimum standards.

More apologies needed

2011-07-13T21:54:00.001+01:00

So, when shall we expect the apologies to the families of the Gaul, Derbyshire and Trident victims?

Balancing commercial interests with safety

2011-07-01T15:44:00.012+01:00

“DfT seeks to ensure that the UK shipping industry remains a major player globally…and that the UK balances commercial interests with safety” – http://www.dft.gov.uk/shipping/

In our posts of 1 Jan 2010 and 8 Feb 2010 we discussed how the stability of the Gaul had been adversely affected by modifications to two of her double bottom seawater ballast tanks - modifications carried out by the Gaul’s owners to enable her to carry more fuel oil and thus be able to spend more time fishing at sea. The modifications were performed after her delivery from Brooke Marine in 1972, when she was named Ranger Castor, before she was sold on to British United Trawlers (Hellyer Brothers) and renamed the Gaul.

We also mentioned that during the original public inquiry of 1974, the DOT (now DfT) went to great lengths to ensure that the Gaul’s stability deficiencies, which resulted from these tank modifications, did not become the focus of the public inquiry. We suggested in our posts that, because of the errors they had made during their stability review, the DOT were uncomfortable with the possibility that stability deficiencies could be cited as a factor in the Gaul’s loss.

A copy of the official Stability certificate for the Gaul (when she was known as the Ranger Castor) (Crown copyright)

However, there was another compelling motive behind the DOT’s desire to deflect attention from the Gaul’s fuel tank issue and that was the fact that the change in use for these two tanks was instigated and carried out at a time when the Ranger Castor (Gaul) was owned and operated by the P&O Group - the UK’s ferry, ports and cruise ship operator.

The ballast tank modifications were unauthorised; they led to significant reductions in Gaul’s operational stability and they rendered the DOT’s stability approval certificate and the Gaul’s onboard stability information invalid (see second paragraph in the certificate above).

In 1974, as is the case today, the DOT’s ‘balance’ seemed to be weighted more in favour of big business than with the interests of the Gaul’s surviving relatives. The DOT would have been very reluctant to see P&O, one of the UK’s most prestigious companies, being sued for a negligent act [1], one that was potentially a crucial factor in the deaths of 36 fishermen.

The P&O Group were eventually broken up and sold on and today are no longer British-owned: the cruise business was taken over by the Carnival Corporation [2] in 2003, while the ferries and ports business was sold to DP World [3] in 2006.

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[1] An unauthorised modification that allowed the (Ranger Castor) Gaul to carry fuel oil in her ballast tanks without a concurrent check on her stability amounted to negligence on the part of her owners

[2] British and American owned company with Carnival UK (P&O cruises) in the role of junior partner

[3] Dubai Ports group of companies

Email to Ed Miliband

2011-06-09T14:28:00.008+01:00

UPDATE: And, as a result, the government is, in turn, putting pressure on us to drop our legal case. More details to come ...

HM Courts and Tribunals

2011-06-02T12:10:00.003+01:00

Following up from our post of 25 May 2011, we can now advise that the Case Management Discussion (CMD) mentioned there took place on the 27th of May, as scheduled.

The Department for Transport (and the MCA), the Respondents in the case, always liberal with taxpayers’ money, had hired a top-notch lawyer for the event. This barrister (who also sits as a judge) - a slightly fresher version of Justice Eady - has recently been given notoriety by the Daily Mail – as a gagger.

The CMD, unbefittingly called a ‘discussion’, consisted of the Respondents’ Counsel giving directions to the judge and the judge showing little resistance in following them, while the Claimant, accommodated with ostensibly dissimulated impatience, was hardly allowed to speak. The barrister hired by the DfT looked so upset that it was hard to believe that he was simply acting on the government’s behalf. The judiciary may have been closing ranks, we reckoned, bearing in mind that the Claimant’s disclosures have cast doubt on the integrity of a number of prominent figures within the judicial brotherhood.

What felt stranger, however, was the impression we got that the judge presiding over the CMD seemed somehow afraid of the government’s Counsel, and even took the cue from him as to when to take a break and when to adjourn.

Their plan was to remove the DfT from the proceedings, probably, so as to cut short the liability chain and ‘ring-fence’ the wrongdoing at some junior level within the MCA. Warned that trying to push her arguments forward will be sanctioned by the Court, the Claimant’s representative used the few moments when she was directed to give yes or no answers to a couple of questions to try to object to the Tribunal’s steamroller technique. At one such moment, she tried to suggest that not only the DfT, but also the Crown and former DPM John Prescott should be added as Respondents, a suggestion that was met with instant opposition from the judge and an indignant snort from the DfT’s barrister. The matter, however, was left unresolved.

Further on, the DfT’s Counsel demanded that a deposit be paid before the full hearing so as to make the access to justice more difficult – justice, it seems, is not a luxury for the plebs. The opposing party was prepared to do anything to prevent a full hearing where evidence, witness testimonies and the thorny matter of the Gaul could be heard in open court.

The end of the CMD was marked by the DfT’s Counsel delivering a diatribe against his opponent and the judge’s failure to intervene or to allow the Claimant to respond.

A pre-hearing review has been scheduled for the 11th of July and a full hearing for the 17th of October. But we very much doubt that there is much to expect from our justice system. The whole thing is rotten to the core.

Closed Justice

2011-05-25T09:56:00.003+01:00

In our previous post we revealed that the Department for Transport is being sued under the Public Disclosures Act. A Case Management Discussion will take place at the Southampton Tribunal this Friday, when the date for a full hearing will be appointed.

Anyway, about three months ago, one of the solicitors we met told us that it was very likely that the hearing will be held in Camera – i.e. in private and not in open court like everybody else. We were not explained the reasons for that. Anyway, this was an extraordinary thing to hear. Why should such secrecy be necessary? What would our government have to hide?

***

Amidst the recent furore about judicial excesses and abuses concerning the ‘right’ to privacy, we could not miss the news about John Prescott’s keen interest in press injunctions proven by his attendance at the Commons debate on the subject as well as by his opposition to any reform of the libel laws, which he expressed so fluently in the House of Lords the other day. (LINK).

(More to come...)

The oncoming Court case

2011-05-17T12:41:00.002+01:00

Whistleblowing case - concerning miscarriages of justice + cover-up

Privacy or the latest protection racket

2011-05-08T16:29:00.008+01:00

"Have you ever wished that something in your life had never happened, just call 0800 …today, and we can help you" - this is the kind of advert that we could expect the High Court of Justice to place in the national press any day now.

Confusing privacy, perhaps, with clandestinity, our High Court judges now offer tailor-made injunctions that can conceal the misbehaviour of any celebrity or other well-heeled public figure, who has the wherewithal to pay for this privilege.
Reminiscent of the medieval church practice of selling indulgences for the forgiveness of sins, our courts are now providing much more than mere pardons for human transgressions, they are erasing their very existence - by self-ordained powers, which places members of the judiciary on an equal footing with God.

Recently, our judges have even devised tools that will gag you so effectively that you will not be even able to say that you have been gagged. So, upon having been granted a super-injunction, the supplicant, sporting a cloak of invisibility whenever it suits, will be able to maintain his respectable status as if nothing had happened, while the rest of society will be kept in blissful ignorance of its role models’ real credentials. And, when they have enough finance to pay for the enhanced, premium service – a super- contra mundum injunction, that will rival the ubiquity of God’s powers, can ensure that no one will ever be able criticise them in English or in any other language on Earth.

The sad fact, however, is that our courts are not protecting the privacy of the solitary, the vulnerable or the wrongfully maligned; they are just making the law with a view to protecting the elite from the public exposure that would make it difficult for the law enforcement authorities to keep their eyes closed. (I remember one senior Met officer once telling me, in respect of our complaint, "If the newspapers don’t write about it, it cannot be true".)

The right to freedom of speech and the principle of open justice in Britain seem to come second to the rights of some to sweep their faults under the carpet. The long-term consequences of this state of affairs cannot be yet fully appraised, nor is anybody able to tell when it was that we first started to allow our justice system to go so madly astray.

GIGO

2011-04-27T13:35:00.004+01:00

In our post of 4 August 2010 we provided details of how the ‘Joint Panel of Experts’ (JPE) had, in the Trident Re-opened Formal Investigation (RFI), slyly manipulated official data in order to modify the Trident’s indicated reserves of stability. Subsequently, in our post of 28 February 2011, after reviewing the evidence and conclusions that emerged from the Trident RFI we refuted Sheriff Young’s final report. As a follow up to those posts, we would now like to re-emphasise the following critical factors and add further details:

The Sheriff’s conclusions, as to why the Trident was lost, were merely an endorsement of the views of the ‘joint panel of experts’, who, in turn, had based their own conclusions upon the results of a series of model tests carried out on a ‘scale version’ of FV Trident by MARIN in Holland. Unfortunately, it is now evident that the stability characteristics of the Trident model (- constructed to meet the JPE’s technical specification), as tested by MARIN, did not correspond or correlate with the stability characteristics of the Trident on her final voyage.

Thus, most of the ‘new’ evidence and ‘expert analysis’, that was aired at great length throughout the Court proceedings in 2009/10, and which underpinned the Sheriff’s final conclusions, was based upon a fallacy:

– i.e. that the observed capsize behaviour of the RFI’s ‘scale’ model in waves, would accurately replicate Trident’s capsize in 1974.

The principal incongruity between the JPE/RFI model of the Trident and the Trident herself relates to her calculated lightship and deadweight particulars. The JPE’s estimates for both lightship and deadweight differ significantly from those that were utilised in previous official investigations.

The original formal investigation (OFI)

In 1974/5, in the absence of reliable and accurate data [1] as to Trident’s displacement and the position of her centre of gravity, the official investigating panel decided to obtain such data by carrying out an inclining experiment on the Trident’s sister vessel (Silver Lining). The experiment they carried out was an official inclining test in that it was performed under controlled conditions and was witnessed and supervised by the Department of Transport (DOT) and the owner’s consultant. The data the test provided was valid for both Trident and Silver Lining. Detailed comparative calculations were subsequently carried out and this enabled more or less definitive values for the Trident’s lightship and deadweight to be obtained.

The information derived by official investigators in 1974/5 was thus the best that was available at that time and it was obtained using calculation procedures that were accurate and accepted internationally. In fact, the same calculation procedures are invariably used to obtain stability data for ships today.

The re-opened formal investigation (RFI)

Thirty years later, even though they had no additional or more accurate sources of data, the JPE decided to come up with new estimates for Trident’s displacement, centre of gravity and deadweight, estimates which, co-incidentally, would favour a no-liability outcome - always preferred by our officials.

We have checked through their calculations and can advise that, in addition to noting a number of dubious assumptions and approximations, the JPE have utilised inappropriate source data [2] to arrive at something they call ‘a best mean estimate’ for the Trident’s lightship and deadweight at the time of her loss.

Unfortunately, in arriving at this ‘best mean estimate’ the ‘experts’ have deliberately ignored accurate data of known provenance (the official inclining experiment on Silver Lining), using instead data that had been recognized to be valueless. In fact, during the 1975 formal investigation, when the DOT Surveyor was presented with inclining check information (similar to that used by the JPE), he gave the response which can now be read in the OFI transcripts of evidence:

OFI Day 10 (page 2)

Q. – I think that you have endeavoured to discover whether, from the figures there, any useful information can be obtained to assist the court to carry out an exercise to determine the stability characteristics of the Trident
A. - Yes
Q. - Are you able from those figures to obtain any assistance at all?
A. – It is my considered opinion that on examination of this particular document which has been presented to me that it is of no value at all to this court.

Thus the rough inclining data used by the JPE to determine Trident’s stability for the RFI was also available to, and rejected by, official investigators in 1974/5. However, it is this discredited data that has enabled the JPE to calculate better stability reserves for Trident than was actually the case.

The Sheriff’s conclusions as to why Trident capsized are thus based upon test results from a model that was not a true representation of Trident. This, in our view, renders the outcome from the RFI invalid.

(To be continued)
---------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Although the vessel’s designer had carried out a number of rough inclining checks on both Trident and her sister the ‘Silver lining’, the sketchy records that survived from these tests were of no real practical value as they lacked detail, did not exhibit the required degree of accuracy and essential data was either omitted or not recorded.

NB: For an inclining experiment to yield realistic and valid data, it has to be conducted by competent personnel, follow strict procedures and generate accurate measurements and data for use in centre of gravity and displacement calculations. For UK fishing vessels, built since 1975, inclining experiments are required to be conducted by qualified consultants and be witnessed by the (DOT(MCA)) the authority responsible for reviewing and approving the vessel’s stability.

[2] In 1974/5, official investigators quite properly rejected the same rough data that was resurrected and utilised by the JPE to estimate the lightship and deadweight particulars (and stability) of Trident for the MARIN model tests.

Happy Easter!

2011-04-24T01:18:00.000+01:00

Justice Removed

2011-04-21T11:56:00.001+01:00

“Justice removed, then what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers” (Augustine, City of God)

In our post of 30 January 2011, we mentioned the fact that we had finally commenced legal action against the Government (the DfT, MCA etc.) and that our complaints revolved around the Government’s refusal to address, openly and honestly, the disclosures about the Gaul and the other miscarriages of justice and cover-ups.

However, in the process of fighting against past miscarriages of justice, we are becoming increasingly suspicious that new abuses and inequities may be taking place in order to obscure the old ones.

To be more precise, we found that, first of all, hiring legal advice was for us a major problem, in that most of the law firms we approached – and we contacted quite a few – were initially very keen to take on our case, then, suddenly and inexplicably, lost heart just before clinching the deal. The name of the Gaul seems to have acted as a powerful deterrent for our prospective lawyers. On many occasions we were surprised to note that, although not yet familiar with the merits of our case or with any of the evidence supporting it, many law firms told us that we were not going to win. Others simply avoided looking at our documents or even attending a previously agreed appointment in person, and, only hours after genuinely showing themselves quite optimistic and well disposed towards accepting our custom, many solicitor’s feet turned cold. Others’ brief advice was so implausible that it almost made us laugh.

We couldn’t understand this curious behaviour displayed by a group usually well known for their lack of inhibitions. It is possible, of course, that they knew something else that they wouldn’t tell and that such knowledge had not been gained through divination.

But it would be amazing, wouldn’t it, if we were to learn that some invisible, political force had offered them guidance?

Some time ago we were given a clearer answer when a solicitor informed us that a court’s ruling in our favour “would be unpopular with the powers that be” and that we would not be allowed to succeed. How extraordinary! Is there a judicial mafia in this country that decides the outcome of legal cases before they come to court? Would the fact that the Gaul saga touches unpleasantly upon the integrity of the judiciary make the legal profession gang up against this case?

Anyway, we have eventually managed to find a less fearful solicitor and a most competent one as well – whom we keep, though, at a safe distance so as to protect him from the noxious fumes of this lawsuit - and we are now toddling along curious to see what further abuses this poor kingdom can accommodate.

Deal-hacking

2011-04-07T20:28:00.006+01:00

When a profound ethical issue is under consideration, John Prescott is the best person to have joining in the debate. Well seasoned in political street battles, Mr Prescott knows very well that a lot can be achieved in life through roughness, broil and threats. And, since he was admitted in the House of Lords, his eloquence has been provided with an even higher platform from which to demonstrate its power and, most recently, to voice his anger against perceived infringements to his privacy.

What a pity Lord Prescott has not been similarly incensed by the Gaul and the Derbyshire miscarriages of justice that followed the tragedies in which many seamen - some from his very own constituency town of Hull - lost their lives; instead, he shows himself much disturbed by the hacking of a few cellular phones. (Not ours, of course, which have been monitored for about eight years now due to our blowing the whistle on the above-mentioned affairs, but those owned by a number of light entertainment celebrities.)

Of course, there is enjoyment to be derived from hitting at a Conservative government’s interests and the jubilation of the primal, aggressive instinct against the aristocracy of the spirit; however, judging by the vehemence displayed, there must be some other, supplementary motivation behind Lord Prescott’s recent outbursts.

In the House of Lords debate on the phone-hacking saga, alongside Baron Prescott, Lord Fowler, Minister for Transport in the 80s, was also boiling with indignation.

What a coincidence! Does having held a portfolio at the Department for Transport turn one into a fighter for the right to privacy, or is there a different commonality at play?

Lord Fowler even went as far as asking the government to give an assurance that there will be an inquiry into “how scandals of this kind can be prevented”. What scandals did he mean? And why prevent them? We should maybe try to prevent their causes, but, when we can't, scandals must always be welcome.

So, now, it seems, we are going to have our government’s endurance and probity tested and, unfortunately, we are not going to be the only ones watching the results of this test.

FV Trident RFI – short memory

2011-04-06T17:23:00.004+01:00

"We've met, but you don't remember me. I worked for a company you hired to have part of your memory erased." (Quote from the movie "The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind")

No, we have not abandoned the subject of the Trident RFI, and, as far as we are concerned, this matter is far from over. But we must take one thing at a time.

We have already commented on the response received from the Marine Accident Investigation Branch of the DfT following our request for their report that recommended the Secretary of State for Transport to re-open of the Trident inquiry.

In that response dated 15 December 2010, the MAIB provided us with a ‘draft’ summary report on the loss of the Trident and stated that they had no evidence in their files "that the MAIB made a recommendation to the Secretary of State that the Formal Investigation should be re-opened."

