Thirty Below on a Steel Deck

People who read safety regulations at a desk sometimes think they are written for an ideal sailor on an ideal day. They are not. The good ones are written for a tired man, in bad weather, at the end of a long watch, when his hands have stopped working properly.

I learned that loading crude oil in Alaska.

The cold

In winter, the deck of a tanker at a northern terminal can sit at thirty below. Cargo operations do not stop for the weather. You stand on steel that pulls the heat out of your boots, watch the gauges, handle the gear, and check the lines. A loading can keep the deck officers on their feet for eighteen hours.

By the end of a stretch like that, a man is not the same officer he was at the start. His fingers do not close properly. His judgment slows down. He starts taking the shorter path across the deck because the longer one feels like a mile. Nobody decides to be careless. The cold decides for him, a little at a time.

That is why procedures for cargo work spell out steps that seem obvious. The person following them may not be thinking clearly enough to remember them on his own.

Then the heat

A few weeks later, the same ship could be headed south toward Panama. The temperature on deck climbs past a hundred and ten. Down in the engine room, it is worse. The same crew that was fighting frostbite is now fighting heat exhaustion, on the same schedule, with the same amount of sleep.

There was no internet and no cell phone. When something went wrong, the ship handled it herself. You trusted the people around you because there was nobody else.

Boredom and terror

I used to describe life at sea as ninety-five percent boredom and ten percent sheer terror. Yes, that adds up to more than a hundred. That is the point. The quiet days are long and repetitive, and they lull people into believing nothing will happen. Then the weather turns, a machine fails, or something appears out of the dark, and there is no time to read the manual.

Good training exists for that ten percent. Drills feel pointless on a calm Tuesday. They are the only thing that works when the alarm goes off at three in the morning and half the crew is still waking up.

What it taught me about the rules

When I review a casualty now, I keep those years in mind.

Fatigue is a condition, not an excuse. Work and rest rules exist because tired people make predictable mistakes. A company that schedules its crew past exhaustion has made a choice that shows up in the accident.

Procedures are for the worst moment, not the best. If a procedure only works when everyone is rested and alert, it is not a good procedure.

Training is what remains when thinking stops. Under stress, people do what they practiced. If they never practiced, they improvise, and improvising on a loaded tanker is a bad idea.

The weather is not an act of God if you saw it coming. Ice, heat, storms, and fog are part of the job. Planning for them is part of the standard of care.

Why this matters in a courtroom

Jurors have usually never been to sea. Most have never been cold for eighteen hours straight or worked a ship through a storm. An expert who has done those things can help them see why the rules read the way they do, and why breaking them is not a technicality. That understanding is often the difference between a jury that shrugs at a missed procedure and one that grasps why it mattered.

About the author

Captain Mitchell S. Stoller is a Master Mariner Unlimited, former Exxon tanker master, and former Los Angeles Harbor pilot. About Captain Stoller