Post by tyty on Mar 23, 2006 9:53:07 GMT -8
PRINCE RUPERT (CP) -- Passengers on an overnight B.C. ferry were torn from their sleep Wednesday morning and thrown into a living nightmare, evacuating onto lifeboats that tossed and swayed on stormy seas for more than an hour as the Queen of the North disappeared "like the Titanic."
Ninety-nine passengers and crew were accounted for, saved by the efficiency of coast guard rescuers and the reckless heroics of a local aboriginal band. But B.C. Ferries was unable to find two passengers. George Foisy of Terrace, B.C., said his brother Gerald Foisy and Gerald's common-law wife Shirley Rosette remain unaccounted for.
Ferry officials insist everyone got off the ship and speculate Foisy and Rosette returned to Prince Rupert from Hartley Bay on their own, although the village is inaccessible except by air and boat.
George Foisy said the passenger head count at Hartley Bay numbered 63 - two short - despite a fellow traveller's initial claim he saw the middle-aged couple in the village.
"He thought he got a glimpse of them and just thought 'Wow, they're OK,' " said Foisy, who saw the couple board the ferry for their holiday trip south. "Now he's not so sure."
Ferries handed the file over to the RCMP as a missing persons case, saying Gerald Foisy and Shirley Rosette may have attempted to find their own way back to Prince Rupert from the remote aboriginal community of Hartley Bay.
It was an even stranger twist in a day that began for those aboard with a crashing noise, then another, then sirens.
"Within an hour, the ship actually tilted to the side, levelled out and it sunk down to the sixth deck, came back up like the Titanic, dipped and then it went under," said passenger Lawrence Papineau.
Another passenger reported the ship split in half.
Douglas Rice of London was dozing in his cabin aboard the B.C. ferry Queen of the North when it plowed into a rock about 90 kilometres south of here.
"We heard the alarm go off and then we were all just sort of pulled out of the cabins," said Rice.
The retired Financial Times journalist and his wife Sylvia, vacationing in Canada before visiting their son in San Francisco, were about four hours into the 15-hour overnight from here to Port Hardy on the northern tip of Vancouver Island.
The ship, carrying about 100 passengers and crew, had torn across the submerged edge of an outcrop off Gil Island.
Jolted awake, the Rices obeyed the crew's orders, throwing topcoats over their pyjamas and following directions to the lifeboat station.
"They were all very, very good," said Rice, 74. "They were on the ball. We were looking around for things to take and they said 'No, you can't take anything.'
"We were given lifejackets and they directed us to the side of the ship."
Barney Dudoward didn't wait for instructions. The 62-year-old fisherman from Bella Bella, on the northern B.C. coast, knew something was wrong.
"I don't know what happened," said Dudoward. "I was laying in my bed . . . and I heard this crunching.
"I ran outside and we were listing over. I couldn't believe it was happening in this day and age in British Columbia . . .I was thinking about the Poseidon Adventure. I wanted to get out of there."
While the Rices were being helped into a large life raft, Dudoward found himself alone initially on the lifeboat deck but B.C. Ferries crew members quickly hoisted a boat over the side.
"Everything went smooth," he said. "It stopped alongside the deck and we just walked into it and they lowered everybody down."
Although they were working in choppy seas and dealing with rain mixed with snow, the Queen's crew had only a relative handful of passengers to deal with.
But for those who clambered off the listing ship just after midnight Wednesday, their ordeal was far from over.
The Rices shared their partly enclosed raft with about 20 other people, the little boat commanded by a female ferry crew member.
"It was fairly rough, the sea, but the worst part was the rain," said Douglas Rice. "There was quite heavy rain, although we were covered in to a certain extent."
Dudoward got a good look at the ferry as his lifeboat pulled away from the stricken vessel but there was nothing to hint it might go down.
As he watched, though, the Queen began to slip away.
"It sat on the rock and went down by the stern slowly for about an hour," said the fisherman. "Then all of a sudden she slipped off, the bow went straight up and down she went."
Sylvia Rice saw it go too.
"It just upended and went down, just went, the lights still on and it went down," she said.
But the survivors were no longer alone on the sea.
Little boats from the First Nations village of Hartley Bay, up a small nearby inlet, were racing to the wreck site.
The community of 200 maintains a 24-hour radio watch and activated its first responders' plan after alerting the coast guard to the ferry's distress call.
The Rices were picked up after bobbing in their raft for about 45 minutes, "wondering if we were going to sink," said Douglas Rice. "It was very, very wobbly and it was very dark, of course."
A vacationing flight attendant from Qantas Airways who happened to be on the ferry helped keep people calm, he said.