From their end, the Department for Transport have now advised us that they had also been unable to locate the document containing the recommendations made by the Chief Inspector of MAIB to the Secretary of State for Transport, prior to the latter’s order to resurrect the investigation. (According to the Merchant Shipping Act a re-opening of a formal investigation is only mandatory if ‘new and important’ evidence comes to light.)

Thus, we were amazed to learn that, at a time when the Trident RFI had not yet been closed, the government had no record of why they had opened it in the first place.

From what we have seen, it looks as though the inquiry was re-opened in order to produce the very evidence necessary as grounds for re-opening the inquiry.

So, why was £6mil spent on re-hearing the Trident formal investigation in its entirety? In our view, the inspection of the wreck did not invalidate, but added extra certainty to the original conclusions of the 1975 OFI. These conclusions were further validated by the NMI model tests, which, relative to the OFI, also constituted new and important evidence. Would it therefore not have been better to make all the historic evidence public, re-open the inquiry for one day, at a small fraction of the costs incurred, and re-state the findings of the OFI, this time, with a greater degree of confidence?

Would it also not have been better if the money spent on legal fees and manufacturing evidence had been used to compensate the victims’ families?

The routine of deception

2011-03-25T00:51:00.000Z

On its own, the recent miscarriage of justice perpetrated in FV Trident inquiry was neither inevitable nor particularly worthwhile. However, as an act in a long series of irregularities, the Trident RFI had an important role to play: it served to complete a pattern, inspire a sense of normality into the unlawful actions of the past UK administrations by conveying the message that this is how things are usually done nowadays, and blunt the sensitivity of the public to what once would have been considered an outrage.

The Trident inquiry was not simply about the fact that important evidence was concealed or distorted and fabrication substituted for factual proof in what constituted a conspiracy to defraud the public; no, it was about consecrating the notion that, no longer bound by scientific veracity when deciding their objectives, governments are also free to apply any measure of arbitrariness to official investigations and judicial processes. Government decisions, we are left to infer, are now based on such supreme notions that they can do away with both science and ethical commandments, at the same time.

After the Derbyshire and the Gaul formal investigations, the Trident inquiry was meant to consolidate a routine – the routine of standard deception. Thus, ex- government ministers and other Establishment figures involved in those earlier inquiries could now feel justified in claiming that their actions did not amount to downright fraud, but were merely acts of compliance with an established system - a system which transcends political regimes and which, like many systems nowadays, can never be questioned under caution.

Of course, while governments come and go, many deceptions survive political change by virtue of the old convention that wrongdoing by members of the Establishment should not be revealed to the laity.

However, such deviations from the norms of decency and justice as we have witnessed in recent times are too wide to be described as just ‘the usual Establishment foul play’; they can only be the result of our having been completely supplanted as the main beneficiaries of the State’s actions - the consequence of the fact that, today, the ultimate source of authority is no longer local, is no longer moral and no longer takes its subjects into account.

The MV Derbyshire final report and a self-congratulatory re-write of history

2011-03-20T01:43:00.004Z

As we have revealed earlier on the MV Derbyshire blog, the 2000 Re-opened Formal Investigation (RFI) into the sinking of the 173,000 tonnes bulk-carrier failed to acknowledge the fact that the vessel’s hatch covers did not meet the minimum strength criteria applicable at the time she was built – a fact highly relevant to the stated cause of her loss.

Apart from circumventing the fact that the Derbyshire did not comply with the applicable standards, via the final report to the Derbyshire RFI, the officials also tried - in a self-congratulating, orgulous manner - to re-construct the history of the events connected with the introduction of the 1966 Load Line Convention.

We were already aware that the Department for Transport had a knack for avoiding the slightest whiff of blame or criticism, but now it appears that, no longer satisfied just with evading trouble, the Department also sought to cast themselves - unduly - in a commendable posture.

The article published today on the MV Derbyshire blog reveals that the account given in the Derbyshire RFI final report as to the UK delegation’s role at the 1966 Load Line Convention Conference was different from actuality. The report tells us that, in the name of maritime safety, the UK delegation fought for increased strength standards for hatch-covers as well as for the introduction of 'tanker freeboards' for ore carriers with steel hatch covers.

The truth, however, is somewhat different: the UK delegation’s primary objective was to obtain backing for a major reduction in freeboards for ore carriers, even smaller than the 'tanker freeboards' that had been allowed under the previous Convention; their proposal for enhanced hatch cover strength was only of secondary importance – merely a concession offered in exchange for the deeper loading they sought.
When the majority of the delegates at the Conference did not accept the UK delegation’s arguments for deeper loading, the Labour [*] government’s envoys lost interest in pursuing enhanced strength standards for hatch-covers. The Derbyshire RFI report erroneously implies that the UK’s proposal for improved hatch cover standards was a mere consolidation of UK’s standard practices prior the 1966 Convention. It was not.

The Derbyshire report also states that "the UK government cannot be criticised for failing to secure an agreement to its proposals" for increased cover strength.

As we have explained in detail HERE we do not agree with this statement. The government could certainly be criticised for the manner in which those proposals were made.

Furthermore, it can also be criticised for subsequently failing to implement the Convention’s provisions for hatch cover strength in their entirety, as well as for misinterpreting the Convention’s minimum requirements for hatch cover strength.

So, at the end of the Derbyshire investigation, there should have been someone to blame - the UK government.

-------------------------------------------------

[*] The Labour government under Harold Wilson

The MV Derbyshire – re-visited

2011-03-12T18:42:00.002Z

These are my mates, that make their wills their law. (William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Act V, scene iv)

In the four and a half years that we’ve been running this blog, we have highlighted and commented on a multitude of serious ‘anomalies’ associated with the re-opened official inquiries into the sinkings of the trawler Gaul (36 lives lost), the OBO MV Derbyshire (44 lives lost) and most recently in the FV Trident investigation (7 lives lost).

Our studies over the years have exposed a number of common themes running through each of these inquiries, from which, in fact, a clear and recurring pattern has emerged:

Evidence presented in court that could lead to a finding of fault or blame (and which could lead to litigation) was suppressed, while evidence supporting the government’s preferred outcome was promoted. Nonetheless, the possibility of negligence or errors on the part of the crew (who obviously could not defend themselves) was always a theme that the court’s official investigators were happy to explore.
Over many years, public officials have treated the families of the deceased in an offhand, uncaring manner and actively thwarted their aspirations to learn the truth of what had happened and what caused those tragedies.
A number of personnel/experts/organisations have been repeat players in two or more of these public inquiries, while in the field of physical and computer modelling and tank testing the same overseas research facility has always been chosen to deliver crucial technical input to each investigation.
The government (the DfT), although responsible for setting and enforcing safety standards on UK ships, has been effective in distancing itself from even the slightest hint of criticism in each and all of these public inquires

With the above points in mind, and being slightly more cynical now, we thought we would re-visit the Derbyshire 2000 RFI.

On page 17 of its final official report we find that:

the UK Government cannot be criticised for failing to secure agreement…

On page 21 we find that:

This report does not recommend that the UK Government should act unilaterally…

On page 24 we read that:

The long delay […] in organising an underwater survey cannot be the basis of any criticism of the UK Government

And from page 151 we learn that:

…the UK Government cannot be criticised for reaching this solution. The Ministry of Transport and the UK delegation did all that reasonably could be done to obtain agreement to enhanced hatch cover strength.

So that’s it then, the inquiry judge has told us that the DOT, MOT, DETR (or whatever the DfT was known as at that time) cannot be criticised for anything associated with the Derbyshire tragedy.

We are now going to check up on one or two of these points.

FV Trident RFI - More from the Department for Truth

2011-03-01T18:28:00.004Z

In a press release issued by the DfT on 24th February 2011, concerning the outcome from the Formal Investigation into the loss of the FV Trident, the Department gave a summary of the Sheriff Principal’s findings, advising us that his report contained:

A complete rejection that a 1976 NMI report provides the answer to the loss of Trident

We have carefully looked through Sheriff Young’s report and noted his comment on the National Maritime Institute’s (NMI) Trident report dated 22 October 1976:

This report was the subject only of brief passing references during the inquiry

We have also noted that a subsequent technical paper, released to the public in 1979 by Dr A. Morrall and entitled "Capsizing of small Trawlers", repeated a substantial part of Dr. Morrall’s earlier NMI work, and that it was only this published paper that was examined by the Court in, as the Sheriff puts it, "considerable detail in the course of the evidence".

Yet, the Sheriff ventures to form an opinion on the NMI report from, presumably, a mere examination of this later technical paper:

In my opinion the NMI report is of no assistance to this court in explaining the loss of the Trident.

So we are left to conclude that the Sheriff’s weakly stated opinion, based upon his examination of a similar but different document, amounts to, in the DfT’s words, a "complete rejection".

Notes:

1. The 1976 NMI report contained a number of important conclusions that were not carried over into Dr. Morrall’s subsequent public report, one of which is reproduced below:

later experiments in which either displacement or GM were increased proved conclusively that the hull shape itself was not at fault but rather its weight distribution which produced an unfavourable value of GM [i.e. an unfavourable position for the Trident’s vertical centre of gravity VCG * ]

2. The complete Trident intact stability research folder, which included tank test video evidence from the National Maritime Institute, was allegedly destroyed by the DfT in 2005.

---------------------------------------------------------------

* The position of the VCG on the Trident was unknown at the time of her capsize, as an inclining experiment was not carried out on completion and prior to her departure from the building yard.

FV Trident RFI - A question

2011-02-28T21:39:00.000Z

We have a question that nobody seems willing to answer and which is: why nobody from the Department for Transport, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, MAIB and the former DOT was ever called to give evidence under oath during the Trident RFI hearings?

FV Trident RFI - a costly farce

2011-02-28T14:46:00.002Z

The Trident RFI followed the same script as the Gaul RFI - to the letter.

FV Trident RFI - “No evidence was led at the inquiry…”

2011-02-27T16:30:00.002Z

Perhaps the most important question for the RFI, once it had established that the Trident had capsized in sea conditions that were not exceptional and that her intact stability was deficient, was whether full compliance with the IMCO minimum stability standard would have prevented Trident’s capsize and the loss of seven lives.

Unfortunately, this was one critical question that the RFI's investigators were unwilling to answer. They were prepared to answer questions that skirted this central issue, they also touched upon matters on the fringes of this issue and were happy to pontificate at great length about many things that seemed to be related, but in fact deflected attention elsewhere.

Perhaps the nearest we can get to a straight answer on this important point is contained within the Sheriff's comments in Para [41] of his final report:

The first question here is what changes would have had to have been made to the design and construction of the Trident to secure full compliance with the IMCO recommended criteria when she was built. No evidence was led at the inquiry, which would allow me to answer this question, so it is impossible to hold that, if she had been built so as to secure full compliance with these criteria, she would not have been lost.

But surely, Your Honour, as you were in charge of this £7m inquiry, you should have given directions that evidence be obtained and led on this matter?

You were eager to dismiss the results of the 1976 NMI model tests, the report from which, co-incidentally, showed that Trident would have survived if the IMCO Stability criteria had been met. In the words of Dr A. Morrall:

Experiments in breaking waves were repeated and no capsize was obtained. Test periods of up to 1 hour full scale were carried out. Motions were extremely severe and decks were very wet and an impression was gained that limiting conditions for survival had been reached.

Instead we have been asked to accept the conclusions that were drawn by a panel of experts, whose objectivity can be disputed, from a very limited and questionable set of test results from the MARIN test facility in Holland.

Question

Why was the Trident model NOT tested at the MARIN test facility in a condition representing full IMCO compliance so as to see whether or not she would capsize?

If tests had been carried out in this condition, then we would have had a straightforward and conclusive answer to the main question above.

This would not have been a difficult or expensive test to arrange, and it would have provided concrete evidence for the RFI. In fact, when a similar test was carried out at the NMI test facility in 1976 Dr Morrall commented: "this was achieved quite easily by rearranging the ballast inside the model and carrying out an inclining experiment to check"

Perhaps we already know the reasons why evidence was not sought or allowed on this point. The OAG, DfT, Seafish and a number of other parties just did not want to hear the answer that:

If Trident had met the IMCO minimum stability standard, she would have survived.

More to come…….

FV Trident RFI - The development risks defence [*]

2011-02-26T16:40:00.002Z

In earlier posts, concerning the Derbyshire and the Gaul disasters [http://mv-derbyshire.blogspot.com/2008/10/dry-run-for-litigation.html], we have highlighted the fact that formal investigations into maritime casualties are mainly driven, not by a desire to seek out the truth of the matter, but by the over-arching principle that any form of litigation ,which could be harmful to Government or the British Establishment, must be avoided at all costs.

We have now seen that, throughout the Trident RFI, this principle has remained the primary driver of events.

An example of this can be seen in Question 5, posed by the AG:

5. At the commencement of her last voyage was the Trident unseaworthy (as determined by the standards which applied in 1974)…

This question enabled the Sheriff to give a ruling, which would support the ‘development risks defence’ argument, in any future product liability case, where compensation was sought.

His response, in paragraph [49], states:

What happened to the Trident on the day of her loss was not reasonably foreseeable to anyone in light of the knowledge and understanding of the design and construction of seagoing vessels available at the time.

While the clear intention of the Sheriff’s statement is to support any future ‘development risks defence’ argument, the statement in itself is clearly nonsense. In 1974, fishing vessel capsizes were an all too frequent occurrence and what happened to the Trident was, in fact, foreseeable; that is why, at that time in the UK, there was a requirement for fishing vessels to be designed and constructed to meet the IMCO minimum stability standard.

It is our belief that public inquiries should be about seeking the truth, not about providing cover for potential defendants.

---------------------------------------------------------------

[*] http://www.jstor.org/pss/4507206

FV Trident - Design faults

2011-02-26T13:27:00.004Z

The FV Trident had significant deficiencies in her stability reserves that remained unresolved from the time she was delivered in 1973 until she capsized in 1974. This factor has been glossed over in the Sheriff’s final RFI report published this week.

The Trident should have been designed and built to meet the requirements of the building specification and contract. This contract, amongst other things, stipulated that the Trident should satisfy the IMCO recommended minimum standard for intact stability (this criterion within the build contract had been included as a pre-condition to significant Governmental grant aid towards Trident’s building costs – an important issue at that time and part of an initiative to try and improve the fishing industry’s appalling safety record)

Unfortunately, upon completion of building, the Trident sailed from the builder's yard without undergoing an inclining experiment and the actual status of her stability reserves, vis-à-vis compliance with the IMCO minimum stability standard, remained a factor that was ignored until a detailed investigation into her actual stability reserves was carried out following her loss.

Subsequent stability calculations during 1975-8 and within the past decade have all indicated that Trident did not meet her contractual stability standard. The findings contained within the 2011 RFI report have now also confirmed that this was indeed the case:

A statement by the Sheriff Principal on this particular issue is contained in Para [46]:

I have already discussed the significance of the fact that, as designed and built, the Trident did not comply fully with the IMCO recommended criteria.

An indication of just how serious this stability shortfall was may be gleaned from the fact that significant structural modification work was required for her sister vessel, the Silver Lining, before she was finally able to meet the required standard and allowed to sail.

A further indicator of the magnitude of Trident’s stability shortfall, is also given by the Sheriff himself (perhaps inadvertently) in paragraph [41] of his report:

…I am advised by Mr Macwhirter (and Professor Macfarlane at one point in his evidence appeared to support this) that all that would have been required in the design of the Trident to secure full compliance with the IMCO recommended criteria would have been a modest increase in the depth of her hull amidships of the order of 0.3 to 0.4 metres reducing to zero at the bow and the stern

We would suggest that a 'modest' increase in the depth of the Trident’s steel hull of 0.3 to 0.4m (i.e. a 10% increase in her depth) would have resulted in a totally different ship being built. One that would have had significantly improved intact stability reserves, as well as ‘specific sea-keeping characteristics’ markedly different from that of the hull that capsized.

The Advocate General and a number of the parties in the current investigation have sought to cloud these issues by raising number of related questions and offering a multitude of views that cannot be supported by the overriding facts of her loss. The Sheriff has now confirmed that he was willing to go along with this charade.

Some examples:

The Advocate General, in questions 8(b)(i) and (ii) sought the Court’s views on whether the Trident possessed intact stability characteristics that were in 'substantial compliance' with those recommended for fishing vessels by the DTI and DOT (i.e. the IMCO standard). The Sheriff was happy to provide positive answers to these questions in paragraph [29] of his report.

Note: The building specification and contract called for compliance with IMCO requirements not just ‘substantial compliance’. If it takes lengthening the ship by 10 feet or increasing its depth by 1.5 feet in order to obtain full compliance, then the difference between the DOT’s understanding of ‘substantial compliance’ and full compliance is rather substantial in itself.

The Advocate General, in questions 8(d) sought the Court’s views on whether the loss of the Trident was 'caused or materially contributed to by any lack of statical stability'. As a result of the confusion and disinformation that was allowed to enter into the case, the Sheriff was able, in paragraph [31], to provide the following unsatisfactory reply:

I think the answer to this question is no

Whilst the post of Sheriff Principal is a very senior position within the Scottish legal system, we do not think that this confers the right to challenge the established principles of Naval Architecture, which are irrefutably based on Archimedes and Newton’s laws.

