Newfoundland and Labrador's transportation minister said he has few options to deal immediately with a series of ferry malfunctions that have thrown the province's service into disarray.
John Hickey said suggestions that the government lease ferries from other jurisdictions to replace vessels such as the MV Inch Arran — whose crew issued a mayday Wednesday when the 43-year-old ferry's engine failed — are not practical.
Transportation Minister John Hickey said there is little he can do immediately to replace aging ferries.
(CBC)
"We're going to have to deal with the fact that we only have so many ferries in the fleet. We have a very old fleet," Hickey told CBC News.
"We just can't go out and pick up a ferry down alongside the wharf that's waiting to be leased. That's just not available."
The Inch Arran, which services the island community of Little Bay Islands on Newfoundland's northeast coast, is out of service. It is among four ferries in the province's 20-vessel fleet currently having problems.
The province intends to build five new ferries in the next five years, and has issued design contracts for two new vessels, with construction beginning next year. The government has not identified where those vessels will go.
George Wiseman, one of four passengers aboard the Inch Arran when high winds pushed the idled ferry to the shore, said the experience was frightening.
"It seems like that somebody's going to have to die before any major changes take place," said Wiseman, who said he will nonetheless board the Inch Arran when it is repaired.
Mechanical failures happen: expert
Meanwhile, Little Bay Islands Mayor Perry Locke wants to know why one of the two life-rafts aboard the ferry did not inflate properly on Wednesday.
The MV Inch Arran, which is temporarily out of service, was built in 1963.
(CBC)
"These life-rafts, from what we've learned, were replaced on this vessel this past summer," Locke said.
"I don't know if someone didn't do a good job of recertifying the raft or it was just a freak accident that the raft didn't open."
Dag Friis, a professor of ocean and naval architecture engineering at Memorial University in St. John's, said mechanical failures aboard vessels like the Inch Arran should not be a surprise.
"We are dealing with equipment that is old, and it may have been fine the last time it was inspected, but the older these things get, the higher the likelihood of failure of some sort," said Friis, who has previously described the ferry fleet as similar to vessels in Third World countries.
Friis said the Inch Arran, built in 1963, should have been retired from service 15 years ago.
The youngest vessel in the domestic ferry fleet is 16 years old.
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