Weighty Matters

During the past 40 years, the Department for Transport (DfT) has gained a wealth of experience in the art of data manipulation and disinformation when conducting official investigations into fishing vessel casualties, especially those in which dubious stability was thought to be a factor in their loss. This expertise is currently being used quite blatantly by the DfT (via MAIB) to both cover their own backs and safeguard the interests of their many business ‘clients’.

Generally, the DfT only feels threatened when it has made a mistake - when there is something it did not do, that it should have done or it did something that it should not have done - and lives were subsequently lost at sea.

In the case of the FV Gaul, the DfT approved her stability (see copy of the stability certificate below), for unlimited operation at sea, just 14 month’s before the trawler capsized and sank (in February 1974), with the loss of 36 lives.

Following the loss of the Gaul, the official investigation, led by the DfT, was quick to put on record that the Gaul had met the IMCO minimum stability standards for deep-sea trawlers “with a substantial margin”. 

In our posts of 1 January 2010 [LINK] and 8 February 2010 [LINK] we were able to point out that this official statement was, in fact, incorrect and we gave details of the Gaul’s ‘arrival in Port’ and preceding sailing conditions where the IMCO minimum stability standards were not and could not be met. 

Trident 
 

In our post of 4 August 2010 [LINK] we also described how the stability records for the calculated lightship and sailing conditions of the Trident, which capsized and sank in 1974, with the loss of 7 lives, were callously modified by the Trident RFI experts (hired and paid for by the DfT) to give credence to the “official” view that, at the time of her loss, the Trident substantially met the IMCO stability standards of the day – an official requirement for grant-aided fishing vessel purchases in the early 1970s. 

We also noted in our posts of 28th February [LINK] and 27th April 2011 [LINK] that considerable sums of money had been squandered on worthless model tests, which were deliberately fed with doctored data, to give the results that our officials desired [1]. 

This blatant deception was only attempted because, contrary to official policies, the Trident’s lightship particulars (and stability reserves) had not been accurately established and verified [2] at the time that she was built. 

Gaul 

The Gaul’s lightship particulars (and stability reserves) were also left unverified when she was built [3], the data used being merely a copy of those derived from the inclining experiment, held in February 1972, on the Ranger Calliope (subsequently re-named Arab).

Testimony by Mr M. Scott (DfT surveyor) - 1974 Formal investigation into the loss of the Gaul - Day 12 page 27 : 

Surprisingly, if you check out the lightweight figures in the footnote below [4] you can see that an additional 11 tons of solid ballast has somehow managed to make its way into the calculations of the DfT, the shipyard and the Owner’s Consultants. When their investigations into Gaul’s stability were put in hand for the 1974 inquiry, it became an integral, unspecified part of the Gaul’s lightship weight. 

This 11 tons of notional ballast was useful in subsequent calculations in that it lowered the Gaul’s vertical centre of gravity (by 180 mm) - and would therefore be readily adopted by those who did not wish the tag of ‘deficient stability’ to be linked to the Gaul’s loss. Nonetheless, at the original FI hearings, the Builders, Brooke Marine, the Owner’s consultants, Y-ard and the DfT all managed to imply that solid ballast was not necessary on the Gaul to meet the IMCO minimum stability requirements (see below):

Mr M. Scott (DfT) - transcripts day 12 page 45 

Mr G. Donaldson (Brooke Marine) transcripts day 9 page 67

 

Mr A. Gilfillan (Y-ard) transcripts day 11 page 43 – in proposing improvements for Gaul’s 3 remaining sister vessels: 

This notional ballast was also an integral but invisible part of the Gaul’s lightship weight during the subsequent lengthy and expensive testing carried out by Morral in the late 1970s at the National Maritime Institute. This was another instance in which taxpayer’s money was spent on extensive model testing, but in which the basic data was skewed, to give the results that our officials desired. 

If we exclude this 11 tons of phantom ballast (it was not present on the Gaul) from the Gaul’s lightship and then check out her reserves of stability, we can see that this was degraded to the point where she did not meet the IMCO minimum stability criteria on arrival at distant fishing grounds. Furthermore, if she then did not proceed to promptly fill her fish hold with a significant catch of fish, she would be unable to meet the IMCO minimum stability standard throughout the rest of her voyage!

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[1] In 2005 the DfT also deliberately destroyed a number of folders of evidence and video that was unfavourable to their desired outcome.

[2] Neither an inclining experiment nor lightship check was carried out on the Trident. 

[3] The Gaul’s lightship data (displacement & vertical and longitudinal centres of gravity) were not obtained from a unique inclining experiment; they were copied instead from an inclining experiment held on the Ranger Calliope (a sister to the Gaul) on 1 February 1972; however, a simple lightweight check, to verify the integrity of the copied data, was not carried out on the Gaul. 

[4] Lightship data obtained from the inclining test on the Ranger Calliope: 

Displacement = 1099.63 tons, 

Vertical centre of gravity = 20.2 ft above base 

Longitudinal centre of gravity = 9.46 ft aft Midships 

Gaul Lightship data - used for all official stability investigations: 

Displacement = 1110.6 tons, 

Vertical centre of gravity = 20.02 ft above base 

Longitudinal centre of gravity = 9.99 ft aft Midships

Sufficient for the DfT

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)

FV Trident Formal Investigation – the distance from reality

“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)