When the dust settles from the Great Ferry Fiasco of 2018 — and it needs to happen soon — the Steamship Authority has much to account for to its Island constituency, which has shown remarkable patience throughout the weeks-long ordeal.

Marc Hanover, the Vineyard’s representative on the authority’s five-member board of governors, has called for an independent marine consultant to review its communications and operations. It’s the right idea, though in fact what may be needed are several different reviews.

Certainly the authority needs to answer why a ferry that has just undergone an $18.5 million renovation and another that is just two years old experienced multiple mechanical failures. Was it shoddy workmanship? Design flaws? A rush to bring the boats online prematurely? Inadequate training or supervision? All of the above? Were the failures the fault of contractors or authority personnel? This kind of review will require someone with specific and up-to-date knowledge of marine engineering.

Mr. Hanover suggests that boat line operations need to be reviewed to ensure reliability and consistency in the ferry schedule. By tradition and law, a ship’s captain has the ultimate responsibility for the safe operation of a vessel, but it is reasonable to conduct an independent review of how this responsibility is carried out and to audit and address other reasons for schedule slippage.

More to the point, a consultant with expertise in transit operations may be able to recommend better strategies for dealing with unexpected service disruptions. The authority was fortunate that the SeaStreak had a high-speed ferry available to provide passenger service when both the Martha’s Vineyard and the Woods Hole broke down simultaneously. Perhaps a formal backup arrangement could have taken luck out of the equation.

Ironically, the worst failing of the Steamship Authority over the past two weeks was the one that doesn’t require a maritime specialist at all: communications. At the Vineyard Haven and Woods Hole terminals, by all accounts, steamship personnel were friendly and helpful in triaging medical emergencies and dealing with the onsite chaos, but today’s travelers and commercial customers expect and demand to be able to conduct business electronically. The authority’s website was barely adequate before this crisis and was largely ineffective during it.

Business owners that rely on the ferries to get needed cargo to and from the mainland told the Gazette their biggest frustration was receiving only generic emails from the boat line. Travel advisories issued periodically by the boatline were sometimes, but not always, emailed to the Gazette. Notices and updates appeared at random times on the website then mysteriously disappeared. While Steamship Authority general manager Bob Davis and Mr. Hanover made themselves available for occasional interviews, there was no other designated spokesperson. Regan Communications, a Boston-based public relations firm under contract to the boat line, relayed information to and from Mr. Davis. If the SSA was getting advice on crisis communications, it did not seem to be following it.

At a minimum, the SSA should have a Facebook page and a Twitter feed to post updates — and could easily have set both up while the confusion was underway. But most companies in the travel business these days have methods to communicate both generally and directly with customers. It is high time the boat line got with it.

Mr. Hanover is now calling for a special meeting of the SSA Board of Governors on Martha’s Vineyard to hear what Islanders have to say about the ferry fiasco. So far, they have been very forgiving, but it won’t last much longer.