Crew members on an ill-fated California dive boat that killed 34 people after catching fire off the coast of Santa Barbara last year said they weren’t given proper emergency procedure instructions, according to documents released by the National Transportation Safety Board Wednesday.
While NTSB investigators said the cause of the fire is still undetermined, Ryan Sims, who had only worked on the boat for about three weeks before the fire, later told investigators he remembered “seeing sparks” when he plugged his cell phone in before going to bed.
The five crew members sleeping on the top deck of the 75-foot, three-deck Conception were forced to leap from the boat into the water in the predawn hours of Labor Day 2019 when they suddenly awoke to flames. They were the only survivors; All 33 passengers and one crewmember sleeping below deck were killed in the fire.
He said that morning “while still in a sleep-like state, he had heard a pop and then a crackle downstairs,” and a crew member yelling “Fire! Fire!”
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“I didn’t know what the procedures were supposed to be,” Sims told investigators. He said the day before the fire the captain told him they would go over emergency procedures when they “have time.” Other crew members agreed they weren’t well versed in safety procedures.
The Conception is engulfed in flames after a deadly fire broke out aboard the commercial scuba diving vessel off the Southern California Coast. The crew aboard a Southern California scuba dive boat had not been trained on emergency procedures before the deadly fire broke out last year, killing 34 people in one of the state’s deadliest maritime disasters, according to federal documents released Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2020. (Santa Barbara County Fire Department via AP, File)
They said they tried to go below deck to save the passengers but flames blocked their way…