Safety Board collecting information on fishing tragedy.

TSB looking into incident involving Chief William Saulis vessel

When a fishing tragedy happens, those investigating the reason for it gather as many bits of information from all possible sources in the hopes that put together, it can create as large a picture as possible.

“That’s what we’re trying to get as close to as we can,” Transportation Safety Board (TSB) regional senior investigator Shannon Pittman says about the assessment and investigation being carried out following the Dec. 15 mishap involving the Chief William Saulis scallop dragger in the Bay of Fundy.

“People who think they may have the most insignificant piece of information, it may connect to other pieces and pull this all together."

Investigators from the TSB were deployed to the region last week, spending many days collecting information.

“We like to talk to as many people as we can that can tell us about two things. One, being about the vessel itself. And the second part, the operations and the events that may have happened,” Pittman explains.

“We want to talk to the company that owns the vessel and anyone who may have worked on that vessel prior to this trip,” he says, adding another key source of information is talking to other vessels that were on the water when the incident occurred, to get a sense of the weather and sea conditions. Any communication or interactions people had with the scallop dragger is also important.

“It’s a very tight-knit community, the fishing community. They talk amongst themselves quite a bit. There’s a lot of information there with people who have spoken to them, whether it be the day before or the day of,” Pittman says.

There were six fishermen on board the Chief William Saulis – Capt. Charles Roberts and crewmembers Aaron Cogswell, Michael Drake, Dan Forbes, Geno Francis, and Leonard Gabriel. The vessel was heading back to the wharf in Digby to unload and shuck its scallop catch after several days of fishing but never made it. The vessel’s owner, Yarmouth Sea Products, has said the boat’s black box indicated it had left the fishing grounds for Digby at about 1 a.m. The company says the system indicates the vessel continued steaming toward Digby, but that the signal stopped around 6 a.m.

That’s about the same time the company says there was an automatic activation of the EPIRB (emergency position locator) from the vessel.

Pittman says as part of its TSB probe they will review records of the vessel, maintenance inspections, etc., to determine if there were any inherent problems with the vessel.

Yarmouth Sea Products has said its own internal investigation has confirmed all the statutory obligations for the maintenance and certification of the safety equipment on the vessel were up to date and valid at the time of the incident. The 50-foot, 56.22 gross ton fibreglass vessel was built in 2004.

It obviously does complicate the investigation in that there is no vessel to inspect following the incident, but this is the case more often than not.

“Sadly, it happens with marine accidents an awful lot, where we don’t have the vessel,” Pittman says. “It’s different because you don’t have the evidence to see if there was a failure or examine the structure.”

So, he says, the TSB must go about things differently.

However, even when they do have a vessel, it doesn’t mean answers are forthright either.

“That is completely true,” Pittman says. “We have occasions where we have the vessel and it does not create a crystal-clear picture.”

Asked if the type of debris that washes up on shore will help in the investigation, again, Pittman says, it can be useful.

“Just like with the little bits of information we gather, every bit of debris seems to add a little more information."

A body of one of the fishermen was recovered the evening of Dec. 15. In a Dec. 21 update about the search for the remaining missing fishermen, the RCMP said RCMP Air Services did an aerial search of approximately 100 kilometres of coastline between Digby Gut and Harbourville via helicopter the day before. That search had not located the missing fishermen or new debris.

The RCMP said the air search had been suspended for the day on Dec. 21 due to helicopter unavailability.

On Dec. 19, the RCMP said debris unrelated to the air search was located on shore. That debris had not yet been confirmed to be associated to the Chief William Saulis. The RCMP has been working with the Transportation Safety Board to determine if the debris is related.

“It should be noted that materials routinely wash up and litter the shoreline making the task of determining fresh debris difficult,” the RCMP said.

Meanwhile, asked what the end goal is of the TSB investigative effort that is underway, Pittman says that’s not yet been determined.

“We collect as much information as we can to determine the best way forward with the information that is available," he says.

“What we are going to look for is our ability to identify any safety deficiencies that may have caused this and to communicate them publicly so we can make changes in the industry to prevent this from happening again,” he says. “If we collect information and there are no obvious safety deficiencies, there may not be a report. Or in cases where there is very little information and we don’t have enough detail to make those determinations, there may not be a full investigation. We’re very much in the assessment phase at this point – trying to make that determination as to how to move forward.”