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Inside the S.I. Ferry crash

BY GRAHAM RAYMAN | STAFF WRITER

April 28, 2004

About 30 minutes after the ferry Andrew J. Barberi slammed into a Staten Island pier in October, the ferry director saw pilot Richard Smith at the entrance of the wounded vessel.

"What happened?" Patrick Ryan demanded.

"I'm sorry. I blacked out. It's all my fault," he said Smith told him.

Ryan, who would himself later come under scrutiny for his management of the ferries, told investigators he grabbed Smith's arm and ordered him to go back to the pilothouse, saying, "We have to sort this out."

Blood drops on his shirt, Smith pulled away from his boss and walked into the terminal. The ferry director later would order two men to try to bring Smith back, but instead they found him on the bathroom floor at his Staten Island home covered in his own blood after a suicide attempt.

Ryan continued into the heart of the horrific scene, to the pilothouse, he later told investigators. There, he found a distraught Capt. Michael Gansas trying to finish the task of maneuvering the vessel to a safe slip.

Gansas told Ryan that Smith was slumped over the controls as the ferry made its way to Staten Island. He grabbed Smith off the controls, he said, but could not rein in the vessel before the crash.

Ryan asked Gansas if he was in the pilothouse with Smith when the ferry hit, and Gansas answered, "Yes," the ferry chief told investigators. A ferry mate later said Gansas was not there. The captain was seen by two tugboatmen running from the other end of the vessel toward the pilothouse after the crash.

Six months after the tragedy, those encounters aboard the Andrew J. Barberi - reported here for the first time - brought the curtain down on a fatal sequence of lax procedures, questionable decisions and simple bad luck and timing that combined to kill 11 passengers and injure 73.The absence of a lookout in the pilothouse, the failure of crew members to monitor the boat's progress, the tide and a blacked-out pilot on a risky combination of medications all played a role in the Staten Island Ferry's first disaster, Newsday has found.

A more detailed portrait of the ferry tragedy and the confluence of events that caused it emerged from dozens of interviews with ferry workers, passengers, maritime experts, officials sources and what crew members have told investigators.

The crash has spawned probes by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, police, the Coast Guard, the National Transportation Safety Board and the city Department of Investigation. All declined to comment for this story, as did lawyers representing crew members.

The doomed trip

Ride the ferry for seven hours - the length of a typical shift - and the 20-minute, 5.7-mile journey becomes hypnotic. For passengers, the ride amounts to a break from the noise of the city; for tourists, it's a way to see the Statue of Liberty for free. For the crews, the repetitive journey nurtures the kind of complacency that turned tragic on Oct. 15.

At 3 p.m. that day, the crew of the Andrew J. Barberi was beginning the third transit of the shift with far fewer passengers than the vessel capacity of 6,000.

The 3,335-ton, 310-foot-long vessel, in its 23rd year of operation, was due for a Coast Guard inspection the following day.

Capt. Michael Gansas, 38, a former Navy submariner and musician, had replaced Capt. Andrew Covella, who had emergency surgery that morning on an abscessed tooth.

Smith, 55, a former tugboat captain and veteran ferryman, was the assistant captain.

The chief engineer, Charles Covella, the 60-year-old brother of Andrew, was also a veteran. Senior mate, Robert Rush, 56, and mate David Hyde, 50, had extensive experience.

The sun sparkled off the waves. Visibility was 10 miles. Whitecaps dotted the harbor. The Coast Guard reported gusts as high as 50 mph out of the west and a fast current, running toward the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. The tide was 2 feet higher than predicted.

The Yankees were about to play Boston in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series - a contest on the minds of almost every crew member. Gansas, as it happened, was a Red Sox fan and Smith a Yankees fan.