Behind the Buoy
By Michael G. Sciulla
Editor & Associate Publisher




July 2001

For the second time in less than two years, the sorrowful story of a mother who lost two sons in a boating accident was heard by the Coast Guard Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

This time it was mid-May and it was Bambi Dixey of Colorado whose two boys died from carbon monoxide poisoning while swimming off their houseboat on Lake Powell. In November 1999, it was Libby Cornett of Virginia whose two sons drowned after their sailboat, the Morning Dew, crashed into a jetty and sank just outside of Charleston Harbor, SC.

In both instances, the congressional hearing room was jammed with government officials, witnesses, spectators and the media. In fact, at least four television crews covered the hearing and were in the face of Bambi Dixey, her husband, Ken, and their congressional sponsors, Reps. Scott McInnis (R-CO) and J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) from the get-go.

This is in sharp contrast to the usual congressional hearing on boating safety which generally happens once a year and is attended by a mere handful of people, even though recreational boating fatalities constitute the second largest number of transportation-related deaths after automobiles.

Sitting directly behind the Dixey's at the witness table, trying to hold back tears as they testified, I was caught in the rush of the media who descended on the couple the minute they finished. Glancing around for a way to escape the horde, it was obvious to me that I wasn't the only one who had been touched by the tragedy of a parent surviving the loss of a child.

But beyond the empathy for the grieving parent was another emotion - anger - that was triggered by the Dixey's charge that the government knew or should have known that these houseboats were defective and should have acted by alerting the public before the tragedy struck.

Libby Cornett made a similar case in arguing that the Coast Guard should have acted once it responded to a report that a commercial vessel had heard calls for help from the water. The Coast Guard watchstander elected not to conduct a search and her sons subsequently perished.

Some good may yet come from both of these calamities. Following the national publicity afforded the Morning Dew case and a detailed investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, more money was found for the Coast Guard to upgrade its communications system and beef up the manpower needed to run the operation. A wholesale upgrade of the Coast Guard's national distress communications network system is now in the works, spurred on, in part, by the lessons learned from the Morning Dew.

The government should act just as swiftly, if not more so, to warn the boating public of the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning aboard motorboats of all types, not just houseboats. If the government can require you to have a placard in your engine compartment warning you against discharging oil, they can certainly require that a placard be placed at your helm station and on your generator reminding you of the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning.

But, much more needs to be done. Over a course of the past 35 years, BoatUS has testified some 75 times before various committees of Congress. We have taken the opportunity on many of these occasions to warn Congress that the "defect" provisions of the Federal Boat Safety Act of 1971 were not being employed as intended to protect the recreational boating consumer.

The automotive industry and its federal regulators initially turned a blind eye to the mounting death toll due to Firestone tires during the 1990s. Once the story was out and the spotlight on, Congress rushed in to fix the federal regulatory process to reduce the likelihood in the future that disparate reports from around the country about automotive failures would be dismissed as isolated problems.

Recreational boat owners shouldn't be treated as second-class citizens. It's time for the Congress to take that same spotlight to those Coast Guard programs that are supposed to ensure that the boats and engines we buy are safe and can be used as intended and merchandised.

Only then will we be sure that the loss suffered by the Dixey's and at least 15 other boaters who have died from carbon monoxide poisoning will not have been in vain.

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