Seven and a half years ago, I wrote here of the shameless irresponsibility and negligence of the government-owned Washington State Ferries (WSF) in the United States. Well, the home of Boeing, Microsoft and Starbucks, among others – despite its clean, green, caring, woke pretensions – has done it again.
I write, of course, of yet another failed attempt by the hopelessly incompetent and sanctimonious bureaucrats and politicians who direct WSF to get rid of two more ancient, asbestos-riddled, and entirely unsuitable Ro-Pax ferries, Elwha and Klahowya, to a poor country, in this case Ecuador.
The details of this astonishingly irresponsible and inept attempted sale were published here last Tuesday. They described the failed sale of another redundant 60-year-old ferry to the usual kind of impecunious customer that WSF seems to regularly attract. It seems that WSF executives are so incompetent that they are even unable to check the bona fides of their potential ferry buyers.
This latest misadventure is a repeat of the attempted sale of the dilapidated, unsafe, 63-year-old ferry Evergreen State to the impoverished Caribbean state of Grenada in 2017. That was yet another completely irresponsible attempted sale by a government ferry owner whose executives should have known better, much better.
Fortunately, as with the current sale to an Ecuadorian owner, that sale also fell through and probably saved the lives of large numbers of innocent Grenadans.
Not so fortunate, of course, were the 293 Tanzanian victims of the capsize and sinking of the former WSF ferry Skagit on July 18, 2012. That tragedy occurred between Dar es Salam and Zanzibar, two places, presumably, that the shamelessly irresponsible executives of WSF have never heard of. A ”grown up” owner would never permit such blatant negligence.
Meanwhile, naturally, the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) continues to stand idly by and, as the global maritime regulator, do nothing to prevent such irresponsible sales of unseaworthy, inappropriate and ancient ships by rich country government shipowners to poor country victims. It is almost as shameless as WSF.