Officials: 34 Presumed Dead After Fire On Scuba Diving Boat
Speaker 1: 00:00 Officials say 34 people died when fire erupted on a dive boat off the coast of Santa Barbara overnight on Monday. Right now there is an ongoing investigation into what happened. Saul Gonzalez is cohost of the California report and is in Santa Barbara and joins me now saw welcome. Hi. What did you learn from the news conference this morning? Speaker 2: 00:22 Well, essentially the headline is there are, they don't expect to find any more survivors from this vessel and they're transitioning from a search and rescue operation to a full search and recovery operations. Meaning they're going to be looking for the remains of, of, of human beings and they're going to start figuring out how to salvage this vessel. Um, but that's what, and, and, and what started is fire aboard is that's all that does. That's also going to be of course a huge focus. Speaker 1: 00:47 And given the current location and condition of the boat being at the bottom of the channel and upside down along with, uh, some bodies possibly still inside, how are crews planning on proceeding from here? Speaker 2: 00:59 Well, extremely careful carefully because of the tides and the vessel itself. Could be a hazard to people who go in the water in terms of who might be on the vessel. They think they sided for the remains of four to six people late yesterday they couldn't recover those people because they were losing light. So that will be a big focus of today is getting those remains up to the surface and to the mainland. They're also searching the surrounding area because some of the remains were found not in the vessel but on the sea floor. So they're looking up to about a half mile away from the vessel. Um, and, and again, that will be a big focus as well. Speaker 1: 01:37 You know, a lot has been said about locked doors aboard the boat, which could have prevented people who were sleeping below deck from escaping. What did you hear about that this morning? Speaker 2: 01:47 Yeah, that came up in this morning's press conference and basically the Coast Guard spokesperson, um, says that was a miscommunication when, uh, the mayday went out. There was a lot of, you know, you can just imagine a lot of very panic chatter from people aboard the boat, the crew, the crew members who were calling the mayday, and then the radio operators who would listen to the message and were responding with their own questions. So apparently that news of some sort of locked doors aboard the vessel was, was really came out of a radio chatter confusion and who was saying what to whom and who was asking questions and who was answering questions. The Coast Guard says emphatically there were no locked doors aboard this vessel. What stood in the way of the passengers getting to safety was likely to fire itself. Speaker 1: 02:32 Hmm. And do we know any more about where the fire might've started? Speaker 2: 02:36 Well, the likeliest culprit is, is the, uh, is the kitchen have board, uh, up on the vessel. And, uh, there were three levels to this vessel. Passengers were on the lowest level and right above them was the kitchen, which could have been the [inaudible] light, the likeliest source of the fire. And then above that were, was the bridging crew quarters. So essentially the passengers, you know, these 30 plus were though that with written the least accessible place on the vessel, the place where it'd be hardest to escape in the event of a fire. And that's why it looks like they were trapped by the flames itself. But the crew was able to escape because simply they were closer to the water and can jump in the water or jump to another vessel. Speaker 1: 03:18 And we know the surviving crew members have given statements about what happened. Uh, is there any indication if charges could be filed against anyone? Speaker 2: 03:26 No, no indication at all of criminal charges at this point. Uh, the coast guard emphasized how the, the, the, the operator that the owner of this vessel at passed all safe safety standards. It was up to snuff in terms of regulate maritime regulations. It has fire suppression equipment aboard smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, all of that. There seemed to be no sign in the past that this vessel, which was built in 1981 with any kind of a problem vessel at all, it seemed to be, you know, it seemed to be fully up to code. Speaker 1: 03:55 Hmm. And you know, you've spent a lot of time at the Santa Barbara Harbor in the last day or so. Give us a sense of how folks there are really reacting to this news and what it's like there. Speaker 2: 04:06 Well, I think they're, they're shocked at just the scale of this disaster. I don't, I personally don't remember a maritime catastrophe like this in California waters in recent memory. Um, and it's just shocking, right? How quickly then the scope of the, of the, of the lives lost. The number of people lost. How strange this was because he very, very rarely hear of these kinds of catastrophes aboard a boat in American waters. So I think people are trying to absorb that. I should say when you go down to the waterline, down to the harbor at Santa Barbara, uh, people have assembled to make shift memorial. So there are candles there and people are living flowers and messages. And um, and I should also say that the company that ran this boat that owned this boat is pretty well respected in Santa Barbara. A lot of people know the vessel. They've gone aboard at themselves on that, on scuba diving expeditions. So it is a, a kind of a, well, it was kind of a well known address on the water here in Santa Barbara. Speaker 1: 04:58 Mm. Yeah. An absolute tragic incident. I've been speaking to California report co-hosts, Saul Gonzalez from Santa Barbara. Saul, thank you so much for joining us. Speaker 2: 05:07 Thank you very much.
