The former City of Seattle Fireboat Alki was sold at auction this past week for the bargain-basement price of $71,100, pending a closure process that will include verification of the buyer’s ability to safely moor and insure the 127 foot, 86-year old steel vessel.
That latter portion of the process is a laudable one, and it is being mentioned prominently in the wake of reports indicating that the Port of Seattle sold the derelict vessel Deep Sea without such precautions, leading to environmental and financial disasters for shellfish farmers in Penn Cove last year when that vessel burned and sank there. A number of other problematic derelicts wound up in the hands of their current owners through similarly lax process, and the city is no doubt working hard to avoid the Alki becoming a similar story years down the road.
In that effort, they are already ahead of the game, because Alki is a working vessel that has been maintained by firefighters whose lives depended on her and whose resources were backed by city coffers. Most other big, old boats that port agencies find themselves auctioning off are well-past the end of their working lives, and have already suffered years of neglect before being sold. The buyers have big dreams, but rarely the big money required to refurbish the boats to match.
But despite the precautions, it’s all too easy for big, old boats to spiral past the point of easy restoration, despite the best efforts of owners and crew alike.
This was driven home dramatically, and tragically, by the recent sinking of the HMS Bounty during Hurricane Sandy in the North Atlantic. If there is nothing else to know about nautical misadventure, it is that there is always more to the story; on this story, no one has done more to uncover the rest than Mario Vittone, in a series of excellent articles on gcaptain.com covering the Coast Guard hearings on the disaster.
There is much to critique in the Bounty case that has little to do with her being old, or wooden, or poorly maintained. But it is clear that those factors were ultimately important ones in her foundering, and Vittone details testimony that is fascinating and informative in tracking the progression of decisions that led officers and crew to take to sea in a vessel that was barely hanging together in the first place.
It’s a familiar pattern in the history of disasters, described succinctly by Richard Feinman in the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident as “…gradually decreasing strictness.”
The paragraph that line is from is worth quoting at length:
The argument that the same risk was flown before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to delay a flight because of their continued presence.
For “flight” you can read “voyage” and find that the same factor is inextricably involved in disaster after disaster at sea. It’s a very human failing; we’re mostly optimists from birth, trying new things, and assuming, often reasonably, that if we’ve done it before successfully, then it is probably safe to do it again. In fact, as sailors, we often speak positively of this experience; we call it “gaining confidence in ourselves and our boats.”
But sometimes that confidence is mis-placed, and the trick is in knowing when you were well-prepared and well-equipped, and when you simply got lucky.
And the complication with old boats is that the circumstances of operation often devolve into a series of trade-offs, which you can get lucky with for a long time without fully realizing that it is just luck. The vessels cost so much to maintain and berth and insure that, for most owners, it is impossible to cover without operating them in some capacity to make money. In making their best efforts to earn more money to provide for a better maintained vessel, they are getting on a treadmill that will have no graceful exit for most of them. Even when they start out with the resources to moor and insure and maintain the boat, as the Alki’s buyer must, there is no guarantee that they will continue to have enough to keep it up, as expenses mount and funds dwindle.
The reality may be that there is only an ecosystem to fund a small percentage of all the surviving big old boats that are out there to the highest standards. The rest will scrape by, making difficult decisions about the distribution of limited funds between a wide variety of safety-related necessities, and hoping that somehow they will be the ones to raise enough money, have a big enough profile, to restore themselves to that pinnacle of seaworthiness. The choices that are made may be life or death, but they are not between life or death. They are between one dangerous possibility and another. If one comes to pass and the other does not, they will either look brilliant, or fatally misguided.
The fact that these boats are coming up for auction and selling for such low prices in the first place points to the problem. It’s easy to arm-chair quarterback these situations and say that owners should either maintain the vessels to a standard or get rid of them. But the fact is that there probably isn’t anyone else with the resources to buy most of them and the scrap value is negative. If government agencies can’t afford to break them up, then it is far, far beyond the capacity of most private owners. They’ve already spent all their money trying to avoid the scrapyard; by the time it gets to that point, it costs more to get rid of the boat than it does to just let it sit. At which point, almost inevitably, it will go on the auction block again, or end up in the headlines as another disaster.
Perhaps illustrating the difficulties faced by the new owner of the Alki is her older sister, and predecessor into retirement, the Duwamish. Moored today more or less permanently adjacent to the Museum of History and Industry on South Lake Union, the Duwamish has struggled since her own retirement in 1985 to attract the money and volunteers required to keep a big old boat seaworthy. Duwamish was a steal compared to Alki; the current owners, the Puget Sound Fireboat Association, picked her up from the city for a dollar in 1994. Yet, at the time, the prospects looked good for the old workhorse. The foundation had active volunteers, a fundraising effort, and a working fireboat to attract more interest.
As recently as 2006, complete cost to refurbish her was estimated at $3 million. For a few years, and with tens of thousands of dollars invested in her, Duwamish continued to make the rounds in central Puget Sound, amazing viewers with astounding water shows and the sheer brute pumping power that was unequaled by any modern vessel until 2003.
But despite the time, dedication, and efforts of the members of the Foundation, Duwamish has gradually continued to deteriorate, following the same unhappy path as most big old boats. If one magnificent old fireboat could not find enough funding for here for restoration, can two? There are few more dedicated volunteers than those keeping the Duwamish afloat today, and their efforts to raise funding have been heroic, but their situation now is illustrative of the general plight of big old boats… whatever they have put into her over the years, it will likely cost more to fully restore her now than it would have when they started. The choices aren’t easy.
One hopes for a brighter future for the Duwamish, after the years spent in the desert, just as one hopes the Alki will wind up in good hands and find the means to continue life on the waters of the Pacific Northwest. But the fate of the Bounty, and the Kalakala, and all the other big old boats from our storied past, point to the many whirlpools along that passage. And it takes so long to make that journey that there may be no way for anyone, seller or buyer, to judge how well they will navigate it.