The elderly couple was among the first rescued by Hartley Bay fisherman Eddie Richardson, partly out of concern for Douglas Rice's health. He'd been forced to leave his blood-pressure medicine on board the ship.
Along with the other survivors, they were taken to the village about an hour away. It was alive with residents prepared to receive them.
"Everybody pitched in," said Dudoward. "They gave us blankets and food, coffee, anything you wanted it was there. You could phone home right away."
The Rices telephoned their daughter in Britain, who in turn notified their son in California.
The couple, wearing borrowed clothes to replace their pyjamas, were among 11 people brought to Prince Rupert by helicopter to treat some minor injuries.
Doctors at the regional hospital checked Douglas Rice and replaced his meds.
"We have nothing, no money, no passports, no travel documents, no travel insurance documents, at all," said Sylvia Rice.
Dudoward joined the remaining passengers and crew who travelled back to Prince Rupert aboard the coast guard vessel Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
They stepped onto the dock late Wednesday afternoon, about 16 hours after their ordeal began, as eagles soared overhead.
Most said little except to praise the ferry's crew and the people of Hartley Bay.
"Everybody in Hartley Bay was involved in this one, literally everybody from small children to the elders, including some elders that couldn't even walk," said Ernie Westgarth, housing co-ordinator for the village.
"To see all these people coming off the rescue boats onto the docks was a sight in itself - the young and old, the scared, shocked look on their faces, young children with no shoes."
James Bolton had been getting ready for a game of poker when his group got a call from a friend at 1 a.m.
The gillnetter took to his boat and helped pull 13 people off the lifeboats.
He saw the ship go down, watching the massive vessel bend as it headed deep.
"The lights were still on until about halfway down. It sort of popped back up and then went straight down."
Another rescuer said he heard the 16 vehicles inside the ferry crash together like roughly handled toys.
Westgarth said the entire Hartley Bay community of 200 helped to give the passengers hot coffee, tea, pastries and hot chocolate.
"It's got to be said: the people of Hartley Bay are heroes. I've seen them do this before but not on this scale. People (residents) are still walking around in a daze, like tired, they haven't slept at all. They want to make sure everybody is safe and fed."
Douglas Rice, who was taken to hospital by helicopter due to his high blood pressure, said the people in Hartley Bay were tremendous.
As he spoke to a reporter in a Prince Rupert hotel, he shifted in his borrowed clothes. A stranger pressed money into his wife's hand. Someone else had bought them both new underwear.
Health officials in Prince Rupert said 11 people had been treated in hospital for cuts and scrapes.
Suzanne Johnston of the Northern Health Authority said the passengers walked into the hospital on their own, but were obviously stressed.
"Mostly, they just wanted to connect with people."
After daybreak, the rest of the passengers were shepherded onto the Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a coast guard icebreaker. They set sail again to make the three-hour-plus voyage back to Prince Rupert.
It was just over 12 hours after the Queen of the North had left Prince Rupert for its routine 8 p.m. overnight sailing.
By then, there was nothing visible at all of the ship.
Environment officials mobilized a spill response team as an oil slick spread over the water. Life jackets, cafeteria trays and paper floated within it.
The Queen of the North hit a rock just after 12:30 a.m PST off Gil Island in Wright Sound. It sank within an hour.
Hahn said the hit would have had to have been major to sink the ship so quickly, but he wouldn't speculate on the cause of the accident.
"It was clearly off course. There's no other way to look at it. The question is, how did it get to be where it was?"
The captain was not on the bridge at the time, but Hahn would not say who was. B.C. Ferries regulations require the captain have a backup for a the 15 hour voyage.
Investigators from the Transportation Safety Board were expected to arrive in Prince Rupert late Wednesday afternoon.
A "shocked" Premier Gordon Campbell travelled to Prince Rupert and said counsellors will be on hand to help the passengers, as will officials from the Insurance Corp. of B.C., the province's auto insurer.
"It's frightening," said Campbell.
"I've heard this morning that some of the passengers were awakened in their nightgowns and I imagine it's pretty darn scary. . . Thank God that we've got all these people apparently safe (but we have to) recognize that these things last for people for some time."
Although B.C.'s ferries are considered an extension of the province's highways, the death toll on those waterways is significantly less: only four people have died in accidents with the formerly Crown-owned ferry fleet in the last 20 years.
The Queen of the North was sailing south on a 450-kilometre overnight trip from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy along B.C.'s Inside Passage, a strikingly beautiful stretch of coast immortalized in some of Emily Carr's paintings.
Seas were reported to be choppy and winds were blowing at about 75 kilometres an hour.
According to the B.C. Ferries website, the ship was built in Germany in 1969 and refitted in 2001. It can hold up to 700 people and 115 cars.
Campbell said the Transportation Safety Board approved the ferry for use on that route.
