Breakdown at SSA Continues to Grate on Those Stranded

By JAMES KINSELLA
Gazette Senior Writer

As the Steamship Authority launched post-mortems on its performance
when two freight boats failed last Saturday night, the experience has
continued to rankle with visitors, some of whom waited up to 12 hours to
leave the Vineyard.

"It was horrible," said Meg Evans of Warrington, Pa.,
who waited in Woods Hole from 6:45 a.m. Sunday to 6 p.m. later that day
to board a ferry after her initial reservation was cancelled.
"We're not coming back to the Vineyard because of the
Steamship Authority."

SSA general manager Wayne Lamson said Wednesday that boat line
employees did the best they could, given the uncertainty about when
vessels would be able to come back into service, or when the MV Governor
could be brought in as a backup vessel from the Authority's
facility in Fairhaven.

Mr. Lamson said the failure Saturday evening of the Sankaty,
followed by the failure of the Katama, stranded about 200 people
Saturday evening and Sunday morning - 100 people each in Vineyard
Haven and Woods Hole. On the freight ferry Sankaty, the problem was
traced to a failed generator; a problem in the reduction gears on the
freight ferry Katama led the SSA to take that vessel off-line as well.

On Saturday, a number of people spent the night sleeping on the
beach next to the Vineyard Haven terminal or in their cars. People on
Sunday spent hours in the terminal parking lot waiting to leave.

Mr. Lamson said Wednesday that he welcomed how a number of Authority
employees stepped up to get the vessels working again and to coordinate
their return to service. He said the staff has been reviewing the boat
line's performance during the outage and seeing what steps, if
any, could have been taken to clear out the backlog on the Vineyard
route more quickly.

But the major complaint coming from a number of people left stranded
by the failed vessels was not about the resumption of service -
but rather about the lack of communication about the resumption of
service.

"There was no effective distribution of information,"
said Monica Touesnard of Ithaca, N.Y., who with her husband was stranded
overnight when their 11 p.m. departure was cancelled. "You had to
go and seek out the information."

"There was no information," said Ms. Evans, who was
traveling with her mother, her husband, and their three children, ages
six, four and two. "No one apologized. More than one employee got
combative."

At 6:45 a.m. Sunday, she was directed by an SSA employee into Lane
10 at the Vineyard Haven terminal to await the scheduled departure at
7:15.

No boat line employee said anything about vessel failures, she said.
The first inkling that something was amiss came when she looked across
the parking lot and saw her sister in law, Cathy Valinoti of Red Bank,
N.J., waiting with a group of other travelers and their vehicles in
another section of the terminal parking lot. She knew that Ms. Valinoti
had been scheduled to leave on a ferry late the previous evening.

Mr. Lamson said Authority employees at the Vineyard Haven terminal,
and across the water at the Woods Hole terminal, could not speak to the
issue of resumption of full service because relevant facts, such as when
the Governor would be coming onto the route, remained in flux for a
large part of the outage.

The Sankaty's cancelled trips on Saturday were the 7:45 and 10
p.m. trips from Woods Hole and the 8:45 and 11:00 p.m. trips from
Vineyard Haven.

The Katama discovered the problem with its reduction gears on the
last trip of the evening back to Woods Hole. The vessel missed all seven
scheduled round-trips on Sunday before coming back into service at the
start of the day on Monday.

The MV Governor came from Fairhaven to go into service in Woods Hole
about 2 p.m. Sunday. The vessel, staffed by the Katama crew, made four
round-trips on Sunday to help with the backlog from the Katama.

But circumstances surrounding the arrival of the Governor just threw
more salt into the Evans family's wound.

When the Governor appeared in Vineyard Haven, Ms. Evans wrote in a
letter to the Authority, the boat line changed its policy.

"Instead of clearing the backlog, they decided to let those
passengers with reservations for 1:30 p.m. board the boat," she
wrote in a letter dated Tuesday to Gina L. Barboza, the reservations and
community relations manager for the boat line. "The 1:30 group was
no different from the 11 p.m, the 7:15 a.m. or the 9:45 a.m. group
- the boat for that time was out of service. Instead of making
them join the backlog, the Steamship Authority ‘resumed the
schedule.'"

Last night, Mr. Lamson said boat line policy calls for slotting a
replacement vessel into the original schedule, such that it takes over
for the failed vessel from that point forward - in this case,
picking up the people with 1:30 p.m. reservations. To move people ahead
onto the Governor whose reservations previously had been cancelled, he
said, would create a domino effect of delays into future reservations.

Earlier in the week, Mr. Lamson said the SSA could have pressed its
two large ferries on the route, the Martha's Vineyard and the
Islander, into service with extra trips early Sunday morning to eat into
the backlog.

Under Coast Guard rules, however, using the same crews who already
had been working on the vessels would have required those crews to stand
down for part of Sunday's regular schedule, creating a new
problem. The boat line did not come up with volunteers to staff extra
runs early Sunday morning.

Asked why the reservations center did not notify people scheduled to
leave Sunday that their reservations might be in jeopardy, Mr. Lamson
said the Authority does not staff the center on a 24-hour basis.

Earlier this week, he estimated that the boat line's extra
personnel costs over the weekend came in between $2,500 and $3,500.

Bridget Tobin, who manages the Island terminals in Vineyard Haven
and Oak Bluffs, referred questions about the weekend to senior
management in Woods Hole. Kevin Smith, who manages the Woods Hole
terminal, could not be reached for comment.

On Wednesday, Mr. Lamson said the terminal managers in these
situations are caught in the middle between customers who are frustrated
and senior managers who are trying to draft a plan on the fly.

Mr. Lamson said all travelers and their vehicles whose reservations
had been displaced Saturday evening or Sunday morning had reached the
Vineyard by 6 p.m. Sunday, or had reached Woods Hole by the end of the
evening Sunday.

Passengers are faulting the boat line for its customer service
during the outage.

Ms. Touesnard said Authority employees were conspicuous in not
sharing with the passengers what was going on, or what might happen in
the coming hours.

"It was very frustrating," she said.