W5 RESEARCH

MG2650: Week 5 Organizational Control

Research 5.1

Off Course Case Study

1

Just after midnight on March 22, 2006, the Queen of the North ferry, part of the BC Ferries system, hit rocks off Gil

Island, south of Prince Rupert. It was immediately clear that the ferry was in trouble, and within 15 minutes, all the

passengers and crew were off the ship and in the ferry’s lifeboats. As local townspeople and the Coast Guard rescued

the passengers from the lifeboats, the ferry sank, a little more than an hour after first striking the rocks. Initial media

reports celebrated the fact that all 99 passengers and crew had managed to get off the ferry safely. The crew was

widely praised for conducting an orderly evacuation, something employees practice and train for at regular intervals.

On day two, passengers were reported missing. While international maritime regulations require that ferries record

identifying information about all passengers (name, gender, and whether they are adults, children, or infants), the

Canadian government doesn’t require BC’s ferry fleet to meet international standards. Passenger names aren’t

collected, and ferry staff don’t even take a head count after loading. The number of passengers is only roughly

determined by the number of tickets sold. Thus, the initial reports from BC Ferries that all passengers and crew

survived were based on the simple belief that everyone had been evacuated. Demands for explanations of what had

gone wrong arose.

The regional director of communications for Transport Canada (a governmental agency) reported the Queen of the

North had passed an annual safety inspection less than three weeks earlier, including a lifeboat drill that required

passengers be evacuated in less than 30 minutes. “They did very well at it, and they obviously did very well when it

happened for real,” he said.

The internal investigation BC Ferries conducted after the incident concluded that “human factors were the primary

cause” of what happened. During the investigation, crew members responsible for navigating the ship that night

claimed that they were unfamiliar with newly installed steering equipment. In addition, they had turned off a monitor

displaying their course because they could not turn on the night settings. The bridge crew used the equipment “in a

way different than as instructed,” the report noted, although this was not cited as a cause of running the boat aground.

The report also concluded that the crew maintained a “casual watch-standing behavior,” had “lost situational

awareness,” and “failed to appreciate the vessel’s impending peril.” Transcripts of radio calls that evening noted that

music was heard playing on the bridge.

Regarding the evacuation, though the crew was praised for acting quickly, several things made the evacuation more

difficult than need be. There was no master key to the sleeping cabins; rather, multiple keys had to be tried. A chalk X

is supposed to be drawn on searched cabin doors, but no one had chalk. As well, only 53 of the 55 cabins were

confirmed to have been searched.

Source: Robbins, S. P., De Cenzo, D. A., & Coulter, M. (2013). Fundamentals of management (8th ed.). Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Prentice Hall.