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Report: CG safety inspectors unqualified

The Coast Guard’s maritime safety inspection program is staffed by unqualified personnel who don’t follow proper procedures and mismanage their backlog of thousands of unfinished investigations, according to an internal report by the inspector general of the Department Homeland Security.

The findings, which could have broad implications for the future of U.S. maritime oversight, were unveiled Tuesday before a House panel.

Among a sample of 22 safety investigators, 15 were not fully qualified under U.S. regulations and four were not qualified at all, the investigation found, although a senior Coast Guardsman defended the service’s 136 maritime investigators as a group.

Coast Guard inspectors did not give hundreds of maritime accidents, known as “casualties,” the formal inspections they warranted under official rules, the report says. And in 2006, when the backlog of old investigations got too cumbersome, the Coast Guard closed 3,848 cases it deemed “low risk” even though DHS inspectors found many were worthy of “high risk” treatment, according to the report.

Members of the House Transportation subcommittee on the Coast Guard and maritime transportation and the chairman of the full House Transportation Committee lambasted the Coast Guard about the findings of the investigation during the hearing. They were especially upset because its findings were similar to previous reports from 10 years ago and as far back as 1981.

“I find it to be a disservice to the American people when government kicks around the same issues year after year — or, in this case, decade after decade,” said Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Democratic chairman of the Coast Guard subcommittee.

Minnesota Rep. James Oberstar, the Democratic chairman of the full committee, said it was time to re-examine the Coast Guard’s maritime oversight powers from the ground up.

The inspector general’s findings and Oberstar’s comments revived a congressional debate, in limbo for several months, over whether the Coast Guard’s maritime inspection and rule-making powers should be given to another federal agency or an altogether new one.

A new twist on that question is a legislative bid by the National Transportation Safety Board to increase its power in investigations of major maritime accidents. Currently, the Coast Guard and the NTSB collaborate on investigations using an unofficial “memorandum of understanding,” but the agreement puts neither one in charge.

Coast Guardsmen defended their oversight powers Tuesday.

The Coast Guard’s director of prevention policy, Rear Adm. James Watson, told committee members that “your alarm has reverberated throughout the Coast Guard.”

But he said the service wants to keep its maritime oversight powers, even after gaining a slew of new post-Sept. 11 security responsibilities. Ceding high-level maritime investigations to the NTSB could have many unintended consequences and be seen worldwide as a “demotion of the authority of the commandant” of the Coast Guard, Watson said.

Watson said that, for the most part, the Coast Guard agreed with the findings of the report.

The Coast Guard has agreed to increase its number of maritime inspectors, change its personnel management to encourage longer port-security tours and adopt more stringent rules for vessel inspections. The service already asked for 276 new sector-level billets in its fiscal 2009 budget requests. All those changes, top Coast Guardsmen say, will strengthen the service’s ability to make sure ships are safe.

Even with those changes, the NTSB wants Congress to make it the automatic lead investigative agency in major marine incidents, said board member Kathryn O’Leary Higgins, who also appeared before the subcommittee.

Maritime casualties are the only type of transportation accident over which the NTSB doesn’t have automatic authority, she said. In the case of accidents such as air crashes or bridge collapses, the NTSB investigates alongside other federal agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

But Congress didn’t give the NTSB authority in maritime accidents, so it uses the memorandum of understanding with the Coast Guard and informal personal ties between officials.

Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen “is a good friend of mine,” Higgins said.

Officials from both the Coast Guard and NTSB agreed that the agencies work well together in inspecting most major maritime casualties, except the most recent one — the November accident in which the freighter Cosco Busan rammed the San Francisco Bay Bridge and spilled 58,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay.

In that case, Higgins said, NTSB investigators didn’t respond to the spill for three days because the first Coast Guardsmen on the scene erred in assessing the size of the spill, believing it was too small to warrant NTSB involvement.

The lost time meant the NTSB couldn’t immediately secure the Cosco Busan’s voyage data recorder — the ship’s “black box” — or test the ship’s crew for alcohol or drugs.

Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, defended the relationship between the Coast Guard and the NTSB, pointing out that even though it criticized the Coast Guard, the DHS report did not look into the qualifications of NTSB inspectors as potential replacements. And since there has never been a serious deadlock over which agency would take the lead on a casualty investigation, LaTourette said, there’s no need to change the system.

Cummings disagreed, saying such a system can’t rely on the personalities of its participants.

“I would hope that everybody who takes on the job as commandant would be as good as Adm. Allen,” Cummings said. “But what about when we’re all gone, having hearings up in heaven?”