Safety breaches on Lamma IV may hit insurance claims
Failure to comply with guidelines could affect compensation
Hongkong Electric and the sunken vessel it owned breached maritime safety guidelines by failing to keep a passenger list and not ensuring that children were wearing life jackets.
While the breaches may not result in any legal action, it may affect passengers' chances of claiming insurance.
The Marine Department's guidelines, formulated for vessels viewing the fireworks display, required coxswains and owners of all vessels to take four measures before the start of the voyage: inform all people on board of the location of the lifesaving equipment and the proper way to don a life jacket; require all children to wear a life jacket at all times; keep a passenger list containing their names; and adhere to the carrying capacity specified in the operating licence.
They won't compensate for something that could have been under control
"If people had followed the guidelines, [Monday's] incident would not have been that disastrous," marine director Francis Liu Hon-por conceded in a radio programme yesterday.
The collision of a public ferry and a motor launch, which was taking Hongkong Electric staff, family and friends to watch the fireworks on National Day, left 38 dead, including five children.
Many of the children wore no life jackets and, as of yesterday, Hongkong Electric had failed to release a full list of passengers.
Two days after the accident, a Hongkong Electric spokeswoman said the company only had a registration list, not a list of those finally on board. She said yesterday that the company had information on 127 passengers involved in the accident, three more than its first announcement of 124 passengers. But the government figure shows a total of 131 people dead or injured.