Ferry Service Has Long Been Unsafe- Even as the city has resisted the idea of building a bridge or a tunnel, it has done virtually nothing to actually make the ferry service work in the way it could, Edward Keenan writes.

“Very lucky.” That was the conclusion of Étienne Séguin-Bertrand, an investigator from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, offered earlier this week. Which might seem like a strange phrase to apply to the crash of a boat, the Sam McBride Toronto Island ferry, that was carrying more than 900 people. An accident that injured 20 people and sent six of them to hospital. Some luck.

- By Edward Keenan

“Very lucky.” That was the conclusion of Étienne Séguin-Bertrand, an investigator from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, offered earlier this week. Which might seem like a strange phrase to apply to the crash of a boat, the Sam McBride Toronto Island ferry, that was carrying more than 900 people. An accident that injured 20 people and sent six of them to hospital. Some luck.

And yet, after looking at the details of Séguin-Bertrand’s report on the 2022 crash into the docks at the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal, it clearly applies. Because it could have been much worse. It could have been, as the report says, “an emergency” instead of a just a crash. And in the event of an emergency — a fire on the boat, some kind of accident in open water — the boat and its crew were woefully unprepared to respond.

For starters, there were only six crew members, rather than the Transport Canada safe-operation threshold of 13. And the evacuation plan was not viable, as it called for each of those crew members to be handling multiple tasks at the same time. The crew members expected to multi-task had never received emergency passenger management training. And this blatant unpreparedness had not previously been clear to them because they had never run full-scale evacuation drills — the closest they ever came was one with 50 people acting as passengers.