Without Wind, Kids Couldn’t Escape Fatal Barge Hit, Lawyer Says

Attorney: Coast Guard Balking at Criminal Investigation

Peter Swanson Aug 11

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The Hobie catamaran run down by a barge late last month was effectively adrift and unable to get out of the way, even though her skipper could see the 200-ton commercial combo coming at them, according to the lawyer suing on behalf of one of the victims.

The barge ran over the 17-foot Hobie, capsizing it and resulting in the deaths of three girls, ages 7, 10 and 13, who had been learning how to sail. They were participants in a sailing program sponsored by the Miami Yacht Club and under the tutelage of a 19-year-old camp counselor.

Attorney Judd Rosen of Miami represents one of the survivors, a nine-year-old. (Six were on board. The counselor and a fifth girl also survived.)

Rosen said the engineless Hobie was unable to maneuver to avoid the barge because of light air. “They could see the barge. They just couldn’t move the boat to get out of the way,” he said.

Forecasts for that day—July 28—called for winds of less than 10 knots. A screenshot from a video in the moments before the barge impact shows nearby sailboats with drooping sails. A video of the Hobie shows a close-hauled sail on mast standing straight up right up until the collision.

Sailors on Facebook, ignorant of any weather factors and eager to debate rules of the road, were split between blaming the barge skipper and blaming the Hobie skipper. The parents’ lawsuit finds fault with both by naming the barge owner and the yacht club (and its sailing camp) as defendants.

The lawsuit was filed last week in Miami Circuit Court. It asks for damages as determined by a jury trial.

According to the lawsuit, the counselor in charge of the boat was “careless, reckless and negligent” for her failure to avoid collision. Rosen said she had a handheld VHF, which she was using to communicate with the yacht club but did not use to warn the tug captain. The yacht club was to blame for its “unqualified and improperly trained counselors.”

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In an interview with Loose Cannon, however, Rosen seemed to reserve his harshest criticism for the crew of the barge. Rosen said there was apparently no observer at the front of the barge at the critical moment, even though the tug’s captain was blocked by a crane and construction material from seeing what was in front of him.

According to Rosen, the barge was traveling 3.5 knots, not fast, but with 200 tons of mass, not easily stopped either. “If they had a proper lookout, they could have dropped the spuds and stopped the barge within 10 to 20 feet,” he said.

Illustrations From Goldberg & Rosen

The fact that the barge captain failed to blow five blasts on the horn as a warning to the Hobie was indicative that no-one saw it coming, Rosen said. According to the lawsuit, defendant Waterfront Construction, owner of the barge, failed to hire adequately trained employees and did not have “a sufficient number of employees present on the subject barge…to keep an adequately lookout for other vessels.”

(One of the news stories reported that the crew consisted of a captain and one other man.)

Attorney Lorenzo Palomares, representing Waterfront Construction, told CBS News that the crew “absolutely tried to avoid hitting the sailboat.” An “experienced lookout” saw the sailboat before the crash, and the tug-and-barge crew “acted reasonably,” Palomares said.

Speaking to Loose Cannon, Rosen did something a little unusual and walked back a key assertion in the parents’ lawsuit. He contradicted language in the suit that said the daughter had suffered “permanent injuries as a result of the incident.”

The parents now say she was recovering from minor injuries. The Miami Herald quoted the girl’s dad:

Thank God, physically, she’s doing well, Emotionally, we’re still trying to understand how she is doing. Our family is so thankful she is alive, but we’re hurtful for the other parents.

According to Rosen, the Coast Guard was not undertaking a criminal investigation and had assigned the probe to the branch’s civil fact-finding team. Seeing that as a failure, the parents were motivated to go to court, not only to represent their own family interests but on behalf of the girls that died, other sailing program participants and the community at large.

When the Coast Guard refused to divulge the name of the tug captain, they decided to file suit at once, only 11 days since the accicent. “I wasn’t going to wait around for them to release information,” Rosen said.

The language of the lawsuit appeared to suggest that it was a bad idea to train children to sail on busy Biscayne Bay at all. Not quite, Rosen said, but if you are going to teach kids in a busy port like that, there need to be more safeguards in place, such as multiple chase boats and areas designated as off limits to commercial traffic.

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