SEATTLE — State officials pulled Washington’s oldest ferries from service Nov. 20 not only because of safety concerns, but also out of worry that the Coast Guard would take that step first if one more problem surfaced in the 80-year-old hulls.
E-mails, memos and other communication among Washington State Ferries staff late last year provide glimpses into how the agency wrestled with mounting questions about the safety of the 1927-vintage Steel Electric-class ferries.
A recurring theme in the documents, recently released under public records laws, is the pressure faced by ferry officials due to stepped up Coast Guard scrutiny.
That same level of Coast Guard review is now being applied to the rest of the state’s ferry fleet.
Officials last week warned ferry users to expect continuing travel headaches as nine boats, roughly half of the remaining fleet, are squeezed into limited dry docks for mandatory inspections or repairs before the end of spring.
“I think there will be disruption around the system,” state Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond said, adding she hopes to provide passengers with more notice of challenges than has been the case in recent months.
The state has been running fewer ferries since Hammond ordered the Steel Electrics out of service on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday rush. Crews scraping paint found extensive pitting along 1927-vintage riveted plates deep in the hull of the Quinault. Similar problems were suspected in the ferry’s sister vessels, the Klickitat, Illahee and Nisqually.
Close inspections ultimately determined nearly half of the Quinault’s hull was too corroded or cracked for continued use. The state opted to abandon all the Steel Electrics before completing the same costly dry dock examinations on the other three boats.
Gov. Chris Gregoire on Dec. 13 announced that instead of spending millions of dollars attempting to keep the Steel Electrics seaworthy, the state should instead focus on trying to build replacement ferries sized to serve narrow and shallow Keystone Harbor on Whidbey Island.
She’s asked the Legislature this session to approve a $100 million plan to build three new boats.
Some within the ferry fleet have questioned the decision to abandon the Steel Electrics.
Among the most vocal has been Karl Jacobsen, staff chief engineer on the Klickitat for nearly two decades.
Although Jacobsen declined to be interviewed for this story, he’s spoken up in public meetings and sent e-mails pointing to the hardship that tying up the Klickitat has created by closing down car ferry service between Whidbey Island and Port Townsend.
Within days of Hammond’s decision, Jacobsen wrote Paul Brodeur, director of vessel maintenance and preservation for the ferry system. The Coast Guard had repeatedly deemed the Klickitat safe, he pointed out.
“In light of recent inspections completed on the Klickitat it is very hard to put much credibility in the statements the ferry system and the Department of Transportation are making regarding the removal of the Klickitat from service because of safety concerns for the public,” Jacobsen wrote.
In a Nov. 23 e-mail, Brodeur praised Jacobsen’s advocacy for his ferry but also defended Hammond’s actions as logical and prudent given the problems found on the Quinault and the Coast Guard’s scrutiny.
“Due to the attention of this issue at the highest levels in their organization, they have been extremely conservative in their requirements with all the steel electric (sic) decisions,” Brodeur wrote.
“The distinct possibility existed that the very next incident on any of the steels would have had the (Coast Guard) making the decision for us to remove them from service.”
A senior port engineer in charge of vessel preservation for the ferry system, Tim Browning, also shared with engineers an e-mail sent by a Coast Guard inspector a few hours before Hammond announced she was tying up the ferries.
“With the conditions noted on the Quinault we have real concerns with the continued operation of these boats without something definitive on their condition,” Coast Guard inspector Larry Thompson wrote.
He noted that generally favorable hull surveys of the Steel Electrics a few weeks earlier “sure missed a lot on the Quinault so we are not real comfortable at this point.”
The Coast Guard was concerned about the Steel Electrics in late November, but wasn’t ready to pull the boats immediately, Lt. Cmdr. Todd Howard, chief of vessel inspections for the Coast Guard in Seattle, said last week.
That was something state officials decided on their own after weighing the costs of repairs and expected regulatory hurdles, he said.
Washington has the largest ferry fleet in the nation.
It should be no surprise that as problems emerged with the state’s oldest boats “we were briefing the admirals all the way to Coast Guard headquarters,” Howard said.
The Coast Guard was getting questions, too.
In August, Admiral Thad W. Allen, Coast Guard commandant, was questioned about the Steel Electrics during a Congressional subcommittee hearing. The inquiry focused on his agency’s ability to enforce maritime safety rules while shouldering expanded patrols and other homeland security duties.
Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, said some on the committee had distributed a memo suggesting hull problems on the Steel Electrics raised questions about the Coast Guard’s program. Larsen testified he believed problems with Washington State Ferries are more complex, and more local, than the Coast Guard’s abilities.
In an interview last week, Larsen said he’s regularly asked questions about ferries and is convinced the Coast Guard has been a consistent force in pushing for improvements.
The Steel Electrics clearly needed to go, he added.
“I think Gov. Gregoire made a swift and strong decision once she had the necessary information,” he said. “The only thing leaking faster than the Steel Electric ferries was money from the budget to fix them.”
Up until recently, the Steel Electrics were the oldest ferries operating on salt water in the nation. Hammond said she knows they had a dedicated following inside and outside the ferry system.
“There are people who wanted these boats to never die,” she said.
Documents show that ferry officials didn’t easily give up on the old ferries.
As late as Nov. 29, the ferry system was preparing draft budget requests that would have poured nearly $13 million into identifying and repairing all problems on the Quinault and Illahee.
The idea was to repair the ferries sufficiently to keep them in service for a few more years while replacements could be built.
State lawmakers urged Hammond to abandon the concept.
Ferry system documents make clear that state officials moved quickly, and with candor, once the full extent of problems on the Quinault were understood.
On Oct. 30, ferry leaders had told the Legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee that hull surveys of the Steel Electrics showed they were in good condition. While ferry officials later admitted they’d not shared all details about the hull defects that were found, their presentation tracked closely with what they told the Coast Guard in mid-October, documents show.
By Nov. 1, however, e-mails show crews on the Quinault started reporting areas of significant corrosion.
The problems were in places not examined during earlier surveys because of inaccessibility, or thick hull coating intended to preserve the underlying steel.
Ferry officials initially expected repairs to the damaged areas would create minor delays.
Ironically, at one point they projected the Quinault’s “splash date” from dry dock would be Nov. 20, the day Hammond later pulled the boats from service.
As time passed, messages among ferry staff and state officials increasingly focused on rising repair costs. A new hull survey documented extensive areas of corroded steel along the Quinault’s keel.
Hammond had all that information, as did the Coast Guard, the day she made her decision to pull the Steel Electrics from service, said Marta Coursey, communications director for the ferry system.
One difficulty was that details about problems on the Steel Electrics arrived piecemeal, making it tough to respond, said Steve Reinmuth, chief of staff at the state transportation department and acting director of Washington State Ferries.
“Everyone in Washington who rides a ferry, or helps maintain or preserve a ferry, or runs a ferry system, knew that 80-year-old boats had maintenance needs. The starkness of it, and the safety impacts” were only clear in the end, he said.
Howard said that problems found first on the Steel Electrics, and now on other boats in the ferry fleet, are behind the Coast Guard’s stepped up demands for repairs and inspections.
“It is a cumulative effect,” he said.
The good news, he said, is that repairs likely will be successful.
“I have no doubt that they can fix those boats, any of those boats,” Howard said.
Reporter Scott North: 425-339-3431 or north@heraldnet.com.
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