The failure of Trident to meet her design specification in respect of a mandatory [*] stability standard, and the fact that this was unresolved until she capsized can be viewed as nothing less than a serious design fault - and one in our view that was a material factor in her loss.

More to come…

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[*] It was mandatory in the sense that Governmental grant monies should not have been advanced for this vessel until it had been verified that she met the required stability standard. The whole purpose of the conditional grant scheme was to improve the stability (safety) of UK fishing vessels.

FV Trident Inquiry - Final Report - Part 1

2011-02-24T18:39:00.011Z

The Sheriff Principal’s report on the loss of the FV Trident has now been released [LINK].

The most important question that was asked at this public inquiry is contained in paragraph [32] of the Sheriff’s report:

Unfortunately the answer to this crucial question is not actually contained within the Sheriff’s main report.

One would expect that, following the 10-year and £7m investigation into the loss of Trident, the Sheriff and his Assessors should have been able (and obliged) to provide an answer to this question in writing, themselves. Instead, all they appear to have done is simply a cut and paste exercise from a document that is not in the public domain (i.e. the Joint Panel of Experts report, finished before the court hearing started), leaving it up to us to sift through a number of pages of verbal padding until we arrive at the following text.

From the text above we are left to surmise that the Sheriff’s uncritical acceptance [*] of the conclusion lifted word for word from the JPE report (paragraph 12.1), as indicated above, provides us with the answer to the question that was asked in paragraph [32] – but we are not really sure about that!!

(More to follow...)

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[*] Note the passive connotation of the verb ‘accept’, which does not imply full endorsement

The Trident and Aquila inquiries ... and interesting facts about scallopers

2011-02-23T00:35:00.006Z

We think that we may have found one of the reasons for the delay in finalising the Trident’s RFI report: the DfT is keeping Mr Macwhirter, the Assessor in the Trident inquiry, very busy these days, as he is also giving evidence, in his role as stability expert for the MAIB, in the Fatal Accident inquiry into the Aquila tragedy. (See press article HERE)

Mercifully, the experts in that inquiry have not seen the need to delve too deeply into vessel motions and dynamic stability topics, and appear to be ready to arrive at their conclusions concerning the loss of the Aquila by reference to contemporary stability standards only.

That being said, we must admit to being somewhat surprised to learn from the Press and Journal article that Mr Macwhirter considered the “extra weight alterations to the Aquila over the years were unlikely to have caused the capsize”, as he had also previously stated that the extra weight on the Aquila had led to a significant deterioration in her intact stability [1] reserves.

So, we thought we would check his further views in the MAIB’s ‘Aquila’ report:

9. Conclusions:
Further analysis indicated that even if the Aquila had fully complied with the stability requirements, it was very probable that capsize would still have occurred [2]

At first glance, this statement appeared quite familiar to us once we realised that, if we substituted ‘Trident’ for ‘Aquila’ in the above sentence, then this would be exactly the same conclusion that the experts in the Trident RFI are striving to arrive at!

There is a striking level of consistency here!!!

And, if we think about this some more, it looks like we are being invited to believe that official ‘stability standards’ have little value when it comes to preventing capsizes of Scottish fishing vessels.

We would take a contrary view and suggest that, apart from being nonsense, this is not really the type of message that a responsible Maritime Authority (like the DfT) should be promoting.

---------------------------------------------------------------

[1] And thus be more likely to capsize

[2] Unfortunately the “stability requirements” that Mr Macwhirter used as the basis for his analysis were for side and stern trawlers only, not for scallop dredgers (as the Aquila was). Scallopers are required to meet an enhanced stability standard (i.e. trawler stability standards increased by 20%). Now if the Aquila had indeed met the scalloper stability standard ….what would his conclusions have been regarding her probability to capsize?

Enough is enough

2011-02-11T21:53:00.003Z

It is now nearly ten years since the wreck of Trident was discovered on the seabed off the north-east coast of Scotland (12 June 2001).

It is also nearly nine years since the official investigation into her loss was re-opened by Stephen Byers (RFI – 28 March 2002)

It is 16 months since the court hearings re-opened in Aberdeen (17 October 2009) and 7 months since the hearings closed (14 July 2010).

We understand that mindless of the pledge made that the official report would be published before the end of 2010, the RFI’s officials are still dithering and passing the report back and forth amongst themselves, dotting 'i' s and crossing 't' s getting the message 'right', picking their noses, and covering backsides and other official sensitivities.

COME ON, PULL YOUR SOCKS UP! SHOW SOME CONSIDERATION FOR THE VICTIMS’ FAMILIES WHO HAVE HAD TO PUT UP WITH YOUR EVASIONS FOR MORE THAN 36 YEARS NOW!

Remembrance

2011-02-08T00:38:00.000Z

It is now 37 years since the Gaul was lost in the Barents Sea.

Two public inquiries were held (in 1974 and 2004) and both failed to reveal the causes of the tragedy. 36 crewmen perished with the Gaul.

Rough Politics

2011-01-30T13:40:00.010Z

So, the day is coming, when the truth about the Gaul will emerge from obscurity. As surprising as intercepted secret communications which, when exposed to the light of the day, can reveal crude, new meanings, striking even to their authors - the truth about the conspiracy to pervert the Gaul formal investigation and its ongoing cover-up will equally strike those who plotted it.

What I want to announce today is that we have recently taken legal action against the Department for Transport and that part of our complaint concerns their failure to address the disclosures about the Gaul RFI cover-up.

However, the prospect of a court hearing seems to have alarmed the offenders – who are now trying their best in order to prevent a lawful resolution to this long-standing problem. The past Labour governments managed to suppress this scandal, but now, no longer in power, they fear that the current regime may not be so effective in maintaining the pretence.

Consequently, so it appears, political pressure – and political pressure from the left is no trifling matter - is being applied on the current government for the purpose of forcing them to prolong the sham. The government is, thus, expected to tie themselves up in lies, interfere with the course of justice and undermine our legal case for the sake of political expediency.

The Labour party is well known for their unscrupulous ways and power to cause damage. Also known is that socialists, even fake ones such as ours, have always had a penchant for direct action; and today, although they no longer mount assaults on public buildings and main street liquor stores, abetted by sections of the press and our meek State Institutions, they can ambush and twist the arms [*] of their opponents with the same ruffian vigour.

Yet, we are confident that, at the end of the day, there can be no more vigorous riposte, than the truth.

We shall keep you informed...
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[*] Somebody has even boasted about that.

Honour and Justice

2011-01-10T18:59:00.003Z

For reasons which we shall delve into later, in a separate post, the government has not yet provided the answers we had expected and knew to be correct.

Meanwhile, a new Freedom of Information request has been lodged with the Department for Transport, which reads:

Grounds for the re-opening of the Formal Investigation (RFI) into the loss of FV Trident by the Secretary of State for Transport under the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act

Recently obtained MAIB documents concerning pre-RFI matters related to FV Trident state that "The chief inspector of marine accidents will recommend to the secretary of state if there are grounds for the formal investigation to be re-opened or not."

Although the discovery of the wreck of the Trident, itself, in 2001, meant that new evidence was found, for the condition of "new and important" evidence to be satisfied and hence for the Secretary of State for Transport to be able to order a re-opening of the Trident investigation in accordance with the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act, a survey of the wreck and an analysis of its findings by MAIB technical experts was necessary.
It was only on that basis that the "new" evidence could have been deemed as being also "important" - the pre-requisite for a new inquiry.

The official FV Trident Formal Investigation website (maintained by the DfT) states clearly that "In August 2001, the Marine Accident Investigation Branch carried out a more detailed examination of the wreck to confirm its identity and to see whether there was anything that would either contradict the original findings or, indeed, confirm them. The discovery of the wreck together with the examination was new and important evidence."
This official statement means that the examination of the wreck by the MAIB found evidence, which either confirmed or contradicted the findings of the 1975 inquiry.

I would therefore be grateful if you could provide me with the information you hold on the MAIB findings, which triggered the re-opening of the Trident formal investigation. Did they confirm or did they contradict the original findings?

I would also request a copy of the recommendation made by the chief inspector of marine accidents to the Secretary of State for Transport, Mr Stephen Byers, prior to his order for the re-opening of the investigation on 28th March 2002.

Looking forward to a new batch of disinformation and spin which, in due course, will surely emerge from the Department for Transport.

Coastguards

2011-01-05T13:48:00.000Z

In the first post of this year we would like to say good riddance to 2010 and wish everybody a Happy New Year.

In December, we learned the upsetting news that more than half of the UK’s Coastguard stations are to be closed due to budgetary constraints. This is a decision, which we hope the government will re-consider, for the outcome from such a drastic reduction in search and rescue resources will, sadly but undoubtedly, lead to unnecessary loss of life.

Important savings could be devised, especially in respect of cutting the spread and the costs of the Department for Transport's more frivolous, bureaucratic functions, in order to save our coastguard frontline services.

It was particularly disturbing to hear that the Shetlands coastguard centre is one of those planned to be closed, notwithstanding the fact that it covers some of the most dangerous areas of the North Sea and the North Atlantic, where fishermen are likely to be most at risk.

Campaigns aimed at bringing about a change in the government’s plans have been started and petitions have been set up at: http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41468.html
and http://www.petitiononline.com/ukcghq/

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-24T18:13:00.002Z

FV Trident Investigation - the paper trail (part 3)

2010-12-23T19:14:00.009Z

Some comments on the MAIB’s 'summary report'

Although in our previous post we advised that we wouldn’t like to embarrass the MAIB by commenting on the technical content of the summary document they recently released, having subsequently learned that, in September 2009, the MAIB had also tried to pass off this very same document to the relatives of the Trident’s crew as being a copy of Admiral Lang’s official report to the Secretary of State for Transport, we have decided that, in these circumstances, we ought to change our minds.

When we first received this document, a document we did not request, we questioned the MAIB’s Chief Inspector of Marine Accidents on its status and suitability for publication, we also suggested that the ‘report’ was incomplete, not impartial and that an inspector, who was probably not competent to make pronouncements on Trident’s stability, had drafted it.

We received the following reply:

…..My position is that you made a valid request for information that we hold. The report you refer to is in our files and, in my view, I was obliged to consider whether it could be released. I have made my decision in good faith…….. However, I do find offensive your suggestion that any MAIB employee was not impartial or was incompetent. In the 6 years I have worked for the Branch I have been more than impressed by the commitment, enthusiasm and pure talent of my staff……
………I do not intend to debate this issue with you any further.
(Steve Clinch, MAIB Chief Inspector)

A copy of this MAIB document is available in pdf format HERE; we have also reproduced a few representative paragraphs below, together with our comments – which question the MAIB’s impartiality and competence in matters pertaining to Trident’s stability:

Page 3

The most important point here (omitted by the Inspector) was that in 1975 the Court of Investigation had already concluded that the stability of the vessel was probably deficient; this was not mere speculation by the next of kin and the media.

Page 12

The Inspector has stated here that Trident’s sister vessel had only minor stability deficiencies and that when she sailed in a similar condition to the Trident (as lost), she had adequate stability – thus implying that Trident also had adequate stability. However, the Inspector has omitted to mention the fact that, in the conditions he quotes, the Silver Lining had already been provided with an additional 8 tons of pig iron ballast to counter her stability deficiencies - Trident did not have this ballast onboard at the time she was lost.
Additionally, after having read the report of the 1975 Formal Investigation, his summary report should have taken account of the Court’s views on the Silver Lining’s stability (page 6):
“Without going in detail into the owner’s complaints regarding Silver Lining, it must be noted that despite the addition of 8 tons of ballast, her stability is still in considerable doubt.”

On page 15 the Inspector also implies that, following Trident’s loss, the reason why Silver Lining was laid up and lengthened by 10 feet was because of factors other than deficient stability (i.e., difficulty in getting a crew and for insurance purposes, which are consequences of the vessel’s deficient stability rather than direct causes of her lay-up and lengthening).

Page 16

Here the Inspector seems ready to accept that Trident’s stability was adequate based upon the testimony of her owner. We have carried out a simple stability check and ascertained that the Trident would have capsized in any of her sailing conditions, if the powerblock had borne a direct load of 26 tons, as described above. In any case, the gear on Trident was incapable of a direct lift of such magnitude and would have probably failed before capsizing.

The Inspector again has made a statement that cannot be supported by analysis. We have carried out a brief calculation and found that, if the net (weighing about 1.3 tons) shifted to port or starboard by 2.5m, the vessel would have heeled by about 2 degrees (i.e. not a large angle of heel)

Conclusions

The underlying tone of this document, recently released by MAIB, seems to be that the families of the deceased and the media have somehow exaggerated the possibility that Trident had been deficient in stability.

The fact that this MAIB document plays down the principal conclusion of the original investigation (OFI) regarding the Trident’s stability, and the fact that the outcomes from the NMI Trident model tests, which added weight to that conclusion, have not even been mentioned, raise further questions as to its objectivity and impartiality.

In a previous communication to us, the Chief Inspector of Accidents admitted, that the MAIB reports only had the legal status of OPINION. In that case, we would argue that the public does not really wish to pay out a lot of money for casualty investigations that only deliver DfT opinions; what they would prefer, to be sure, is to receive information as to what actually happened and the reasons why an accident occurred – delivered promptly from an impartial and competent source.

(More to come)

FV Trident Investigation - the paper trail (part 2)

2010-12-19T17:40:00.007Z

Our latest dealings with the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) have not been very fruitful. (Not that they have been fruitful in the past, when we approached them in connection with the Gaul RFI.)

Conceding to our request for information on the role that MAIB played in the run up to the Trident RFI, the head of the MAIB has sent us four documents - one of which wishes itself to be a summary of the MAIB’s views on the loss of the Trident following their underwater survey of the wreck and prior to the re-opening of the official investigation in 2002.

The document in question records some generalities relating to the Trident accident, a few anecdotes of disputable value, a fairly absurd technical assertion (we won’t reproduce it here so as not to embarrass the MAIB staff), an inaccurately justified denial of Trident’s stability problems, and an ambivalent statement as to whether the FV Trident formal inquiry warranted a re-opening in accordance with the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act.

This was in no way the robust recommendation to the Secretary of State for Transport that, as announced at the time in the press, you might have believed the re-opening of the Trident inquiry had been based on. No, we are led to think that the MAIB left it to the politicians to decide this for themselves, unencumbered by a definite technical viewpoint[*].
The MAIB’s experts’ only judgement was that new evidence about the vessel had been found (quite obvious, since the wreck had recently been located and surveyed), but they couldn’t say whether or not that new evidence was important enough to give grounds for another formal inquiry. What the MAIB also omitted to add was that the discovery of the wreck in itself tended to reinforce the conclusion of the original inquiry that: “inadequate stability is the factor most likely to underlie her foundering in conditions which would not normally have overwhelmed a ship of her size”

(Well, we know now that the evidence most relevant to the cause of the loss - the National Maritime Institute’s model tests and research - was not new, except to the families and the public. The results from the NMI research, coupled with the discovery of the wreck should have been reason enough to allow the inquiry to be re-opened and to conclude that: “inadequate stability led to her foundering in conditions which would not normally have overwhelmed a ship of her size.”)

Now, going back to the released MAIB documents, we have also noted that their brief summary on the Trident did not refer to the NMI research data on the Trident’s stability – that very interesting file that the DfT claims to have shredded. Although the MAIB had to admit that they had had unrestricted access to all the official documents related to the vessel, they only mentioned the A. Morrall technical paper - ‘Capsizing of small trawlers’, which is a sort of sanitised derivative of the original NMI research on the Trident.

Well, well, who can seriously believe that such a top organisation as the MAIB would not have used the real data contained in the DfT’s official files?!

Anyway, what caught our eyes above all that was the fact that the MAIB’s summary, apart from being fanciful and superficial, looked as though it had been made ad-hoc, to entertain us. The document had no date, no author, and the MAIB’s Chief Inspector did not even know whether and to whom it had been addressed. He just found it somewhere “in the system”. (Well, if this document was compiled or modified after our request for information and specially for that purpose, then, I think, this sort of undertaking has a rather unpleasant name to it…)

And that is all we’ve learned from UK’s prestigious Marine Accident Investigation Branch. To find out more, the Chief Inspector advised us, would cost more than £600. Furthermore, we were also told, the “the key players involved in the MAIB’s work have since left the organisation.” That is exactly what the Head of Shipping Policy in the Department for Transport told us once, in response to our questions about of the Gaul RFI.
Just like the tribal chief who said to his visitors: we no longer have any cannibals in our tribe - we ate the last one yesterday…

(More to come…)

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[*] Apparently, an unequivocal recommendation for the re-opening of the investigation came from a non-technical quarter, namely, from the Office of the Advocate General in Scotland.

FV Trident Inquiry - The MAIB leaves no traces

2010-12-08T14:12:00.003Z

As we announced in our post of 15 November 2010, we lodged a FOI request with the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) of the Department for Transport asking them a few simple questions aimed at clarifying their role in the FV Trident Investigation.

The response from MAIB, which we received yesterday does not clarify anything. What is more, it gives the false impression that the MAIB did not play any technical role (or keep any records of its role) in the run up to the Trident RFI, and goes on to suggest that, even if it had played such a role, this ought to remain an official secret.

