SEMO:
Federal plan to recruit more tugboat pilots may have backfired
NEW ORLEANS — A federal program to recruit more tugboat pilots may have backfired by allowing thousands of novice captains to take the helm and contributing to a 25 percent increase in the number of accidents on the nation’s rivers.
An Associated Press review of Coast Guard records indicates that the U.S. tugboat fleet is increasingly piloted by captains who have spent as little as one year in the wheelhouse.
“The system has failed,” said David Whitehurst, a tug captain and member of the board of directors for the National Mariners Association, a national tug workers’ group based in Houma, La.
“We have the highest horsepower in history, pushing more tonnage than ever in history, with the least knowledgeable personnel in history. It is a disaster. Look at the accidents we’ve had in the past few years.”
Said Richard Block, secretary of the mariners’ group: “You can’t learn to run a towing vessel overnight, and some of these companies are simply rushing it too much.”
The article doesn’t mention this explicitly, but I’m sensing that there’s affirmative action involved here. Any “Federal plan” to recruit anyone for employment these days is going to be AA-heavy.
Someone much wiser and much more efficient with words than myself wrote a couple of years ago:
Amtrak’s “Sunset Limited” was on its Los Angeles to Miami route when, around 3:00 A.M., it crashed into a section of the Bayou Canot Bridge which, only minutes before, had become misaligned as a result of a collision by a barge. Two crewmen were burned to death, three persons died of smoke inhalation, and 42 passengers drowned when several passenger cars sank to the bottom of the Mobile River.
The driver of the tugboat “Mauvilla” that had damaged the bridge was a negro named Willie Odom. Mr. Odom is living testament to the ravages of affirmative action, and the disasters which so often accompany it.
Willie Odom had originally gained employment with the Warrior and Gulf Navigation Systems as a deckhand. Almost certainly as a result of pressure from the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Odom was allowed to become a pilot-trainee after only one year: Naturally, he failed the necessary exam on his first attempt.
Although he then had a pilot-trainees’ license, this didn’t mean Odom was a qualified pilot: Judgment and skill are necessary prerequisites for this. Mr. Odom couldn’t read navigational charts, he pursued his course despite a blinding fog, and eventually took a left, rather than right turn, that resulted in his collision with the bridge.
Advocates of “affirmative-action” and the E.E.O.C. are actually more culpable than Willie Odom for this disaster. They should be held accountable.
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