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Name: Jan (As in Dutchman) Age: 61 Vessel: 170 CC Triumph, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Ch 68 Location: Northern Calif. Mckinleyville Job:HAHAHA ...Retired Telco Bio: Former marine, http://humboldttuna.com
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SILENT DEATH LURKS FOR PLEASURE BOATERS
Outdoor poisoning from carbon monoxide exhaust called hidden danger
- Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, July 18, 2003
Folsom, Sacramento County -- Mike Farr dived off a friend's ski boat into Folsom Lake moments after his 11-year-old son sank below the churning waters while bodysurfing in the vessel's wake.
"I swam as deep as I could and as far as I could," said Farr, his voice cracking. "I expected to catch an arm, but there was nothing."
An autopsy after the accident on May 28 revealed the boy had been knocked out by carbon monoxide fumes and then drowned, making young Anthony Farr a new victim of boating's dirty little secret: CO poisoning.
Marine engines, not subject to the same emission controls as cars, produce so much carbon monoxide that, on calm days, invisible clouds of the odorless gas can form in the open air. Swimmers, boat passengers - possibly dockworkers and passers-by - can be exposed to doses big enough to cause dizziness, unconsciousness, even death.
The danger of carbon monoxide poisoning inside boats has long been known. But only in the last three years have federal and state health officials realized that outdoor CO poisoning from boat exhaust has caused or contributed to at least 46 deaths nationwide since 1990, which is as far back as investigators have searched for past incidents.
As a result, surviving family members are suing boat manufacturers, alleging design defects and inadequate safety warnings.
Boat makers, who note that their manuals warn of the dangers of CO poisoning, counter that fatalities from outdoor CO exposure, though regrettable, are rare. And, they add, the accidents often result from pursuits like teak surfing - holding onto the wooden platform behind a ski boat - the game young Anthony Farr played to a tragic end.
But Dr. Robert Baron, an Arizona emergency room physician who helped expose the outdoor CO danger, blames dirty marine-engine exhaust. He says too many people are dying in too many circumstances to chalk it up to dangerous sports. Last August, a 9-year-old girl drowned in 30 inches of water while playing near the generator exhaust of a moored cabin cruiser.
"These are innocent, unnecessary deaths," said Baron. "Unless you can change the (boat) engines somehow, maybe by putting catalytic converters on them, it'll just keep on happening."
'BEGGING TO GO BODYSURFING'
Mike Farr, 27, said his son shared his passion for water sports. On the evening of May 28, the two Farrs joined seven friends from El Dorado Hills on the ski boat belonging to Mike's neighbor.
"This was Anthony's first day out for the season," his father recalled.
The five adults and four children set course for a narrow finger of Folsom Lake where the glassy waters are ideal for high-speed skiing. After the grown- ups had sliced up the lake for a while, they slowed the boat down to give the children a thrill.
"The kids kept begging to go bodysurfing," Farr said, using another name for the teak surfing fad that, he argues, seemed safe because of the ski boat's design.
Ski boats are powered by inboard engines that are enclosed in compartments to shield them from sight or touch. Their propellers are mounted beneath the vessel, out of sight - and reach - from the stern. Boaters paid nearly $38,000 on average for these sleek speedboats in 2002, according to the National Marine Manufacturers Association.
Most ski boats come with platforms at the back of the boat, level with the water. These platforms, often made of rot-resistant teak, are meant to help skiers climb back into the boat.
But Farr believes the placement of that platform, out of reach of the propeller, lulled him into thinking there was no danger in letting his son bodysurf just a few feet behind the boat.
"Honestly, I thought it was the safest thing I've done in my boat," said Sean McKune, 29, Farr's neighbor and the owner of the ski boat. "We had easily done this 200 to 300 times with nobody getting hurt."
McKune, who taught his friends to teak surf, explained that as the ski boat moves through the water at low speeds, it produces a trailing wave, just behind the stern, between the v-shaped wake. This trailing wave curls back toward the boat, carrying along any person or object caught in this zone. By gripping the teak platform while the boat moves slowly, a swimmer could slip back a foot or two and bodysurf this trailing wave - being pulled along as if by a moving carpet of water.
