Risks to ill passengers not just a ferry tale, woman says
Katherine Walters of Bell Island has taken to posting videos on Facebook to express her displeasure with a policy that requires “medically fragile passengers” to leave their vehicles for the 20-minute ferry ride across the Tickle between the Conception Bay island and Portugal Cove.
Walters underwent double-by-pass surgery about a month ago and recently was back in hospital after suffering a pulmonary embolism (blockage of a major blood vessel in the lung, usually by a blood clot). After being discharged from hospital, and waiting in the lineup to board the ferry at Portugal Cove to head home to Bell Island, she made a video expressing her anxiety of having to get out of her car in her weakened physical condition and compromised immune system.
Walters said she attempted to get an ambulance to take her home — patients remain in the ambulance while on the ferry — but it was deemed she didn’t need one.
“When my car rolls onto the boat now, I’m expected to get out of my car, make my way to the elevator, and go up to the passenger lounge,” Walters says in the video, with sometimes laboured breathing.
She said part of the reason for sharing the video is because there are “a lot more like me on Bell Island, medically fragile people going back and forth. We are expected to adhere to the same sets of rules as ablebodied people. We go up and sit in dirty lounges, touch surfaces full of germs because of kids running around, no hand sanitizers available, no crew members assigned to where we are, no designated area just for us.
“The last thing I, or other ill people, need is to catch the influenza.”
Social media is often used by Bell Island residents upset with the policy that passengers have to leave their vehicles for the 20-minute crossing, something they never had to do until the policy was enforced by the provincial government after two new ferries — the MV Legionnaire and the MV Veteran — came into the provincial ferry service last year.
The policy is provincewide, not just on the Bell Island run.
The Department of Transportation and Works has stated that an independent risk assessment conducted by Lloyds Registry recommended the department continue to require ferry passengers to vacate their vehicles while travelling on the ferries. The assessment concluded there are safety risks associated with passengers staying in their vehicles during trips, such as scenarios involving vehicle fires and power failures, and emergencies requiring passengers to evacuate the vessel.
Most Bell Islanders are opposed to the new policy.
The town council has complained to the government, and the Bell Island Ferry Users Committee has fired off emails to everyone from the provincial and federal human rights commissions to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to try to get the policy changed.
The committee says the policy most negatively affects the elderly and those with disabilities and medical conditions.
“My question to everybody is, if this was a rule change designed to make things safer, somebody explain to me how I’m safer with all this extra beating around and exposure to germs than staying in my own car,” Walters said.
“It’s a 20-minute crossing on an open boat deck. I don’t understand what the problem is. If this has to do with insurance for the vessels, since when is it ethical to download the risk associated with this sort of measure to the most medically fragile passengers. There is something seriously wrong with this picture and I for one am fed up with it. I will be doing one of these videos every time I cross. It’s time for people who make these decisions to have to come and face people like me who are back and forth four or five times a week.”