To bolster their equivocation, the MAIB misinterprets the Merchant Shipping (Accident Reporting and Investigations) Regulations 2005 and tries to apply the prohibition clause therein, not only to the content of restricted documents or evidence[*], witness statements, or the personal details of any persons making such statements, but also to the question of whether they hold such evidence in their coffers.

Notable, however, is their reluctance even to address our query about any advice the MAIB might have provided to the DfT and the Office of the Advocate General for Scotland, in the run up to the Trident RFI.

As this blog bears witness, we have had encounters with the MAIB before, in connection with the Gaul investigation, and they were just as unhelpful. So it does not surprise us in the slightest to read their attempt at obfuscation in the Trident case now.

Well, as they say, 'once your reputation’s gone, you can live a life of fun'. And this is the obvious trend in most of our governmental institutions today.

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[*] The Sheriff presiding over the FV Trident RFI has, nevertheless, the powers to call for such prohibited documents and evidence.

FV Trident Investigation – the paper trail (part 1)

2010-12-03T13:25:00.003Z

In our post of 17 October 2010, we referred to a statement by Department for Transport in which they advised that the DfT’s shipping safety research folder Ref. No. MS/92/12/09, which contained information about the stability of the Trident, had been routinely destroyed, apparently, like many other official documents that are no longer deemed relevant to current goings-on.

At the same time, the Trident victims’ families had also requested the Department to provide them with the title and information about the contents of this folder. After much delay, the Department for Transport answered these questions by admitting, simply, almost casually, that the title of that file had been “Intact Stability in relation to Trident PD 111” and that, although they “no longer hold information on what was contained in the file”, “clearly, from the title of the file, this would have been information relating to the stability of the Trident.”[*]

Hey, the official might have added, and what are you going to do about that?

So we now have it confirmed that the file in question contained information on the very issue that has lain at the heart of the original and current public inquiries, and which the latest investigation has been trying hard to avoid making a correct pronouncement on.

Anyway, on the subject of the 'shredded file', more is yet to come…

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[*] The Trident victims’ families’ FOI request and the answer provided by the DfT can be viewed at the following site: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/mca_file_ref_ms_921209

A small test of integrity

2010-11-23T01:02:00.004Z

We are currently still waiting for the final conclusions of the FV Trident Re-opened Formal Investigation to be published. However, from what we’ve gathered so far, it seems that the government has already decided to prevent the truth from emerging at the end of this protracted and costly inquiry; we do not believe for a moment that the Aberdeen Sheriff will be able to deliver anything other than the outcome requested by UK ministers.

The current government should have had few reasons to manipulate the results of this formal investigation, unless pressures threatening to affect their political interests have recently provided them with suitable motivation.

Of course, it is not difficult to understand that those who directed the cover-up in the Gaul RFI have a vested interest in seeing that the Trident inquiry goes the same way. Delivering justice in the Trident case, they might fear, could open the Gaul’s families’ eyes and their appetite for a similar treatment.

What may be even more daunting is that subsequent disclosures about the miscarriage of justice in the Gaul case would be linked to some of the most prominent entries in the New Labour Party bestiary.

Notwithstanding that, we would urge our government once again to resist undue pressures, permit an honest conclusion to the Trident investigation and allow the families of the victims to finally obtain justice. It is too ugly to persist with the deception, especially when these families know very well that they are being deceived.
It is also imprudent to think that the truth - already difficult to contain - would not, sooner or later, overcome official censorship, lies and the suppression of facts. Any delay in acknowledging this can only make a future exposure many times more embarrassing.

The Trident RFI may be just a small test of official integrity, but small things like this determine the direction of a government’s course and the chances they have of passing other, more strenuous trials.

LINK

FV Trident Investigation - the role of the MAIB

2010-11-15T22:22:00.002Z

So far, the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) has been sheltered from the strong winds blowing around the ongoing Re-opened Formal Investigation into the loss of FV Trident.

However, we know that, prior to the re-opening of this new investigation, the MAIB played an important role in assessing the causes behind Trident's loss. We have now sent them a Freedom of Information request that, hopefully, will shed some light upon the official handling of this case.

NOTE: In the Gaul RFI, the MAIB produced a detailed report (Rep no.4/99) which accompanied their recommendation for a re-opening of the Gaul investigation. It is therefore to be expected that at least the same level of service and transparency should have applied in the Trident inquiry.

Their name liveth for evermore

2010-11-11T10:50:00.000Z

HMS Ark Royal

2010-11-06T12:08:00.001Z

A ship that one of us helped build in the late seventies (together with her sister, HMS Illustrious):

Clippings

2010-11-04T20:27:00.007Z

Trident

In our previous post, we condemned the actions of the Department for Transport (DfT) for shredding a file, which contained important information on the 1976 NMI stability tests on the FV Trident (The information was destroyed before it could be called as evidence in the current investigation into Trident’s loss, while, at the same time, some £6m was being spent by the DfT to repeat the stability tests and obtain new ‘evidence’ and a different theory for her loss).

NOTE: It now appears that the FV Trident RFI transcripts of evidence, which used to be accessible from the government site: fv-trident.org.uk, have recently been removed. We have no idea why this happened, but can only suspect that they are about to undergo a process of improvement at the end of which they may no longer accurately reflect what was said during the 2009-2010 hearings, but what the officials wished they had said.

UPDATE 26.11.2010 - The DfT intimated that the fv-trident.org.uk "keeps going offline" and that they didn't know why - that it was clearly a technical problem, not their intention to close the site down.
Well, then it must be a serious technical problem, since the site has been offline for more than a month now.

Gaul

We have recently noticed that the official video of the NMI stability tests on the Gaul, transferred to the National Archives in March of this year, has also suffered from data loss during this process. The previous 35.9Mb clip has now shrunk to 20Mb, and its original recording of 18.39 minutes now only runs for just over 10.36 minutes before it freezes.

Critically, the lost material is at the end of the clip - the part that refers to the NMI stability report, analysis and conclusions.

Here is the site and video clip in question: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100303142156/http://www.fv-gaul.org.uk/video.htm

It would seem that, bit-by-bit, in a slow and stealthy fashion, a number of elements of recorded history have been lost or modified over time with public officials stepping in to plug the gaps with new and opportune slants and an adulterated perception of the past reality.

Ayn Rand once wrote, “We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality”. Likewise, we foresee, the consequences of the our political establishment’s re-write of history will not be late in presenting themselves.

FV Trident Inquiry – Shredding the evidence

2010-10-17T18:39:00.002+01:00

An article published in the Press and Journal on 8 September 2010 informed the public about the outcome of the Trident families’ quest for information relating to a hidden NMI report on the Trident’s stability reserves (withheld from them by the Department for Transport (DfT) since 1976).

In a statement from DfT’s current Shipping Minister, Mike Penning, the families were told that it would now be “impossible” to establish the reasons why the report had not been passed over to them in 1976, when it was first produced.

Following a request for further information about this report (information that would have been located within the DfT’s shipping safety research folder - reference no. MS/92/12/09), the families were told that “this file is no longer in existence, it did not disappear, but was destroyed in accordance with the routine, approved disposal agreement” (?!) and that ‘A file is reviewed after 25 years and if National Archives show no interest in maintaining the file, then it is destroyed”

On hearing this news, the families were quite right to register a complaint, but, unfortunately, the task of dealing with it was given to one of the DfT’s divisional directors, a Mr John Bagley, who piously claimed:

“It is clear from documents supplied to me that on 17 February 2005 the MCA instructed Iron Mountain to destroy this file. The file was listed along with 9,777 others in the same instruction and appears to have been a routine procedure, which Iron Mountain complied with the following day when the file was destroyed by shredding. The file appears to have been disposed of in accordance with proper procedures and at a point in time which would have been well in excess of the retention period”

A plausible, but unfortunate set of circumstances perhaps, or bad luck? - We think not!! [*]

In the first instance, merchant shipping files do not go to the shredder by way of a mindless, automated routine; they are sent there when they are no longer relevant to current happenings in the shipping world (for MCA policies relating to file retention and disposal see copy of memorandum below – paragraphs 2, 5 and 7 are the most relevant. Note: files containing the results of expensive maritime safety research are not routinely shredded).

Additionally, the very fact that the wreck of the Trident was discovered in June 2001 and that the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) were subsequently tasked with carrying out underwater surveys on it, meant that, in the first instance, the MAIB would have collected all available Trident files from the Department’s main file registry.

It was only after they had reviewed all official records and the results from their underwater surveys that the MAIB were able to advise the DfT’s Minister that ‘new and important evidence’ had been found - the basis on which Mr Stephen Byers re-opened the formal investigation in March 2002.

Once a maritime public inquiry has been opened (or re-opened), the normal procedure is for all official files and records to be taken into the custody of the DfT and AG (via the Treasury Solicitor) who will then decide which items of evidence should be released to the parties to the inquiry.

Thus, if the Trident investigation was re-opened in 2002 and the Trident stability file was shredded in 2005, it would seem that someone within the DfT specifically requested/authorised the file’s destruction. MCA officials would not have been authorised to take a decision on a file that was linked to an ongoing formal inquiry.

Perhaps the DfT could provide us with a justification for their haste.

(On this subject, there is, however, more to come…)

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[*] By 2005, the DfT and their retained experts were well on course for a re-write of the official records on the Trident’s loss. Obviously, if there were any historical records available from that period – and if they fell into the 'wrong hands' (the FOI act came into force 6 weeks before the Trident’s records were shredded) - then these could be read!!!!

Cowardice and other hindrances

2010-10-02T13:06:00.009+01:00

Over the last four years we have published substantive evidence of a miscarriage of justice in the outcome of the Gaul Re-opened Formal Investigation, in which the Court decided that the crew had been responsible for the tragedy while conveniently ignoring serious faults in the vessel’s design and actively suppressing the evidence thereof.
Over the last four years we have dutifully brought these issues to the attention of all relevant authorities and succeeding governments. The past New Labour administrations, naturally, had no interest in addressing them.

But the newly installed government coalition promised us change – change that we understood would be for the better and, as we have recently made some progress (the Met Police had just become slightly more candid and the DfT a touch more sensitive to facts), we thought that appropriate action was forthcoming.

At the same time, however, the left-wing press turned the spotlight on some past minor scandals, rekindled and hyped up to provoke outrage and unsettle the present administration. (And irony of ironies, and amazing coincidence, old John Prescott, the main protagonist in the Gaul and Derbyshire re-opened investigations, was one of the first to jump onto the media circus bandwagon and, becoming suddenly aggrieved with some perceived past infringements to his privacy and loudly condemning the Police indifference to his claims, threatened them with costly legal action.)

All these irate attacks by the political opposition, though irrelevant to the general public, appear, nonetheless, to have made our government lose composure and falter in its commitment to rectify the errors of the past regime.

Failed inquiries, aborted investigations and other unexposed official transgressions seem nowadays to be like stashed away ammunition - ready for use in political battles - or some form of convertible currency, to be traded off on the black market of politics.

For, nowadays, government and political opposition are all part of the same intricate mesh, tightly tangled together in mutual interests, cowardice and ignominy.

P.S. We urge the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to start acting with integrity.

Police Investigative Methods

2010-09-20T10:51:00.003+01:00

Following on from our post of 19 August 2010, in which we decried the fact that after a FOI request, one demand for an internal review and one complaint to the FOI team within the Information Commissioner’s Office, the mystery surrounding the content of paragraphs 8 to 18 in the assessment report complied by the Metropolitan Police in response to our allegations about the Gaul RFI remained unresolved.

Persistence, however, brought some results, for, after having submitted another complaint - this time to the Data Protection team within the Information Commissioner’s Office - the Met was forced to release their case assessment report - unredacted.

And what a letdown that was. The eleven paragraphs in question refer exclusively to our allegations in respect of the 2004 Gaul RFI, which they reproduce therein almost word for word. No personal data in there, except for our names mentioned once or twice. A copy of the Met’s unredacted report can be seen HERE.

The report contains no information to suggest that the Met contacted any witnesses or in any way probed the alleged facts.

Contrary to what we had expected, the Specialist Crime Unit in the Met does not appear to have even tried to obtain any further information about the case, by contacting for example, experts in the domain, the Department for Transport, the Gaul RFI legal teams, the Treasury Solicitor, the representatives of the victims’ families or any other witnesses.

The Met, although conceding in an addendum to their assessment report that "the Inquiry’s findings as to why various chutes were open are not necessarily correct" [LINK], chose not to pursue the matter any further.

At the end of their assessment, they concluded that, based on the information we had provided at that time, they were "unable to find sufficient evidence to support any further investigation into the allegation" and that they "did not detect fraud, any other crime, or any other matter which warrants any further Police investigation.".

Based on the same approach, the police could just as well refuse to investigate a murder and claim that, although it was reported that a person had been seen gunned down on the street, they did not visit the scene or verify any of the alleged facts, and that, therefore, there was insufficient evidence to suggest that a crime might have been committed.

Back in December 2008, in their first refusal to disclose the contents of their case assessment report, the Met argued that the disclosure would expose to the layman the "operational methodology and investigative techniques" of the Police. They were quite right. Now, that we’ve seen the unredacted report, we know precisely what these techniques really are.

A trip down memory lane

2010-09-12T16:32:00.001+01:00

Having recently leafed through some old books about the Gaul, we found an interesting paragraph at page 62 in John Nicklin’s book, The Loss of the Motor Trawler GAUL, which we have reproduced below.

Sadly, Mr Nicklin is no longer with us and will not be able to read copies of two of the official memos that were circulated at that time (see below). These memos provide the answer to his question as to why the Department of Trade, who had commissioned the NMI report on the Gaul, declined to make its findings public.

The last paragraph in the memo above shows that the Department of Trade were not prepared to permit the publication of the NMI report on the Gaul’s stability, for fear that its conclusions might provide evidence to one of the parties to the litigation.

The above memo shows that only after the prospect of litigation had disappeared did the NMI think it likely that the Department of Trade would grant permission to make the results of their research public.

Unfortunately, this is all we have time for at the moment, but we shall come back to this subject (and to the Trident affair) in due course.

Wreck Discovery

2010-08-25T20:40:00.001+01:00

It has recently been reported that a team of divers have discovered the wreck of a UK fishing vessel thought to be the Blue Crusader, a 274 tons gross trawler which was lost in heavy weather (10-12 force gales) off Ronaldsay Firth in the Orkneys after sailing from Aberdeen on January 13, 1965. All 13 crew onboard perished in this tragedy.

After 13 days without radio communications from the vessel, a full-scale search was launched. Two Shackletons from Royal Air Force station Kinloss scanned the Orkneys area for four days, but the trawler was never found.

The identity of the wreck now discovered has not as yet been confirmed, but the diving team who located it are planning to go back to the site and check its registration number.

Meanwhile, we have found a copy of the Report of the Official Inquiry, dated 3rd December 1965, which can be viewed and downloaded from this LINK (Crown Copyright).

Note

In 1965 when the Blue Crusader was lost the regulatory framework, which governed the safety of fishing vessels was very weak. It was not until after the IMCO had developed their minimum standards for fishing vessels stability and the Holland-Martin Report on trawler safety had been published, that UK safety legislation, courtesy of the 1970 Safety Provisions Act, was put in place to rectify this shortfall.

Personal Data

2010-08-19T20:52:00.007+01:00

In an earlier post we disclosed a previously redacted paragraph from the Met Police (Specialist Crime Unit) case assessment report – to which we had recently gained access care of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The report in question had been, as you can see from our post of 10 of May 2009, almost entirely redacted by the Met who claimed that: "the majority of information contained within the report has been redacted as it is exempt by virtue of Section 40(1)&(2) of the Act."

Section 40(1) of the Freedom of Information Act refers to the personal data of the subject data applicant, whereas Section 40(2) refers to the personal data of other people .[*]
Thus, the Met implied, over 80% of their assessment of the Gaul RFI consisted of biographic detail … (!?) although in their response to our FOI request for information regarding any witnesses/ parties questioned by detectives during their assessment process, the police indicated there were none.

The Met also advised that, should we wish to request the redacted information in respect of Section 40(1) (i.e. personal data about ourselves), which is contained in that report, we would have to complete a Subject Access Request (SAR) application.

We did complete two SAR forms and paid the associated fees. The response we got, however, was the release of another few lines from their case assessment report (these, except for our names, did not contain any other personal data, but only the allegations we had made about the shortcomings of the Gaul RFI).

The rest still remained concealed. That is a big chunk of the report – paragraphs 8 to 18 – remained redacted, purportedly, under the provisions of Section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, which relates to third parties’ personal data.

Now, if we take another look at the redacted report, we can see that paragraph 19 states that the case officer "reviewed the materials described at paragraphs 10 to 18" in order to assess the validity of our complaint about the undisclosed design faults of the Gaul. The materials should, therefore, have contained technical rather than personal information. For, anyway, what personal information could they have contained and about whom? Under the 1998 Data Protection Act (DPA), personal data is clearly defined as data about a living individual, who can be identified from those data.

It may be that the documents referred to in the police assessment report did, in effect, contain information relating to technical matters, but - based on the fact that those materials had an author who, by necessity, must have been a living person, and judging that any expressed opinions reveal the insights of a person’s mind - the Met may have gone as far as to conclude that disclosure of such insights were prone to lead to undue intimacy and breach, therefore, the author’s rights under the Data Protection Act.