McKune said it never occurred to him or Farr that carbon monoxide was bubbling up in the wake, where calm conditions allowed a poisonous cloud to engulf Anthony Farr.
"You're moving. You don't smell it. It's open air," said McKune, who was driving when the five adults let three children teak surf - Anthony, a second 11-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl. Only the girl was wearing a life vest.
"We had no clue of any danger, no warning," said McKune, who says he was horrified by the drowning. "He (Anthony) was laughing one second, and less than 30 seconds later he was sinking."
Farr admits his son might be alive today had he been wearing a vest, as required by California law in most circumstances. But he didn't think it necessary because his son was a good swimmer, and the gear would have interfered with the teak surfing.
"Now that I've read everything you read (about outdoor CO poisoning), I feel stupid," Farr said.
But the young father is also angry and believes ski boat manufacturers bear some liability because they put a swim deck over an engine that emits large amounts of carbon monoxide and failed to adequately warn of the poisoning risk.
Farr's attorney has filed two lawsuits. The first, filed June 11 in Los Angeles County Superior Court, is a class-action that seeks to force manufacturers to change designs and beef up CO warnings.
Richard McCune, the Redlands attorney who filed both suits, says the Coast Guard, which regulates boat product safety, should have forced manufacturers to correct these alleged shortcomings.
"The government has had the opportunity to do that," McCune said. "They haven't, and that's why you're seeing this class-action."
Phil Cappel, the Coast Guard's boating product safety officer, considers that unfair criticism. He says the Coast Guard has mounted a campaign to educate the public about the newly recognized danger, asked manufacturers to suggest fixes and cooperated in studies of engine redesigns.
"We can't just wave a wand and pass laws," Cappel said. "It's just in the last three years that we've become aware of outdoor fatalities from CO."
McCune filed a second suit in Sacramento County Superior Court on June 23 against Calabria Genuine Skiboats of Merced, the manufacturer of McKune's boat,
alleging design defects and inadequate warnings in connection with Anthony Farr's death.
"Boat engines don't have catalytic converters on them," said McCune. "They (boat makers) need to get the word out that there is deadly carbon monoxide being pumped out of the back of the boat where people are sitting, swimming and teak surfing."
A spokesman for Calabria, who declined to give his name, said he was saddened by the tragedy, but he would not comment other than to fax a copy of the owner's manual, which warns buyers to "be alert to carbon monoxide poisoning" and instructs them "stop your engine immediately" when people are in the water near the boat.
But Farr counters: "There are more warnings on a Bic lighter you can buy at a store than there is on my friend's boat."
INAPPROPRIATE BOAT USE CITED
John Dorton, chief executive of MasterCraft, a Tennessee boat maker named in the class-action, says he doesn't see how manufacturers can be held liable for teak surfing accidents.
"I'm shocked people are participating in this activity," said Dorton.
"Plain and simple, teak surfing is an inappropriate, dangerous use of a boat," said Monita Fontaine, vice president of the National Marine Manufacturers Association. She said ski ropes are sold in 75-foot lengths for a reason, and boaters are warned not to ski closer than 20 feet from the boat.
"It is absolutely ridiculous for anyone to be within the danger zone of the exhaust, and that means when the motor is running you should not be on the swim platform," she said.
But the public health officials who proved the link between boat engines, carbon monoxide and drownings say parental responsibility and public education are not the whole answer - they say people have died while merely sitting or standing near boat exhausts.
"The public health priority is to control things at the source," said Jane McCammon, an industrial hygienist with the Denver office of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
McCammon co-wrote a February NIOSH report that pinpointed the risk as the volume of carbon monoxide coming out the tailpipes of boat engines.
The report, done in cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard, measured the CO on 10 types of recreational boats, including ski boats, cabin cruisers, deck boats and fishing boats.
Even while moving, the report said, "Most of the evaluated boats generated hazardous CO concentrations . . . that often exceeded 1,000 parts per million."
Noting that the World Health Organization considered 87 parts per million the upper limit on safe exposure over a 15-minute period, the report said: "When large gasoline-powered engines operate as designed and have no catalytic converter or other pollution control device, dangerously high CO concentrations are commonly emitted into the atmosphere."
Boat engines are just car engines without emission controls, said James Carroll, a small-engine expert with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "So we're talking about 1970s levels of emissions," he said.