Coincidentally, though, the legislature was to consider Wednesday a proposal for funding to replace the three northern ferries. B.C. Ferries has been negotiating the move for two years.
The proposal passed.
Ninety-nine passengers and crew were accounted for, saved by the efficiency of coast guard rescuers and the reckless heroics of a local aboriginal band. But B.C. Ferries was unable to find two passengers. George Foisy of Terrace, B.C., said his brother Gerald Foisy and Gerald's common-law wife Shirley Rosette remain unaccounted for.
Ferry officials insist everyone got off the ship and speculate Foisy and Rosette returned to Prince Rupert from Hartley Bay on their own, although the village is inaccessible except by air and boat.
George Foisy said the passenger head count at Hartley Bay numbered 63 - two short - despite a fellow traveller's initial claim he saw the middle-aged couple in the village.
"He thought he got a glimpse of them and just thought 'Wow, they're OK,' " said Foisy, who saw the couple board the ferry for their holiday trip south. "Now he's not so sure."
Ferries handed the file over to the RCMP as a missing persons case, saying Gerald Foisy and Shirley Rosette may have attempted to find their own way back to Prince Rupert from the remote aboriginal community of Hartley Bay.
It was an even stranger twist in a day that began for those aboard with a crashing noise, then another, then sirens.
"Within an hour, the ship actually tilted to the side, levelled out and it sunk down to the sixth deck, came back up like the Titanic, dipped and then it went under," said passenger Lawrence Papineau.
Another passenger reported the ship split in half.
Douglas Rice of London was dozing in his cabin aboard the B.C. ferry Queen of the North when it plowed into a rock about 90 kilometres south of here.
"We heard the alarm go off and then we were all just sort of pulled out of the cabins," said Rice.
The retired Financial Times journalist and his wife Sylvia, vacationing in Canada before visiting their son in San Francisco, were about four hours into the 15-hour overnight from here to Port Hardy on the northern tip of Vancouver Island.
The ship, carrying about 100 passengers and crew, had torn across the submerged edge of an outcrop off Gil Island.
Jolted awake, the Rices obeyed the crew's orders, throwing topcoats over their pyjamas and following directions to the lifeboat station.
"They were all very, very good," said Rice, 74. "They were on the ball. We were looking around for things to take and they said 'No, you can't take anything.'
"We were given lifejackets and they directed us to the side of the ship."
Barney Dudoward didn't wait for instructions. The 62-year-old fisherman from Bella Bella, on the northern B.C. coast, knew something was wrong.
"I don't know what happened," said Dudoward. "I was laying in my bed . . . and I heard this crunching.
"I ran outside and we were listing over. I couldn't believe it was happening in this day and age in British Columbia . . .I was thinking about the Poseidon Adventure. I wanted to get out of there."
While the Rices were being helped into a large life raft, Dudoward found himself alone initially on the lifeboat deck but B.C. Ferries crew members quickly hoisted a boat over the side.
"Everything went smooth," he said. "It stopped alongside the deck and we just walked into it and they lowered everybody down."
Although they were working in choppy seas and dealing with rain mixed with snow, the Queen's crew had only a relative handful of passengers to deal with.
But for those who clambered off the listing ship just after midnight Wednesday, their ordeal was far from over.
The Rices shared their partly enclosed raft with about 20 other people, the little boat commanded by a female ferry crew member.
"It was fairly rough, the sea, but the worst part was the rain," said Douglas Rice. "There was quite heavy rain, although we were covered in to a certain extent."
Dudoward got a good look at the ferry as his lifeboat pulled away from the stricken vessel but there was nothing to hint it might go down.
As he watched, though, the Queen began to slip away.
"It sat on the rock and went down by the stern slowly for about an hour," said the fisherman. "Then all of a sudden she slipped off, the bow went straight up and down she went."
Sylvia Rice saw it go too.
"It just upended and went down, just went, the lights still on and it went down," she said.
But the survivors were no longer alone on the sea.
Little boats from the First Nations village of Hartley Bay, up a small nearby inlet, were racing to the wreck site.
The community of 200 maintains a 24-hour radio watch and activated its first responders' plan after alerting the coast guard to the ferry's distress call.
The Rices were picked up after bobbing in their raft for about 45 minutes, "wondering if we were going to sink," said Douglas Rice. "It was very, very wobbly and it was very dark, of course."
A vacationing flight attendant from Qantas Airways who happened to be on the ferry helped keep people calm, he said.
The elderly couple was among the first rescued by Hartley Bay fisherman Eddie Richardson, partly out of concern for Douglas Rice's health. He'd been forced to leave his blood-pressure medicine on board the ship.
Along with the other survivors, they were taken to the village about an hour away. It was alive with residents prepared to receive them.