Thus, the Met have conveniently missed the fact that personal data is information about a person, not information a originating from a person – otherwise, except that produced by non-human species, all information would be exempt.

Also, as we have already contended in our reply to the Met, a witness statement is not considered personal data under the provisions of the 1998 Data Protection Act, unless the witness himself is the focus of that information. Just because a document contains the name of a person does not mean that it is about that person.

All opinion has an author, but if the opinion is not about the author himself and his personal life, then that opinion should be able to be passed on. Besides, the Data Protection Act itself suggests the means by which information can be conveyed without revealing its source: i.e. the omission of names or other identity details.

Unfortunately, by choosing not to disclose the requested information, the Metropolitan Police have now left room for suspecting that the content of their case assessment report is either embarrassing or untrue.

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[*](1) Any information to which a request for information relates is exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject.

(2) Any information to which a request for information relates is also exempt information if-

(a) it constitutes personal data which do not fall within subsection (1), and

(b) either the first or the second condition below is satisfied. [etc]

The FV Trident Investigation – Another Public Inquiry - Another national disgrace

2010-08-04T11:17:00.007+01:00

In an earlier post we gave an overview on how the re-opened Trident casualty investigation (RFI) was being conducted and managed by the Advocate General towards an outcome that would be preferred by at least one of the departments in our current Government (the DfT).

Recently we have learnt that the JPE (the RFI’s Joint Panel of Experts) had also taken it upon themselves to rewrite the official records of Trident’s intact stability.

Work done:

The JPE have changed the official DOT lightship particulars for Trident (from those used in the original investigation):

Original investigation (OFI) 1975

Lightship displacement[1] = 149.83 tonnes (147.46 imperial tons)
VCG[2] position = 3.197m above keel (10.487 feet)
LCG[3] position = 9.971m forward of the rudder stock (3.525 feet aft of amidships)

Re-opened investigation (RFI) 2010

Lightship displacement = 153.01 tonnes
VCG position = 3.18m above keel
LCG position = 9.95m forward of the rudder stock

They have also modified the weights of the items that she was assumed to be carrying on the day of her last voyage (the original figures can be seen in the NMI/Morrall testing report page 13 and in the report of the original investigation - condition A2):

They increased the amount of fuel she was carrying by 1.75 tonnes to 6.75 tonnes
They doubled the amount of fresh water on board to 3 tonnes
They reduced the amount of stores in the upper focsle space from 1.5 tonnes to 0.45 tonnes and removed 1 tonne of stores from the lower focsle space
They reduced the weight of the fish boxes in the hold from 3.37 tonnes to 2.4 tonnes
They reduced the weight of the lube oil drums in the engine room by 20kg
They reduced the weight of fishing nets from 3.6 tonnes to 3 tonnes
They increased the weight of the gallows chain from 0.27 to 0.45 tonnes
They removed the ‘dog rope’
They increased the amount of engine room stores by 100kg
They increased the amount allowed for the crew’s effects by 90kg

In brief, the effect of the JPE’s modifications has been to increase Trident’s notional stability reserves[4] by about 10% for her final sailing and loss condition.

If we look at the stability of the Trident in both the original and the JPE-modified conditions we can see that in her original condition, Trident is clearly non-compliant with IMCO minimum stability criteria, however, after the JPE modifications have been applied, her stability improves to the point where she only marginally fails to meet the IMCO minima:

What were the motives behind the JPE’s actions?

1. To ‘update’ our official records to indicate that, contrary to the evidence contained in the report of the 1975 formal investigation and in the 1976 NMI/Morrall report, the Trident’s stability at the time of her loss 'complied substantially with IMCO'[5] minimum standards, and that, therefore, non-compliance was not a factor in her loss.

(RFI Transcript for 12 July 2010 – Advocate General page 102:)

2. To request the Sheriff to dismiss the conclusions from the original 1975 formal investigation and the subsequent model tests carried out NMI/Morrall in 1976;

(RFI Transcript for 12 July 2010, page 105:)

3. And finally to oblige the Sheriff to conclude:

(RFI Transcript for 12 July 2010, page 74)

Our conclusion

The callous way in which the current investigation into the tragic loss of the Trident and her seven crew members has been scripted by the DfT and conducted by the AG towards a pre-determined outcome reveals the depths that our Government, and those it employs, will stoop in order to maintain policies that, regardless of their warped perception of the public interest, they know are both unjust and unlawful.

This is nothing less than a national disgrace

An extended pdf version of this article is available HERE.

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[1] Lightship displacement = the floating weight of the empty ship
[2] VCG = the position of the vertical centre of gravity of the ship’s weight
[3] LCG = the position of the longitudinal centre of gravity of the ship’s weight

[4] Note: In 1975, the Court’s experts carried out a very comprehensive and careful investigation into Trident’s stability characteristics - in terms of ascertaining her empty hull weight, position of centre of gravity and the items of fishing gear, fuel, water and stores she was carrying onboard at the time of her loss. There is no substantive reason or factual basis to justify the changes that have now been carried out by the JPE.

[5] This was the stated position of the DOT throughout the 1975 Formal Investigation

The Met was not quite convinced by the Gaul RFI experts...

2010-07-31T21:18:00.001+01:00

…but left it to us to investigate the fraud

In an earlier post, we gave details of the information received from the Metropolitan Police in response to our FOI request for the police report assessing our allegations that the conduct and the outcome of the Gaul inquiry (RFI) amounted to fraud.

As the published copy of the report shows, most of the information therein had been redacted so that nothing relevant could be seen.

Last month, however, following an intervention from the Information Commissioner, the Met have, reluctantly, released an extra paragraph - one authored presumably by a superior of the case assessment officer - which simply reads:

Please thank DC Boyce for his prompt and thorough assessment of this case.

DC Boyce seems to conclude that the Inquiry’s findings as to why various chutes were open are not necessarily correct [1] when considered against conflicting expert evidence. I agree that these issues are very subjective and I do not have sufficient knowledge of these matters to either agree or disagree with the Inquiry’s conclusions. However, I accept that the evidence to support a further criminal investigation is not made out.

It is quite something to get the police to admit, however reluctantly, that the conclusions of the Gaul inquiry were not necessarily correct (one does not need specialised knowledge to admit that - just a bit of common sense).

The evidence we had provided, both to the police as well as on this blog, should have been more than enough to trigger a criminal investigation. It would have been very easy for the Met detectives to contact the few witnesses we had suggested and thus extract further details about what went on behind the scenes prior and during the Gaul RFI.

Unfortunately, the Met must have decided that it was not their job to investigate and collect evidence, but ours.

As to the rest of the redactions in the case assessment report, both the Met and the Information Commissioner’s Office suggested that a Subject Access Data Request [2](SAR) might shed some light upon those black lines, which we, accordingly, submitted. But that is another story…

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[1] The bold emphasis belongs to us.

[2] We also requested the Met to release, for a small fee, any personal data about us that was contained within the report in question.

The stability of the fishing vessel Trident

2010-07-17T02:34:00.006+01:00

The Court hearings into the loss of the FV Trident have now concluded and we have been advised that the Sheriff Principal has retired to write his report.

Although the control of the technical information, relevant to these hearings, has been unprecedented for a public inquiry, secretive even, the Advocate General’s views on what the preferred outcome should be have been frequently aired in the press:

She said: There is no reliable evidence to support a finding that the loss of the Trident was caused by deficiencies in her design stability, in particular non-compliance with the recommended IMCO intact stability criteria, or by capsizing in different circumstances.
The most probable cause of the loss of Trident was a sudden and catastrophic capsize in heavy seas, which most likely occurred within two or three seconds and was followed by rapid sinking.

Notwithstanding these points, one piece of factual information about Trident, which has recently managed to break through into the public domain as a result of a freedom of information request to the DfT, is a 34-year-old technical report on the tank testing that was carried out on a scale model of the Trident by the National Maritime Institute in 1976.

Although the NMI report is very carefully worded, it concludes that the Trident’s stability reserves were insufficient to prevent her from capsizing in sea conditions that were relatively moderate, ie in conditions similar to those that were recorded on the day she was lost. The report also shows that on her last voyage, Trident’s stability was deficient when compared to the IMCO minimum stability standards. It is unfortunate that for many years the Department of Trade have been unwilling to share these important conclusions with the relatives of those who were lost.

Apart from its conclusions, the NMI report also contains some information that is of real interest to Naval Architects: it contains a scaled body plan and loading data. What the release of this information actually means is that the curious amongst us can now check out the stability reserves of the Trident for ourselves – we no longer have to accept the official, sanitised, line that has been consistently promulgated by the DfT over the years and which has now also been adopted by the OAG.

Stability assessment

We constructed a computer model of the Trident’s hull and carried out an assessment of Trident’s stability reserves against the minimum standards that are laid down by IMCO for fishing vessels:

We have thus discovered that Trident did not meet the IMCO minimum stability criteria in any of the four principal loading conditions.

We were also able to confirm that the Trident did not meet the IMCO stability criteria on the day she was lost and, furthermore, even if 10 tonnes of steel ballast had been added to her keel, she would still have been unable to meet the IMCO stability criteria in all of the four standard sailing conditions.

The following image contains the summary results of our stability assessment, the data that is highlighted in orange shows IMCO non-compliances in each of the six sailing conditions examined. Alternatively, this file [link] contains a copy of the stability assessment in a pdf format.

The IMCO stability standards are minima, which, when met, should prevent a vessel from capsizing in all but the most severe of weather conditions. They come as a package and they need to be complied with in their entirety.
Since 1975, all UK fishing vessels of the Tridents type and size have been obliged to meet the IMCO stability standards in full. Any vessel that did not meet the IMCO stability standard would not have been issued with a UK fishing vessel safety certificate by the MCA and would, therefore, have been unable to fish.

The Trident did not meet IMCO’s minimum stability standards and unfortunately the nature of her non-compliance was such that the mere addition of ballast would not have resolved this problem. For Trident, as in the case of her sister vessel, the Silver Lining, significant structural modifications would have been necessary to bring her stability reserves up to the required standard.

A ship’s propensity to capsize and its inherent stability are inextricably interrelated; the very fact that Trident capsized is conclusive evidence that Trident had insufficient stability for the sea conditions on the day she was lost.

Additionally, the fact that Trident did not meet IMCO’s minimum stability standards (i.e. her stability was deficient) would certainly have increased her propensity to capsize.

ADDENDUM (19 July 2010)

Stability model comparison

The output from our stability model was compared against the results obtained for the Trident’s loss condition from the DOT’s SIKOB program in 1976 (the SIKOB results are contained both in the final report of the original Formal Investigation and in the 1976 NMI model test report). The results from the 2010 computer program and the 1976 SIKOB program were found to be virtually identical (only 3mm difference in floating draught and 7mm difference in trim over 22 metres):

However, it was noted that the original 1976 calculations contained a small input error and, when the input to the 2010 program was modified to rectify this anomaly, the stability results were reduced slightly:

FV Trident Inquiry - Preliminary comment

2010-07-13T14:47:00.007+01:00

Recent reports in the press advise us [Aberdeen Press and Journal and BBC] that Scotland's Advocate General (AG) is of the view that lack of stability was not a significant factor in Trident’s capsize and loss, and that the old chestnut - ‘heavy seas’ - has popped up again as explanation of the 1974 tragedy:

The most probable cause of the loss of Trident was a sudden and catastrophic capsize in heavy seas.

This proposition by the AG does not really hold any weight for a vessel of Trident’s size and type, even when we take into account the more severe weather conditions (force 7-8 or 9 even?) that were generated for the RFI at the behest of its ‘panel of experts’.

Indeed, if this were a plausible hypothesis, we would have had many Trident-type losses (of IMCO-compliant fishing vessels) during the past 36 years and national legislation providing for increased intact stability standards would have needed to be introduced. This, however, has never happened.

Footnote:

In the original Formal Investigation, the Court reached the conclusion that "reliance cannot be placed on the soundness of the design of Trident" and that "she was probably of inadequate stability".

After reviewing the whole of their evidence, they further concluded that " in all the circumstances it would be unrealistic to conclude that her loss was due solely to the action of the sea and, finaly, that inadequate stability is the factor most likely to underlie her foundering in conditions which would not normally have overwhelmed a ship of her size."

(More to follow)

Truffles

2010-07-09T11:30:00.002+01:00

To celebrate the ennoblement of John Prescott and his happy accession to the House of Lords, we have posted the short clip below.
This may also remind his followers that in the New Labour Farm "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.".

FV Trident - Centres of gravity

2010-07-05T01:03:00.004+01:00

During the Original Formal Investigation (OFI - 1975) into the loss of the fishing vessel Trident, matters pertaining to her stability were examined in great depth; however, when it came to writing the final report of the investigation, the Court felt unable to make a pronouncement on whether the Trident had met IMCO’s minimum stability standards or not:

It is impossible to assert categorically that Trident did or did not comply with the IMCO recommendations, to which it was intended that she should be built

Apart from the uncertainty arising from the absence of an inclining experiment, one of the principal reasons cited for this unfortunate lack of assurance was the fact that there were known discrepancies between the designer’s original drawings and the as-built hull shape of the Trident and her sister vessel, the Silver Lining.

In the OFI’s final report, this point was emphasised by including two stability calculations as an Annex, one based upon the dimensions taken from the designer’s drawings (Bute lines) and one based upon the dimensions lifted from her sister vessel, the Silver Lining (Napier lines).

These two sets of stability calculations show that the Trident’s stability passed the IMCO recommendations when the calculations were carried out based upon the ‘Bute lines’ dimensions, but failed the IMCO recommendations when the same calculations were carried out based upon the ‘Napier Lines’ dimensions:

Partial copies from OFI final report plus amendments

This all seems to be quite straightforward and, apparently, justifies the Court’s uncertainty on this matter.

However, what is not immediately apparent, both from the 1976 OFI report and from the transcripts of Court evidence, is the fact that the real reason why the Bute hulled version of Trident ‘passed’ and the Napier hulled version of Trident ‘failed’ was that the vertical centres of gravity (VCG) that were used for these two separate stability calculations were different:

Bute hull lightship VCG = 10.072 feet above the keel (a value of unspecified provenance)

Napier hull lightship VCG = 10.487 feet above the keel (value derived from the inclining experiment carried out on Silver Lining and subsequently used in the 1976 NMI research)

If the same vertical centre of gravity figures had been used in both of these two stability calculations, they would have indicated either a double failure (when the VCGs = 10.487 ft) or a double pass (when the VCGs = 10.072 ft)

i.e The Trident’s stability calculations would show a pass or a fail (with respect to the IMCO stability standard) dependent upon the value of VCG used and not, as the OFI implied, due to differences between the Bute and Napier hull geometries, which were not, by themselves, sufficient to influence the results of the stability calculations.

What is more, it would appear that this was not just an oversight, but more of a deliberate ‘smoke and mirrors’ exercise by the DOT who, when they drafted conditions A1 and A2, also forgot to include the lightship VCG figures in the tables that are contained in the final OFI report:

If one reads through the transcripts of evidence for the 1975 inquiry, it is notable yet again [link to previous FV Gaul post] that Council for the DOT (who in 1975 carried out similar functions to those performed by the AG in the 2010 inquiry) was quite anxious to put forward the notion that Trident had complied substantially with the IMCO minimum standards.

(More to come)

Freedom of Information

2010-06-29T21:45:00.002+01:00

One day before the prescribed deadline, the Department for Transport responded to our FOI request of 2 June 2010 (see also our post of 06 June 2010) by providing us with the 1976 NMI report (a version made public today) and advising that “the Department does not hold a copy of the first draft of the report, nor any subsequent minutes of meeting discussing the document.”

Well, imagine what would happen if they did…

Frankly, the FOI Act is not worth the paper it is written on, for any government office can, when cornered, claim that they don’t hold the documents that they don’t want the public to see.

The FOI Act does not provide for such eventualities, as it assumes a level of straightforwardness on the part of our public servants, which, nowadays, may no longer exist.

(More to come)

Notes on an overdue inquiry

2010-06-15T17:17:00.003+01:00

Today, during his speech in the House of Commons on the Saville Inquiry, Prime Minister David Cameron said that "Nothing can bring back those that were killed but I hope, as one relative has put it, the truth coming out can set people free."

I don’t know how many people believed the sincerity of the sentiment behind that statement, but we surely did not. For as regards other inquiries, into other deaths (see those related to FV Gaul, MV Derbyshire, FV Trident etc.), the coalition government, just like its predecessors, are still actively concealing the truth. And not only are they preventing the truth from coming out, but they also still have systems in place to gag and intimidate those who speak it.

P.S. Members of the coalition government were well aware of these cover-ups long before they came to power.

FV Trident Inquiry - IMCO Standards and Contractual Requirements

2010-06-09T10:36:00.000+01:00

With reference to the article published today in the Aberdeen Press and Journal: http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/1775000

For those interested in more details about IMCO stability standards, White Fish Authority grants and trawlers built in the early seventies, the following link to a 1975 Parliamentary Debate on the Fishing Vessel ‘Silver Lining’ (& FV Trident) may be a worthwhile source of information:

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1975/feb/10/fishing-vessel-silver-lining

The FV Trident Re-opened Formal Investigation – June 2010

2010-06-06T23:16:00.003+01:00

We are now approaching the 50th day of hearings in this second public inquiry into the loss of the trawler Trident and its 7-man crew. The cost of this investigation is also said to be nearing £4m and, according to recent reports in the press, nobody appears to be fully satisfied with the way it is currently heading.