Carroll's institute has a $900,000 contract with the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, to determine whether catalytic converters, which burn off smog at temperatures between 900 and 1,400 degrees, can be installed on boats without sparking fires.
Using engines and boats donated by the marine industry, which has joined the Coast Guard in supporting the work, Carroll says he hopes to test an engine in August modified to meet the increasingly strict emission controls California plans to phase in between this year and 2007.
A spokesman for the Air Resources Board said the agency had acted to reduce the sheer volume of pollution generated by pleasure craft, rather than to curb CO boating deaths. But the agency was aware that reductions in carbon monoxide emissions would be a fringe benefit of cleaning the air.
That benefit could be huge, however. Paul Roberts, a pollution expert with Sonoma Technology Inc. in Petaluma, estimates that one boat emits as much CO as 188 cars. STI is helping study yet another thread of the marine carbon monoxide issue - the concern that people who work or congregate near any large gathering of boats may inhale elevated levels of CO.
Over Memorial Day weekend, STI, NIOSH and the Arizona Department of Health Services conducted three independent studies of carbon monoxide levels around Lake Havasu, a popular boating destination on the California-Arizona border where hundreds of boats routinely gather.
STI, which measured CO levels in the ambient air around the lake, is scheduled to report its findings in October. NIOSH tracked the carbon monoxide levels in the blood of 36 police officers and emergency medical personnel who worked that weekend. Arizona officials performed similar checks on 62 revelers.
Both NIOSH and the Arizona state officials issued reports in June, and their findings suggest that simply breathing the air in boat-congested zones may boost carbon monoxide blood levels.
"The cumulative carbon monoxide exposure increased as the day progressed," said Arizona health officials, who measured CO blood levels as high as 23 percent to 26 percent - enough to cause headaches and mild nausea. "The (carbon monoxide blood) levels observed late in the day posed a public health hazard."
While research goes on, thousands of Californians are heading to waterways this summer, with varying degrees of understanding - and common sense - about the safety issues swirling around pleasure craft.
Coast Guard officials continue to believe that education, not design changes, offers the best and quickest means to curb the newly recognized CO risk, especially in light of the fact that any fixes on new engines would not affect the thousands of existing boats that will emit high levels of CO for years to come.
"We have the responsibility for trying to stop these people from getting killed, and we're getting beat up for not doing enough, (but) it's more complex than that," said the Coast Guard's Cappel.
He laments the fact that many boaters routinely ignore state laws that require people to wear life vests when near the water - the one safety measure that would save more lives than anything else.
A sampling of opinion around Folsom Lake not long after the Farr tragedy found people talking about the balance between taking personal responsibility for safety, and placing the onus on the government or the boating industry.
"You couldn't put enough placards around a boat to warn of all the possible risks," said Steve Sheldon, 43, out with his wife and kids, and two other families.
The grown-ups sat under a canopy, watching their children play along the shore. Their empathy for Mike Farr and his sadness over his son's drowning was tinged with disbelief that parents would let their children bodysurf so close to the back of a boat. Sitting in a low-slung chair, hugging her toddler to her chest, Barbara Sheldon, 42, shook her head as she thought about Anthony Farr.
"He should have had his life vest on," she said.
Mark Gibson, the Folsom Lake ranger who investigated the drowning of Anthony Farr, said he recommended that the Placer County district attorney consider filing charges in connection with the fact that the boy was not wearing a life vest on that fateful night.
Robert Goebel, a senior investigator with Placer County, said the district attorney's office had not yet determined whether anyone involved should be charged with violating state law. "We're not in a hurry to make a snap decision," he said.
Mike Anderson, boating safety officer for the Shasta County Sheriff's Department, said people must wear life vests "when being pulled by" a motorcraft. But people do not have to wear vests while swimming. Anderson, who is not connected to the Farr case, said teak surfing might be a gray area, because if the person is riding the wave and not hanging onto the boat, are they swimming, or are they being "pulled?"
Whatever the legal repercussions, the life jacket issue haunts Mike Farr. "In hindsight, he should have had a life jacket on," he said, describing his sense of loss and guilt this way: "You know that scared feeling you get when your heart drops? Times that by an infinite amount, and then it never goes away. It's in my stomach every single day."
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