Adjunct Professor Lawrence Brennan was quoted in San Diego UnionTribune about the USS Fitzgerald collision off the Japanese coast last week that killed seven sailors.
Capt. Lawrence Brennan, the Navy’s former senior admiralty counsel who now teaches at Fordham University’s School of Law, told The San Diego Union-Tribune that the report establishes a shocking level of “crew incompetence and unseaworthiness” that was punctuated by violations of long-established standard operating procedures, international law and the norms that guide the navigation of all oceangoing vessels.
“It’s almost as if no one on the Fitzgerald or the McCain looked at the rules of the road or read a manual about how to operate a ship at sea,” said Brennan, who served in the Navy for 33 years and investigated several major ship accidents.
In the predawn Aug. 21 collision of the destroyer McCain east of Singapore, the bridge leadership and crew bungled the steering of the warship, losing control of the vessel as it lurched left toward the incoming oil tanker Alnic MC, according to the Navy report.
Multiple bridge watch standers lacked even a “basic level of knowledge of the steering control system,” investigators determined, and other sailors tasked with training them “had an insufficient level of knowledge to effectively maintain appropriate rigor in the qualification program.”
In fact, the most senior officer in charge of maintaining standards “lacked a general understanding” of how to transfer steering between consoles.
Neither the unnamed officer of the deck nor the conning officer on duty attended a navigation brief on the afternoon preceding the collision, a meeting that’s designed to provide maximum awareness of potential safety risks.
The McCain’s crew failed to sound five short warning blasts or hail the bridge of the Alnic after it lost control, efforts that might have prevented the crash, according to the report.
“Sounding the alarm is vital,” Brennan said. “That wakes you up. It gets you moving. In my opinion, that failure to sound the warning alarm to the commercial vessel and general quarters for the crew cost lives.”