The original 1975 inquiry sat for 10 days, managed to cover a lot of ground and, although the precise cause of the casualty was unascertainable at that time (there was no wreck or eye witness testimony to the event), was eventually able to conclude:

“that inadequate stability is the factor most likely to underlie her foundering in conditions which would not normally have overwhelmed a ship of her size”

Subsequently, at the behest of the Department of Trade, the National Maritime Institute ran a series of tests on a model of the Trident (in the period 1975/6) the results of which added considerable weight to the conclusions of the 1975 public inquiry. Unfortunately, however, the conclusions from these model tests (that Trident had insufficient stability) were neither made public nor passed on to the relatives of the crew, thus denying closure to those who had suffered the greatest loss.

Nothing then happened for 25 years until 2001 when a team of amateur divers, searching for the wreck of HMS Exmouth, came across the Trident’s wreck off the coast of Caithness. In 2002, following an official underwater survey of the wreck site by the MAIB, Stephen Byers, then Secretary of State for Transport, decided to re-open the formal investigation, announcing that important new evidence [*] had been discovered.

With hindsight, it now seems that it was at this point in time when the investigative processes started to go wrong.

Following the discovery of the wreck and the evidence it revealed, investigators should have been in a position to:

either

i) Endorse the conclusions of the 1975 inquiry and the NMI model tests (i.e. inadequate stability) and thus bring an end to 25 years of uncertainty

ii) Reveal important new evidence from the wreck site, which countered the conclusions of the original inquiry, and advise us of the alternative cause for Trident’s loss.

This process should have taken no more than a few days of the Court’s time, and would have allowed everyone, in a timely manner, to obtain closure and get on with their lives.

Eight years further down the line, it would now seem that, in 2002, the Department for Transport (DfT) decided instead to embark upon a third option:

iii) Overturn the conclusions of both the 1975 inquiry and the 1976 NMI model tests without any new or important evidence

You may ask how they could do this.

Quite simply, really - rewrite history, redefine the applicable technology, add a bit of obfuscation and, in the absence of new and important evidence – make use of statistics and computers to generate some - although obviously this process was to take some time and be rather expensive (8 years and £4m so far……).

So, what have they been doing during these past eight years?

They formed a investigating team called the Joint Panel of Experts
Two further underwater surveys of the wreck site were carried out including onsite measurements of the Trident’s hull – possibly to seek out ways to ‘enhance’ the deficient stability reserves that were calculated for Trident in 1975
Two new computer simulations for the weather were prepared by leading weather experts – to dismiss the assessment of prevailing weather and wave conditions that was given by Dr Draper in 1975 (wind force 5-6) and substitute weather conditions and waves corresponding to winds of force 7-8 instead
Model testing was carried out in the MARIN test facility in the Netherlands together with computer simulations of model tests - to obtain capsize events on the Trident model with revised weather and sea conditions - to dismiss the 1976 conclusions from the NMI model tests
A report was drawn up by the Joint Panel of Experts containing technical arguments to justify their new conclusion that ‘sea-keeping’ rather than ‘stability’ was the cause for Trident’s loss.

So what have they been doing during the past 50 days of Court hearings?

Discussing all of the above and generating more than 8000 pages of unintelligible evidence

Why are they doing this?

To make sure that the Court concludes that Trident sank for reasons other than deficient stability (with its implicit inference that someone was at fault).

All at taxpayers’ expense.

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[*] The Merchant Shipping Act stipulates that if, subsequent to a casualty investigation either “new and important evidence” or a miscarriage of justice is revealed, the Secretary of State for Transport is required to re-open the formal investigation.

Trident RFI - Freedom of Information request

2010-06-02T11:07:00.001+01:00

With regard to the evidence made available during the current Trident RFI, a Freedom of Information request - which can be viewed and annotated via the link below - was sent today to the Department for Transport:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/mfv_trident_re_opened_formal_inv

FV Trident Formal Inquiry – Openness

2010-06-01T17:56:00.004+01:00

Following on from our previous post, in which we made a few observations on the latest developments in the ongoing Trident inquiry, we now feel bound to express further doubts on the official statement concerning the availability for public scrutiny of an item of important evidence.

When asked about NMI’s 1976 report, which has been hidden from the families for more than 30 years, the Advocate General’s official reply was that the report in question “has been publicly available since it was published in 1976, and was available for anyone to see at the time”.

Regrettably, in the light of a document, which we have recently received and which is copied below, we are now having serious doubts about the veracity of this official statement.

The above internal DOT document, dated 16th February 1977, suggests, amongst other things, that, at the time it was written, government officials in the DOT were actively suppressing the results of the TRIDENT/GAUL experiments.

FV Trident Inquiry - the matter of the elusive document

2010-05-29T16:27:00.010+01:00

Unexpected and most confounding press reports have recently announced that the families of the Trident victims have gained access to a document, which so far appears to have eluded them. The document in question, dating back to 1976, reveals that experts from the former National Maritime Institute, after carrying out research at the behest of the Department of Transport, had assessed that the Trident had inadequate stability.

Confronted with the uproar generated by this belated discovery, the Advocate General was quick to state that the document had not been hidden, that it “has been publicly available since it was published in 1976, and was available for anyone to see at the time”, and was even mentioned by the individual counsel during the recent court hearings.

For some reason, the Advocate General seems to confuse the RINA technical paper “Capsizing of Small Trawlers” by A. Morrall, that was published later, in 1979, for the 1976 NMI report for the DOT, to which the families are actually referring.

In fact, it was only the 1979 paper that has been mentioned by the counsel during the proceedings because, as a spokeswoman for the inquiry tried to justify, it had a “better status”.

Well, indeed, the 1979 RINA paper did have a ‘better status’: although originating from the 1976 research, the later publication was a more sanitized version of the document in question, therefore more suitable for public consumption, less definite in its pronouncements and one which does not even tie the 1976 research to the loss of Trident [*], simply referring to trawlers A and B instead.

Anyway, last week, we sent an email to the Advocate General asking her to name that contentious document publicly and to make it available to the public.

Dear Madam,

Following the latest news in the press regarding the emergence yesterday of "an unpublished government report which concluded that the vessel’s design made it so unstable that it could have capsized in “waves of modest height”", which the inquiry maintains "has been publicly available since it was published in 1976", I would be much obliged if you could arrange for a copy or a link to the aforesaid document to be sent to us.

Many thanks for your kind assistance,

Yours sincerely,

So far, we have received no response from the AG office, but we hope that one will be coming soon.

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[*] This is rather unusual since one of Mr Morrall’s later productions for RINA: “The GAUL Disaster: An Investigation into the loss of a Large Stern Trawler” as the title implies, had no qualms in mentioning the name of the casualty that was being researched.

FV Trident Stability - model testing

2010-05-13T23:41:00.009+01:00

In a few days time - more precisely on the 24th of May 2010 - the re-opened formal investigation into the sinking of FV Trident is due to reconvene.

In anticipation of that day we have read through the transcripts of evidence available so far.
In 2002 when the then Secretary of State for Transport, Mr Stephen Byers, ordered the re-opening of the Trident inquiry, we were advised that new and important evidence had been discovered that justified a new investigation into the vessel's loss.

However, after ploughing through more than 7000 pages of recorded oral evidence (from the 40 days of hearings in the Aberdeen Court), we have not been able to locate any new and important evidence!

We were also surprised to learn that, despite the technical expertise that is available to the court, the Advocate General found it necessary to seek external advice on one of the simplest concepts in Naval Architecture concerning ship stability.

AG - "It is true that raising KG is generally detrimental and lowering KG favourable and this applies to all vessels" - Do you agree with this statement Dr Schmitter? [...]
Dr S - Yes in general terms this statement is correct
AG - Right.
(Transcript of evidence of 12 November 2009)

For the benefit of those with an interest in trawler stability, we have prepared a short video clip (see below, split in two parts), which explains the significance of KG (VCG) to transverse stability. [1] [2]

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[1] KG is the height of the vertical center of gravity above the keel (also known as VCG)

[2] Unfortunately, on the Trident the VCG position was not accurately known because an inclining experiment had not been carried out.

Change against change

2010-05-04T18:51:00.000+01:00

It is now clear that, very soon, we shall have a change of government. Whether this will bring a deeper change of culture or merely a change of air, we are, however, unable to tell.

So far, New Labour has been more than a government party: it has been absolutist state, subversive society and religion and, as such, it has managed to annex almost everything in our public and private lives to its politics - 1997, the year when New Labour came to power, marking the ‘year zero’ in Britain’s calendar and the beginning of history.

During the thirteen years of New Labour rule, the evils of authoritarianism and corruption were followed by the more insidious evil of normalising this state of affairs, which, more or less unaware, many of us have assimilated like a bad taste acquired through prolonged exposure to vulgarity.

It is for these reasons that genuine change will be difficult to make happen. The next government will not be able to improve very much or reverse all the ruinous changes performed by New Labour, without initially mirroring the outreaches of the previous regime and similarly expanding its remit to non-political areas, beyond those legitimately held by an elected political power. The risks contained in any such expansion of authority imply an increased demand for openness and good sense from our next government. In the present circumstances, in which we have to correct not as much the doctrines as the excesses of the New Labour regime, the ideology of the next governing party will matter a lot less than their ability to serve us well - imperative which, sadly, is not going to broaden, but to complicate our electoral choices on the polling day.

Dissolution

2010-04-13T15:10:00.007+01:00

UPDATE: Reply received from the House of Lords Appointments Commission on the 16th of April

Dear *****,

Lord Jay has asked me to thank you for your email and to replay on his behalf. While we are unable to comment on individual cases, actual or theoretical, it may be helpful to explain the House of Lords Appointments Commission’s vetting role in respect of party-political nominees. The Commission is asked by the Prime Minister to vet prospective party-political nominees to the House of Lords for propriety. It submits its advice on individuals to the Prime Minister but has no power of veto.

Kind regards

*****

Just to let you know that the following letter was sent today to the Lords Appointments Commission:

Dear Lord Jay,

I am writing to you in connection with the latest Dissolution Honours List, which your Lordship and the Appointments Commission, over which your Lordship presides, is supposed to be vetting.

In that List, I was shocked to learn, John Prescott’s name was inserted. Whether this recommendation was made out of political cynicism or in a transitory moment of folly, we have no way of knowing, but we strongly believe that John Prescott’s place is not amongst the Lords - to whom we, members of the public, look up as to the highest and noblest spirits in the land.

It couldn’t have escaped your Lordship’s attention that our ex-Deputy Prime Minister has been embroiled in many dubious affairs such as the rigged formal inquiries into the sinking of MV Derbyshire and the FV Gaul, that his conduct while in ministerial office was scandalous in the extreme, his manners unbecoming of a Lord’s ermine and coronet, his oratorical accomplishments are grievously lacking, and his attitude towards taxpayer’s money has been as fishy as the whole trawler fleet of Hull.

I, therefore, appeal to your Lordship and to the Lords Appointments Commission to block John Prescott’s peerage and spare the Upper House from further dishonour and devaluation of the noble title of Lord.

And I thank your Lordship in advance for your kind consideration of my plea.

Your Lordship’s humblest and most faithful servant,

Happy Easter

2010-04-04T00:00:00.010+01:00

FV Trident Inquiry – the Joint Panel of Experts

2010-03-28T17:31:00.010+01:00

The Aberdeen Press and Journal informed us this weekend about the latest goings-on in the Trident inquiry. It was thus that we learned that Mr Martin Pullinger, [*] naval architect and retained expert for the majority of the Trident victims’ families, was criticised by the advocate acting for the vessel’s designer for having formed an opinion on Trident’s stability "without the knowledge required", a claim which the advocate defended by citing Mr Pullinger’s decision to defer matters relating to the Trident’s seakeeping ability to Professor Colin MacFarlane.

We are thus given to understand that Professor MacFarlane’s unique expertise in the arcane subject of seakeeping should preclude other experts from having opinions not only on the subject of seakeeping but also on issues of stability in general (issues deemed up until now to be the bread and butter of any naval architect).

How odd is it then to read pages 64 and 65 of the transcripts of evidence from the inquiry for the 4th of November 2009 about the following exchange, which took place during that day’s hearings:

Cross-examination by MR ANDERSON: […] Well perhaps you could tell us then, Professor MacFarlane, what exactly is it about the prevailing sea conditions which has combined with the specific sea-keeping characteristics of the Trident to cause this to capsize?

WITNESS [Professor MacFarlane]: I do not know […] I do not know the specific sea-keeping characteristics of the Trident at this stage which combined with those sea conditions caused it to capsize.

SHERIFF PRINCIPAL YOUNG: Sorry. You don’t know?

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[1] Mr Pullinger, it’s been reported, has refused to concur with the conclusions of the Joint Panel of Experts - which did not mention static stability as a potential contributing factor to the loss of the vessel - and has submitted his own report to the inquiry.

FV Trident Formal Investigation – the distance from reality

2010-03-21T13:10:00.009Z

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore” (Dorothy Gale, from the film The Wizard of Oz)

With every day that passes, it becomes more and more apparent that the UK government would very much like the Trident court of inquiry to dismiss the findings of the original 1975 public investigation and conclude instead that the loss of the vessel and its seven crew was caused by some reason other than deficient stability.
In fact, the cause for the loss that has been proposed by the inquiry’s Joint Panel of Experts (JPE), after many years of deliberation, and which the Government is vigorously promoting is that:

“The cause of this capsize is attributed to specific sea-keeping characteristics of the vessel combined with the prevailing sea conditions at the time”

To arrive at the above conclusion, without or in spite of the available factual evidence, a few premises need to be introduced beforehand, which when you use a long enough chain of estimative processes, approximations and other abstractions of reality, and when you are not constrained by empirical verification, can be quite easy.

In order to demonstrate and produce evidence about the behaviour of the Trident in various sea conditions the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) was hired to construct a physical model of the vessel, which was tank tested in the weather conditions specified by the inquiry Joint Panel of Experts (JPE), as well as a Fredyn numerical model, which was tuned using the tank testing results from the physical model.

Trident’s weight and centre of gravity details, normally derived from an inclining test, used by MARIN to build their models were, however, a step further from reality since they had been obtained from sister vessel data and negotiations amongst the parties represented at the inquiry.
The weather conditions, specified by the JPE, inconsistent with several eyewitness testimonies and the findings of the original investigation [*], were derived from two weather hindcasts – i.e. other approximations of reality – and then processed for the purpose of providing the necessary parameters for the model.
How this processing was done and how reliable its outputs were, we may never be able to fathom. All we really know is that the conclusions drawn by the inquiry experts from these hindcasts suggest that, on the day when the Trident was lost, the winds and the sea waves were much bigger than the testimony given at the time of the 1975 inquiry indicated.
What is more, the MARIN physical model was only run for a limited number of wave settings, leaving the scientists to analogise freely as to the reactions of the model to other sea conditions.

Then, of course, the error propagation comes into play and, in the end, the results obtained from this combination of successive abstractions of reality, with their accumulated errors and subjectivity, doesn’t inspire great confidence.

In short, it can be argued that testing the behaviour of a vessel whose displacement and centre of gravity at the time of her loss are not accurately known, under weather conditions the parameters for which appear to have been interpolated from extrapolations, by means of a model which incorporates a number of possibly debatable assumptions and suppositions as well as a series of further abstractions, validating this model against another model, observing it through a very limited number of tests and assessing the test results using yardsticks and norms that have not been accepted in the wider maritime community, takes us a some distance from reality and from a level of certainty than we might consider suitable to a fatal accident investigation.
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[*] If we understood correctly the press reports on this subject, the victims’ families were prevented from appointing their own weather specialist. (Aberdeen Press and Journal, 02 November 2009, Trident families’ weather expert is disallowed)

FV Trident inquiry – variable factors and conditional probabilities

2010-03-06T16:37:00.012Z

In the Aberdeen Press and Journal of 5 March 2010 we read about the dialogue that took place between Ms Ailsa Wilson QC (representing the Advocate General) and Professor MacFarlane (expert witness for the inquiry) concerning the stability of the FV Trident:

"Ms Wilson said: "The feeling among the group [i.e. the relatives of those lost on the Trident] is that Trident had survived for 18 months and sailed in much worse conditions to those during the loss, so she must have been a risk.
Mr MacFarlane said he did not see the logic in this, adding: "If she survived much worse sea conditions and more difficult conditions then I don’t see how it could be said that she had a stability problem. That doesn’t seem logical to me.""

If the testimony mentioned above is accurately reported, then we have to accept that the concerns expressed thereafter by Mrs Jeannie Ritchie, one of the Trident widows -“We seem to be going round in circles and being baffled by science,” she said - may be well grounded.
For it appears that, in response to one of the relatives’ reasoned arguments as to what may have caused the vessel to capsize, Professor MacFarlane chose to give a rather superficial and possibly misleading response, neglecting to explain that a vessel’s stability - that gives a vessel its resistance to capsize - is not a constant, but a variable property, which depends on a number of variable factors, such as the disposition and weight of fuel, water, ice, fish etc., and that his answer would only be true, if the Trident’s stability had been exactly the same during her last as well as her earlier trips.