"Everybody pitched in," said Dudoward. "They gave us blankets and food, coffee, anything you wanted it was there. You could phone home right away."
The Rices telephoned their daughter in Britain, who in turn notified their son in California.
The couple, wearing borrowed clothes to replace their pyjamas, were among 11 people brought to Prince Rupert by helicopter to treat some minor injuries.
Doctors at the regional hospital checked Douglas Rice and replaced his meds.
"We have nothing, no money, no passports, no travel documents, no travel insurance documents, at all," said Sylvia Rice.
Dudoward joined the remaining passengers and crew who travelled back to Prince Rupert aboard the coast guard vessel Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
They stepped onto the dock late Wednesday afternoon, about 16 hours after their ordeal began, as eagles soared overhead.
Most said little except to praise the ferry's crew and the people of Hartley Bay.
"Everybody in Hartley Bay was involved in this one, literally everybody from small children to the elders, including some elders that couldn't even walk," said Ernie Westgarth, housing co-ordinator for the village.
"To see all these people coming off the rescue boats onto the docks was a sight in itself - the young and old, the scared, shocked look on their faces, young children with no shoes."
James Bolton had been getting ready for a game of poker when his group got a call from a friend at 1 a.m.
The gillnetter took to his boat and helped pull 13 people off the lifeboats.
He saw the ship go down, watching the massive vessel bend as it headed deep.
"The lights were still on until about halfway down. It sort of popped back up and then went straight down."
Another rescuer said he heard the 16 vehicles inside the ferry crash together like roughly handled toys.
Westgarth said the entire Hartley Bay community of 200 helped to give the passengers hot coffee, tea, pastries and hot chocolate.
"It's got to be said: the people of Hartley Bay are heroes. I've seen them do this before but not on this scale. People (residents) are still walking around in a daze, like tired, they haven't slept at all. They want to make sure everybody is safe and fed."
Douglas Rice, who was taken to hospital by helicopter due to his high blood pressure, said the people in Hartley Bay were tremendous.
As he spoke to a reporter in a Prince Rupert hotel, he shifted in his borrowed clothes. A stranger pressed money into his wife's hand. Someone else had bought them both new underwear.
Health officials in Prince Rupert said 11 people had been treated in hospital for cuts and scrapes.
Suzanne Johnston of the Northern Health Authority said the passengers walked into the hospital on their own, but were obviously stressed.
"Mostly, they just wanted to connect with people."
After daybreak, the rest of the passengers were shepherded onto the Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a coast guard icebreaker. They set sail again to make the three-hour-plus voyage back to Prince Rupert.
It was just over 12 hours after the Queen of the North had left Prince Rupert for its routine 8 p.m. overnight sailing.
By then, there was nothing visible at all of the ship.
Environment officials mobilized a spill response team as an oil slick spread over the water. Life jackets, cafeteria trays and paper floated within it.
The Queen of the North hit a rock just after 12:30 a.m PST off Gil Island in Wright Sound. It sank within an hour.
Hahn said the hit would have had to have been major to sink the ship so quickly, but he wouldn't speculate on the cause of the accident.
"It was clearly off course. There's no other way to look at it. The question is, how did it get to be where it was?"
The captain was not on the bridge at the time, but Hahn would not say who was. B.C. Ferries regulations require the captain have a backup for a the 15 hour voyage.
Investigators from the Transportation Safety Board were expected to arrive in Prince Rupert late Wednesday afternoon.
A "shocked" Premier Gordon Campbell travelled to Prince Rupert and said counsellors will be on hand to help the passengers, as will officials from the Insurance Corp. of B.C., the province's auto insurer.
"It's frightening," said Campbell.
"I've heard this morning that some of the passengers were awakened in their nightgowns and I imagine it's pretty darn scary. . . Thank God that we've got all these people apparently safe (but we have to) recognize that these things last for people for some time."
Although B.C.'s ferries are considered an extension of the province's highways, the death toll on those waterways is significantly less: only four people have died in accidents with the formerly Crown-owned ferry fleet in the last 20 years.
The Queen of the North was sailing south on a 450-kilometre overnight trip from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy along B.C.'s Inside Passage, a strikingly beautiful stretch of coast immortalized in some of Emily Carr's paintings.
Seas were reported to be choppy and winds were blowing at about 75 kilometres an hour.
According to the B.C. Ferries website, the ship was built in Germany in 1969 and refitted in 2001. It can hold up to 700 people and 115 cars.
Campbell said the Transportation Safety Board approved the ferry for use on that route.
Coincidentally, though, the legislature was to consider Wednesday a proposal for funding to replace the three northern ferries. B.C. Ferries has been negotiating the move for two years.
The proposal passed.