The underlying logic behind the proposition put forward by the relatives is really quite simple: if we assumed that the probability of any given vessel capsizing is dependent upon two principal factors:

The intact stability of the ship – where the probability of capsize is inversely proportional to the ship’s stability reserves – which is, as mentioned above, a variable

The sea conditions in which the ship is sailing – where the probability of capsizing is relative to the size of the waves

then, for the Trident’s trips, which she had successfully completed earlier and where the sea conditions were worse, we would have to conclude that the stability of the vessel was better.
By virtue of the same logic, we would also have to conclude that, on the Trident’s last voyage, taken in more benign sea conditions, but ending with the capsize of the vessel, it must have been the vessel’s stability that was worse. The suggestion, therefore, is that it was the stability rather than the wave height, which led to the capsize and loss of the vessel.

The obvious question that follows from here is - what level of intact stability did the Trident have at the time of her loss?

The combined effects of the Gaul’s stability shortfalls and duff and offal chute design faults

2010-02-21T16:43:00.015Z

The principal finding of the 2004 Re-opened Formal Investigation (RFI) into the loss of the Gaul was that flooding of the factory space had occurred through two hull openings in the side of the vessel and that it was probable that this ingress of water led to the capsize and sinking of the Gaul.

Up until December of last year this blog focussed on a number of obvious design faults and flaws in the construction of the duff and offal chutes on the Gaul, and criticised the conduct and outcome of the 2004 RFI which, ignoring these facts had concluded that the flooding and loss of the vessel had been caused by the crew’s failure to close the inner covers of the duff and offal chute hull openings. Recently, however, we have added a summary of the results of a separate investigation, which has revealed significant stability shortfalls (on IMCO’s minimum stability standards [*]) that would have affected the Gaul in a number of her normal operating conditions.

As far the capsize and loss of the vessel is concerned, it should be noted that, while the stability shortfalls and flooding of the factory space through the duff and offal hull openings (facilitated by defective closing arrangements) are two different matters, they do not suggest differing causes for the loss of the Gaul; in fact, the impact of each is complementary to the chain of events which led to the loss of the vessel.

The stability reserves of a trawler may be regarded as a finite but variable quantity, dependent upon the vessel’s condition of loading, disposition of fuel, water etc. If seawater is allowed to flood into the hull, the stability of that trawler is reduced and the possibility of capsizes rises.
The 2004 RFI concluded that an ingress of about 100 tonnes of seawater (entering through her duff and offal chute openings) would have been necessary before the Gaul’s stability reserves would have been depleted to a level where capsize was probable in the weather the vessel encountered.
Our investigation has shown that, because the Gaul’s actual stability reserves were initially much lower than those assumed by the RFI, capsize would have been probable after only a modest ingress of seawater.

However, regardless of the design faults in the chutes’ closing arrangements, the Gaul’s stability problems and their combined effect on the safety of the vessel, the 2004 RFI was still content to attribute her loss to a failure on the part of the crew to close and secure the duff and offal lids during the storm they encountered on 8 February 1974.
Their conclusion, however, appears now extremely far-fetched.
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[*] One of the most important safety standards for a sea-going trawler is that it should meet the IMCO minimum stability criteria, however:

- Compliance with the IMCO minimum stability standard does not guarantee that a trawler will be safe from capsize in severe weather
- A trawler having stability reserves that significantly exceed the IMCO minimum standard is unlikely to capsize in severe weather
- Non-compliance with the IMCO minimum stability standard does not automatically mean that a trawler is likely to capsize in severe weather
- A trawler having stability reserves that fall significantly below the IMCO minimum standard is likely to capsize in severe weather.

The Stability of the Trawler Gaul (part 2)

2010-02-08T16:10:00.022Z

36 years have passed since the trawler Gaul sank in the Barents Sea on the 8th of February 1974 and 5 years since the Re-opened Formal Investigation into its loss laid the blame for the tragedy with her crew. Today, by way of remembrance, we are going to reveal a few more facts about the stability of the trawler Gaul.

On 5 December 1972 the Department of Trade (DOT) finally completed their examination of the stability of the Ranger Castor (renamed Gaul in 1973) and issued their official stability certificate:

This document was meant to attest that the Gaul’s reserves of stability in her foreseeable sailing conditions had been examined by the DOT and found to satisfy IMCO’s minimum stability standards.

Unfortunately, the stability documentation that had been examined by the DOT prior to their certification of the Gaul contained a number of basic errors and, what is more, it did not reflect the fact that two of Gaul’s seawater ballast tanks had been converted to carry fuel oil. The effects of this conversion were, however, significant for the vessel’s stability because they meant that she could no longer meet the IMCO’s minimum stability standards in all of her operating conditions.

The Original Formal Investigation (OFI) September - October 1974

In the original formal investigation, the Builders, the Owners and the DOT were all able to draw upon the testimony of their expert witnesses who were well versed in ship stability matters; unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the relatives of the deceased who, instead, had to rely upon the integrity of the Court.

The loss of the Gaul, obviously, raised a number of questions concerning the safety of her remaining sister vessels, and, therefore, a part of the 1974 OFI was spent in considering the safety of the Ranger C class vessels [1] as a whole.
The effect of the ballast tank conversion on the stability of the Ranger vessels was examined in some depth, leading to the agreed view [2] that, even if these vessels sailed with fuel oil (instead of water ballast) in their no 2 Double Bottom tanks, the IMCO minimum stability criteria would still be met provided operational measures (i.e. where the ships’ staff were instructed on the sequence of fuel tank usage) were implemented, and that these would be sufficient to ensure the safety of the remaining vessels.

An extract from the transcripts of evidence for Day 12 OFI:

(Mr Ward represented the Gaul’s builders - Brooke Marine and Mr Gilfillan was an independent consultant Naval Architect who had been engaged by the Gaul’s owners to examine the safety of their Ranger Class vessels.
In the above transcript they were discussing the content of a letter concerning fuel tank usage that had been sent by the owners, shortly after the Gaul was lost, to the skipper of the Kelt, a sister vessel to the Gaul.)

This operational measure (i.e. that the No.2 double bottom tank was to be used only when the ship was fully laden or on her homeward passage) was introduced prior to the completion of Mr Gilfillan’s detailed research into the safety of the Ranger vessels, in which he would draw a different conclusion: namely that - in order to improve their operational stability following the conversion of their no 2 DB tanks for fuel oil - between 20 and 50 tons of permanent ballast should be provided onboard the Gaul’s remaining sister vessels.

Extract from transcripts of evidence Day 11 OFI - 8th October 1974

The lie

In the above extract from the OFI transcripts, it can be seen that the DOT’s counsel (Mr Brice) is asking the witness patently leading questions, suggesting to him that operational procedures would be sufficient to ensure compliance with IMCO stability standards, and also that such procedures were, perhaps, preferable to the provision of 20-50 tones of permanent ballast.

With regard to stability following the conversion of no 2 DB tank for carriage of fuel oil, the shipyard’s hand calculations [3] of 1974 can be readily replicated, and these clearly show that the IMCO stability criteria would not have been met in all of the Gaul’s normal operating conditions, regardless of any diligent skipper’s desire to ensure ‘proper distribution and use of fuel’ and the ‘proper operation of the ship’, as Mr Brice puts it.

Such calculations show that not only was the OFI proposition, that operational measures would suffice, incorrect, but it was also a lie. In carrying out their detailed analyses of the Gaul’s stability reserves, the owners, the builders and the DOT would all have been well aware of the fact that it was not possible for the vessel (as modified) to meet the IMCO minimum stability criteria for the ‘arrival in port’ condition and the seagoing conditions that preceded it.

In fact Mr Gilfillan admits this in paragraph 3 above, but Mr Brice quickly brushes over this fact by suggesting that a lack of adequate stability would only arise if the vessel were “improperly operated”.
(Note: Mr Brice’s rejoinder to Mr Gilfillan’s advice: “but not in all conditions” should have been to seek clarification regarding those conditions in which the vessel did not meet IMCO minimum stability criteria.)

Additionally, the appropriate viewpoint [4] for the DOT, in terms of trawler safety, should have been that an operational solution (which would still retain the inherent risk of human error) for a stability shortfall would always be inferior to a permanent solution that restored a ship’s stability to its desired condition.
The provision of permanent ballast onboard the Gaul’s sisters would have been a permanent solution, and one that would not have affected the vessels’ ability to catch fish or the quantity of catch (470 tons) that they could carry.

The Re-opened Formal Investigation 2004 (RFI)

During the 2004 RFI, the cover-up that had its origins in the 1974 OFI was duly consolidated, orchestrated by the DfT who were familiar with the Gaul case and the issue of her questionable stability.

Additionally, a new cover-up was put in place, one that would also conceal the obvious design faults in the duff and offal chutes on the Gaul and put the cause for her loss down to ‘crew and operator error’.

The cover-up continues to this day.

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[1] Ranger Cadmus, Ranger Calliope, Ranger Callisto and Ranger Castor (Gaul)

[2] Consensus between the DOT, the Owners and the Builders. It should be noted that all three parties had an interest in obtaining a favourable outcome from the formal investigation, as all could be open to criticism:
- The DOT, who only carried out a superficial document review prior to erroneously certifying the Gaul’s stability in 1972
- The builders, who had produced the Gaul’s stability documentation which contained errors and which over-estimated the Gaul’s stability reserves
- The Owners who had operated the vessel outwith the scope of Gaul’s official stability documentation.

[3] Manual integration of statical stability curves using Simpson’s rules. Calculations have also been carried out using modern ship stability software (with free trim capabilities and automatic free surface correction for tanks) and these show that (after correction for shipyard errors) whenever fishing was poor, the vessel would have had to leave the fishing grounds at a point when approximately 50% of their fuel had been used, to enable them to arrive back in port with more than 100 tons of fuel remaining onboard (this residual weight of fuel was necessary to enable the vessel to meet the IMCO stability criteria on the return voyage). In brief, the conversion of the number 2 Double bottom water ballast tanks for the carriage of fuel oil did not actually extend the operational range of the vessels, it merely substituted fuel oil for seawater, which still had to remain onboard the vessel as ‘ballast’ if minimum stability standards were to be met.

[4] The DOT’s unusual views regarding the provision of ballast become more explicable if we consider that, had permanent ballast been proposed for the Gaul’s sister vessels following the Formal Investigation, then this would have indicated that there had been a fundamental flaw with the Gaul’s stability. Whereas, if safety improvements were required that were of an operational nature only, then it could be argued that the effects of the fuel tank conversion had not been really significant and that the Gaul’s intact stability had been basically satisfactory and that, therefore, the DOT’s certification of the Gaul’s stability documentation in 1972 had not been incorrect.

The team

2010-01-16T18:36:00.012Z

There is nothing unusual in the fact that political parties suffer, at times, from internal fighting and rebellion; what is remarkable is that our New Labour Party has been doing it with the periodicity of a lunar phenomenon, and that our beleaguered Prime Minister has managed to survive, although not unscathed, each attempt to unseat him.

The most tiresome aspect, however, is that after each spell of hostility comes the pacification, and, if you can still stomach the Labour Party’s unending treachery and backstabbing, you may find the bogus kissing and making-up that usually follow - together with all those group photos where prominent members of the cabinet, madly, parade their unity – far more distasteful.
As George Eliot said, there are victories worse than a defeat, and our Prime Minister's latest victory could be safely categorised as one of those. Because, after their latest ‘surrender’, the New Labour rebels seem, nonetheless, to have won additional power and have even acquired prime ministerial prerogatives. The PM himself, it has been suggested, is now a captive and seemingly afraid of his cabinet.
And, like burglars trashing the house they’ve just robbed, after having tied the owners to their chairs, the New Labour insurgents, we ourselves have noticed, now appear free to cause as much mischief as they please.

Caught between a disappearing past and a terrifying future, the New Labour team - representatives not of the people, but of those moneyed interests and shady business networks that sponsored their access to power - have a lot to fear from a change of regime. As the prospect of the coming election starts to hit home - having confiscated our reality and arrogated its powers - the realisation of their inevitable removal from office is leading the New Labour team to desperation and absurdity.

The stability of the trawler Gaul

2010-01-01T00:21:00.013Z

To bring in the New Year with a bang, we would like to announce the outcome of an independent, critical and detailed investigation into the operational stability reserves of the freezer trawler Gaul. The results of this investigation reveal that, contrary to the many official pronouncements that were made on this matter (in 1974, 1980, 1999 and 2004), the Gaul’s reserves of intact stability did not in fact meet the minimum standards and norms that were expected for a fishing vessel built in the early 1970s (ref. IMCO “Recommendation on Intact Stability of Fishing Vessels” 1968).

An extract from the final report of the Formal Investigation into the loss of the Gaul (1974) gives the first pronouncement on this matter:

When the stern-trawler Gaul and her crew left Hull at 6 AM on the morning of 22 January 1974 for the Barents Sea fishing grounds, they were not putting to sea in an “exceptionally seaworthy vessel” nor in one that “had excellent sea-keeping characteristics and a large range of intact stability” [1] as the hyperbole in the 1999 MAIB report into the loss of the Gaul would have us believe, instead they were setting out for a destination notorious for poor weather, in a ship, which did not meet the IMCO basic stability standards [2] in the sailing conditions that were normal for her service.

What made things worse, however, was the fact that due to a number of oversights and design errors, the official stability documentation that was provided onboard the Gaul for the use of the Skipper (although certified by the Department of Trade) over-estimated the vessel’s reserves of intact stability to such an extent that anyone using it would not have been able to identify when the vessel was approaching any marginal or critical stability conditions.

Added to that, and most important of all, was the fact that, shortly after her delivery, the Gaul’s owners converted two of her double bottom tanks to enable them to carry fuel oil instead of ballast water (ballast water was required on the Gaul to ensure that the vessel could maintain adequate stability in all anticipated sailing conditions), but the stability documents were not revised to take account of this significant modification.

The effects of this alteration could only be described as disastrous from the viewpoint of the Gaul’s ability to meet the IMCO stability standards (see example in Annex 1) and, in fact, on the day of her loss it is probable that, unbeknownst to her skipper, she was sailing in a marginal or deficient stability condition [3].

In 2004, the officials charged with conducting the Re-opened Formal Investigation into the loss of the Gaul managed to convince themselves, but not many others, that factory deck flooding, resulting from crew error was the reason why the Gaul had capsized and foundered.
Design faults, which could lead to such flooding, and the fact that the Gaul had inadequate stability for her proposed service were two critical issues that were kept strictly off the agenda.

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[1] MAIB - the Marine Accident Investigation Branch of the DfT

[2] The IMCO stability criteria have been recognized for more than forty years now as being the minimum base stability standard that should be met by seagoing trawlers to ensure safety at sea.

[3] From the viewpoint of stability assessment, the exact condition of the Gaul at the time of her loss cannot be accurately gauged and minor differences in assumptions made as to the amount of fish and gear onboard, fuel consumption, tank usage etc could take the vessel from a marginal ‘pass’ to a significant ‘fail’ (vis-à-vis the IMCO minimum standard).

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The table above shows that the vessel fails to meet four of the IMCO’s six minimum stability criteria (i.e. the GZ areas and the initial GM value) in the given sailing condition and that the failure is neither marginal nor borderline, but a failure by a substantial margin (see differences between minimum stability criteria and the actual values). (Downloadable PDF version at http://freepdfhosting.com/7ecaf3651a.pdf)

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas - 2009

2009-12-22T18:39:00.006Z

FV Trident Formal Investigation – financial pressures

2009-12-13T16:35:00.010Z

The latest news trickling from the FV Trident formal inquiry is rather disquieting. An article in the Times informs us that the relatives of the seven fishermen who lost their lives when the Trident went down in 1974 are now threatened by the government with financial ruin if they continue to press for a correct and unbiased investigation.

Although in 2002 Stephen Byers, then Secretary of State for Transport, promised that the government will honour its obligation to fund the proceedings, and despite the fact that the families have had no say in how the £3 million costs incurred to date have been decided, the government now has the gall to warn the families that they will not be reimbursed for the costs of essential technical assistance, unless they cease their quest for the truth and fall in with the government’s preferred version of events.

Yes, £3 million is a significant amount, but it was the government alone who chose to spend this sum and what to spend it on. The new model-testing performed in Holland, for instance, was not really necessary except to bolster the government’s proposition that it was a big wave rather than poor design that had been responsible for the vessel’s loss (comprehensive model tests had already been carried out in the late seventies, which indicated that poor stability on the Trident could have led to her capsize).
This blatant bullying of the Trident widows shows the level that our government officials will sink to in order to maintain the myth that there is no gain in pursuing justice and to avoid, perhaps, creating a point of reference for other similarly contentious inquiries.

The Times article also mentions that the victims’ families are determined to look further into the possibility that Trident had stability problems, and that the pursuit of this line of inquiry “would involve raising the vessel from the seabed”.
In fact, this is not really the case. In 1975, at the end of the first formal investigation, and 26 years before the wreck of the Trident was discovered, the Court felt confident enough to be able to conclude:
“The Court considers it probable that deficient stability in her design contributed to her foundering.”
Since then, the only new thing that has emerged is the evidence from the underwater survey of the wreck, which appears to attach even more weight to that probability.

Raising the vessel from the seabed may (depending on the state of the wreckage) provide the experts with some additional information that would improve the accuracy of their stability calculations. However, this is uncertain, and it may well be that, at the end of the day, the information already available from the sister vessel (and from the inclining test carried out on the Trident in Middlesbrough) provides the most realistic basis for a suitable assessment of the Trident’s stability.

Anyway, the biggest problem is that the Advocate General has already made it clear that she is determined not to allow an inquiry into the sinking of a vessel focus on the vessel’s design. Now, the stability of the vessel may be assessed one way or the other, but how do you solve that?

The public bath

2009-12-10T16:50:00.008Z

By definition, a public inquiry is said to be a search for truth regarding the causes of some terrible incident or man-made disaster, conducted in the public interest and in the public view - the results from such investigations being deemed beneficial to our understanding of what went wrong with our actions and what measures need to be taken in future so as to avoid similar mishaps.

In New Labour Britain, however - in this respect as in many others - the theory is very much divorced from the actual fact. Many public inquiries have opened and closed, leaving us not much the wiser, only a lot shorter of public cash.
So what are these inquiries for?

The most recent and prominent example is the ongoing Chilcot inquiry into the circumstances that led to the war in Iraq.
Like the investigations into maritime accidents (in which we have a greater interest), the search for the truth about the Iraq war has been a process in need of several re-iterations [1] - each of them having left the public dissatisfied.

Confronted with the horrid necessity of having to satisfy people’s curiosity and diffuse various social tensions, governments are not inimical to the idea of setting up public inquiries, but, if there is any risk of political humiliation, they make sure that these affairs will not seek out the truth in earnest or learn any lessons from it – except, perhaps, on how to circumvent the facts more effectively next time around.

As it can be said about many other similar undertakings before it, the Chilcot inquiry could have easily not existed [2]. Since many in the political Establishment know only too well what really happened and who is to blame and why, it would have been a lot easier (and cheaper) if the truth had been publicly revealed, without too much ceremony and vacillation, and the appropriate corrective/retributive actions had then been taken as required.

But discovering the truth is not what a public inquiry is about. Is it? A public inquiry, nowadays, is more like a communal bath – a public place of sensual abandonment and ritual lustration - where the interested parties, hiding their nudity from the public behind clouds of steam and odorous suds, soak together in opulent lather, scrubbing each other’s backs. Its purpose is simply to make them appear purer in the end, and leave them more relaxed - and smelling of flowers.

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[1] See the Hutton inquiry and the Butler review

[2] Just as the MV Derbyshire, FV Gaul and FV Trident opened and re-opened formal investigations

FV Trident inquiry – confusion and instability

2009-11-25T18:36:00.006Z

The Trident was a typical example of the Scottish trawlers that were built in the late 60’s and early 70’s of just less than 24.4m (80 ft) in registered length. Outwardly it exhibited no obvious characteristics or features that would set it apart from the other similar vessels built at that time.

This particular size and type of trawler had a proven reputation for being seaworthy in all weather conditions, and in this respect we would hope that, ultimately, the Court of inquiry will be able to identify those critical differences on Trident which set her apart from the rest of the Scottish fleet and which caused her to capsize and founder in relatively moderate sea conditions.
The Trident was only 18 months old at the time of her loss.

Stability

Judging by the latest press reports on the debate about Trident’s stability, it seems that currently, there is some confusion within the Court as to what ‘stability’ actually means in the context of a fishing trawler and on what stability standards should normally apply. There also seems to be some confusion as to how a fishing vessel’s stability is actually measured and assessed, and, additionally, the terms ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ stability appear to have the Court’s official experts and Counsel talking at cross purposes.

In recent days it has been reported:

“Sheriff Principal Sir Stephen Young, who is overseeing the inquest, ordered him [the counsel for the families] to compile a second document restating his case.
The first order was served on Monday, when the court ruled that Mr Anderson’s arguments on static stability, dynamic stability and stability curves – all of which must be in check for a boat to remain upright – were not clear.” (Aberdeen Press and Journal 18 November 2009)

“The inquiry heard yesterday that an incline test on the Trident would not have revealed if she was at risk of capsizing.
Richard Anderson, representing some of the families, said it is their belief that the test, which is used to measure the stability of a boat in calm conditions, would have uncovered problems with the Trident’s stability.
William Boyd, a director of TMC Marine Consultants, told the inquiry the test “has no relevance” when a boat is out at sea. […] “An incline test is a necessary and useful test, but in predicting what external forces are going to arise at sea it has no relevance.” (Aberdeen Press and Journal 17 November 2009)

A MARINE expert insisted a test of a Peterhead-registered trawler which sank would not have proven whether it was sea-worthy. […] Mr Boyd said a test on the Trident would have been “non applicable” because it would have been carried out in calm waters. (Aberdeen Evening Express 17 November 2009)

“Master mariner Graeme Bowles said a static test on the boat would not have correctly assessed her stability when at sea, and that a dynamic stability test was usually done to check this. […] The inquiry had previously heard that an inclining test, usually done when the boat is static, had not been carried out. It examines the vertical centre of gravity and its effect on a vessel’s stability. […] When asked by Ailsa Wilson, QC for the advocate general, to explain the difference between static and dynamic tests, Mr Bowles said: 'Dynamic takes into account everything to do with the ship’s behaviour when she is at sea.' The test takes into account the risk of capsizing and the threat posed by violent winds and waves”. (Aberdeen Press and Journal 28 October 2009)

Perhaps we should consider the possibility that the personnel making up this ‘expert panel’ may not be wholly impartial, and that their ‘expert pronouncements’ and arguments, although developed at taxpayer’s expense, may be influenced, to some degree, by the specific interests of their clients.

Mr Bowles and Mr Boyd’s assertions, which have been quoted above, unless taken out of context, are incorrect and misleading; they don’t reflect the stability standards that are applied either on current UK fishing vessels or on those built in 1973. The two marine experts also play down the critical importance that an ‘inclining test’ has in determining a vessel’s stability.
Their implication that the International Maritime Organization’s mandatory requirements for inclining experiments and stability [1] were developed for purposes other than vessels operating at sea is really quite surprising.

Currently, inclining tests are an essential part of the statutory processes that ensure UK fishing vessels have adequate stability while operating at sea. (ref. Merchant Shipping Notice 1770 – contains mandatory static and dynamical stability criteria for contemporary fishing vessels of a type and size similar to Trident).

It may be useful, perhaps, to provide some clarification on the types of ‘stability’ that have been discussed during this inquiry:

All vessels have an inbuilt or inherent level of stability/resistance to capsize; however, this remains an ‘unknown quantity’ until an inclining test has been carried out. The inclining test enables the weight of the vessel and the position of its centre of gravity to be determined. It is only when these values are known that the elements of a vessel’s static and dynamical stability can be calculated and compared against the standards that are required to ensure safety at sea.

Stability (in ships) - is a measure of a ships ability to return to its upright position after being heeled through some angle to port or to starboard. The tendency of a ship to ‘right itself’ is caused by the horizontal separation of the ships weight and buoyancy forces when it is heeled. The term ‘stability’ has a distinct meaning for commercial seagoing vessels and its values may be calculated accurately for different sailing conditions. The principal stability standards that are applied in the UK today are those laid down by the International Maritime Organization in the form of static and dynamical stability criteria, all of which a vessel must meet before it can put to sea.
While the IMO criteria have been developed from ‘static’ rather than ‘dynamic’ considerations and do not explicitly take ship motions and sea conditions into account, they have been found, after many years of experience and feedback from the world’s seagoing fleets, to provide a base stability standard that will prevent a vessel from capsizing in all but the most severe of weather conditions.

Inclining experiment - An inclining experiment neither measures nor tests a vessel’s stability. The purpose of an inclining experiment is to provide data that will enable a vessel’s displacement (weight) and the position of its centre of gravity to be determined. The inclining test is ‘static’ in nature and must be carried out in flat, calm conditions with the vessel in equilibrium in order to obtain accurate results. The results from an inclining experiment are essential for the accurate determination of a vessel’s stability characteristics.

Static stability (righting moment) – For a ship, the static stability at any given heel angle is the product of the horizontal separation (called GZ) between the vertical lines of action of the ship’s buoyancy force and of its weight multiplied with its displacement (note these two lines of action pass through the ship’s centre of buoyancy and centre of gravity respectively). The value of GZ varies with the angle of heel, and, if this variation is plotted from 0 degrees to (say) 90 degrees, something called a curve of statical stability is obtained.

Dynamical stability – If the area under the curve of statical stability is calculated up to any particular angle or between two inclined angles then this is known as the dynamical stability for the vessel (for the range of inclinations considered). It is a measure of the work required to be done or energy expended when forcing the vessel to heel to that angle.

Dynamic stability – This is a term that currently has different meanings for different people within the maritime industry. Traditionally it has been used instead of the term ‘Dynamical stability’ and additionally it has been used to describe a vessel’s ‘directional stability’ (ref Rawson & Tupper – Basic Ship theory) but, nowadays, more often than not, it is used (or misused) in a generic sense to describe the various properties that a ship may exhibit when in motion in a seaway.
Recently, as a result of concerns on stability fluctuations on large vessels such as Container or passenger ships the IMO has decided to examine ‘Dynamic stability phenomena in waves’ with a view to the eventual development of agreed mandatory criteria. However, this is a complex matter and it will be a number of years before any new stability criteria emerge.

******

It is obvious from the above that there is some scope for confusion between the terms ‘dynamical stability’ and ‘dynamic stability’ and, just as has happened in maritime circles, the Court may also have fallen victim to this misunderstanding.
Perhaps the differences between the two opposing camps and their views on stability could be briefly summarized as follows:

The Counsel for the families would very much like the investigation to focus upon the types of trawler ‘stability’ that can be accurately calculated following an inclining experiment and for which there are International and National standards laid down (criteria for static and dynamical stability) i.e. something which is tangible.

It would appear that Counsel for the other parties (including the Advocate General) might prefer the investigation to consider ‘dynamic stability’, for which no industry standards have been yet agreed either Internationally or Nationally and which has different meanings for different people: i.e. something which, at this moment in time, is not tangible.

In its latest revision to the International Code on Intact Stability, 2008 the International Maritime Organisation had this to say regarding the stability of ships in a seaway:

“The safety of a ship in a seaway involves complex hydrodynamic phenomena which up to now have not been fully investigated and understood. Motion of ships in a seaway should be treated as a dynamical system and relationships between ship and environmental conditions like wave and wind excitations are recognized as extremely important elements. Based on hydrodynamic aspects and stability analysis of a ship in a seaway, stability criteria development poses complex problems that require further research.”

It is suggested that while ‘Dynamic Stability’ may currently be of great interest to researchers, designers and operators of large container and cruise vessels, it is inappropriate for this developing field of applied science, on which there is no consensus, to be used as a basis for legal argument in a court of inquiry into the loss of a small trawler.
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[1] IMO - International Code on Intact Stability

Trident Formal Investigation – the wave

2009-11-09T18:55:00.013Z

On reading the latest press reports about the FV Trident formal investigation, we couldn’t help noticing how keen our government is to establish a new set of ‘prevailing weather conditions’ for the time when the fishing vessel was lost, a manoeuvre which, we understand, is being opposed by the relatives of the seven crew members who died in the tragedy.

At the heart of the matter appears to be the government’s desire to avoid any criticism [1] emerging from the current proceedings and the fact that it would be much more ‘convenient’ for them if the loss of the Trident could be put down to an act of God rather than to deficiencies in the transverse stability of the vessel.

Unfortunately for the Government, the weather conditions that were officially recorded and witnessed at the time of the vessel’s loss were unexceptional (no worse than Beaufort 5 to 6, wind from a NNE direction with a fairly rough sea) so, conjuring up a wave that is big enough to capsize an 85 ft fishing trawler from such weather conditions must be a very difficult task.

Since the wreck was discovered in 2001, there have been two official underwater surveys as well as a series of model tests, which were carried out under official supervision, in Holland [2].

Surprisingly, the results from the underwater surveys and model tests have not, as yet, been publicised, but we can guess that they will form the centrepiece of the present inquiry and show the possibility of the Trident capsizing, but only in confused sea conditions with occasional ‘big’ waves - conditions just like those that the inquiry’s official experts are now trying to convince us were in play at the time of the loss.

Subsequently, we suspect, the inquiry will be told by other leading experts that the Trident exhibited poor sea-keeping characteristics in their revised weather conditions and that it was “poor sea-keeping” in conjunction with a ‘big’ wave that ultimately led to her loss. The real factors regarding the vessels probable stability deficiencies will be thus minimised or disregarded.

At this moment in time, however, the above is mere speculation. We would like to hope that, ultimately, the truth could still emerge from the proceedings that are now taking place in Aberdeen.
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[1] At the time the vessel was constructed (1973) the Whitefish Authority was meant to perform a supervisory/monitoring role to ensure that the stability of any fishing vessel, funded with State aid, met certain minimum standards.

[2] This is not the first time that model tests and research have been carried out into the Trident’s loss by the UK Government. In the late 70’s, model tests were carried out on the Trident and a similar sized trawler to compare their resistance to capsize. The Trident was found to be inferior to the second vessel, and capsized when it was made to perform circular manoeuvres in ‘breaking waves’ (note while these test conditions may be deemed ‘unrealistic’ they were found to be necessary for the model to capsize) What is significant however, is that during subsequent model tests it was found that, if the stability of the Trident model was increased slightly, it no longer capsized. (Ref: ‘Capsizing of Small Trawlers’ paper by A Morrall read at RINA meeting in Glasgow on 20 February 1979.)

Truth matters

2009-11-03T11:58:00.005Z

Our wellbeing is not dependant on convenient lies, but on the acceptance of true facts.

Truth alone can provide us with an accurate account of the real world, to which we must adapt our actions in order to survive.

The lack of accurate information arrests human progress: it restrains us from researching and acquiring knowledge, it prevents us from discovering what went wrong with our actions and from making good what our ignorance has wrecked.

“The most irreducibly bad thing about lies is that they contrive to interfere with, and to impair our natural effort to apprehend the real state of affairs. They are designed to prevent us from being in touch with what is really going on. […] Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality. […] In telling his lie, the liar tries to mislead us into believing that the facts are other than they actually are. He tries to impose his will on us. He aims at inducing us to accept his fabrication as an accurate account of how the world truly is” (H.G. Frankfurt, On truth)

FV Trident Inquiry and the confused sea state

2009-10-31T19:49:00.016Z

If what the newspapers report is correct [1], then it looks like the Trident formal investigation is now developing into an open fight between the Government, with their desire to rewrite history, on one side, and the victims' families, who want and have the right to learn the truth about how their loved ones were lost, on the other.

In the latest twist to this public inquiry, one of the government’s paid experts, Mr Stephen Barstow, senior project scientist with Fugro Oceanor, has now put forward the official line, stating that the Trident was lost following a bad storm with gale-force seven or eight winds and 15-16ft waves.
He said that “in a lengthy storm a big wave, measuring about 27ft, was likely to roll across the ocean as well” and added that the Trident would have been ploughing through a “confused sea state” with “individual waves coming from different directions all the time”.
“The inquiry also heard that the crew of the Faithful II, a fishing boat not far behind the Trident when disaster struck, recorded bad weather and eased back on their engines.” (The Press and Journal article, 30October 2009)

While this makes for exciting reading, we prefer the official view from the first public inquiry (held in 1975 when people's recollections were fresher), which, we feel, may be a closer approximation of the truth than the one being constructed today, 35 years after the event.

With regards to the weather conditions on the day of the tragedy, the report of the 1975 inquiry mentioned that “at that time the weather was dull, with fine drizzle; wind NNE force 5 to 6; sea from NNE, fairly rough; tide ebbing northwards.”

Surely Mr Barstow, being an expert on weather, must have realised that the word ‘storm’ is a term that has a distinct meaning on the Beaufort Scale (LINK), equating to force 10 wind conditions, and that a ‘bad storm’ is usually understood to be something approaching force 11, which is just one step down from a hurricane!

We are also interested to know whether those on the Faithful II did, in fact, record bad weather and, as a result, ease back on their engines, as the current inquiry contends, or whether they described conditions as “giving no cause for concern” and “heave to with engines stopped […] without trouble or anxiety” as mentioned in the report of the 1975 inquiry (see extract below).

Earlier in the week, we had heard that another of the government’s experts, Mr Graeme Bowles, a Master Mariner, held the erroneous view that an inclining test on the Trident would not have correctly assessed her stability when at sea, and that “a dynamic stability test was usually done to check this” (LINK). Mr Bowles, it would appear, is not aware of past and current stability assessment procedures on UK fishing vessels and of the fact that, at present, safety regulations with regard to ship stability are based almost exclusively on data derived from inclining tests.

We have also read, in a previous newspaper article, that Ms Ailsa Wilson, counsel for the Advocate General, warned the victims' families that they might have to face an "inconvenient truth". Strangely, in today’s Britain, the “truth” appears to inconvenience the public more often than it does the government. Something must have gone wrong with this “truth” or with our ways of searching for it.
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[1] As yet there has been no official information released concerning the evidence that is being presented in this public inquiry.