Murder of the First Degree!

G- Boats centre of Gravity.

B- Boats Centre of Buoyancy.

M- Meta centre.

GM- Meta centric Height.

The senseless boat tragedy at Thekaddy, Kerala, took my breath away! A boat that sank, in what was probably 10 meters of water, killing upwards of thirty people, many of whom were kids, who were on a holiday. If you carefully sift the facts, you can see, no feel, the apathy of the Kerala administration, who runs the show.

Why?


Boats, poorly maintained, overcrowded, a probable lack of Life Saving Equipment & inexperienced crew, would have led to this disaster.

What went wrong?

The boats Centre of Gravity ( G ), would have gone up unnaturally, as the boats skipper, would have allowed tourists, crowd the upper deck. This would have taken the "G" above the "M", leading the boat to have a negative, GM, or meta centric height, causing the boat to become 'unstable' as against a normal 'stable' state.

As passengers, rushed to one side of the upper deck, to have a look at, animals, the boat would have listed & coupled with the negative GM ( unstable ), capsized and sank.

I do not want this to sound like rocket science, because it is not & anybody with a reasonable idea of ship stability or naval architecture would be up to speed on dangers that light weight boats of the size that went down, would face, with shifting masses on board.

The boat crew should have kept passengers on the main deck & warned them against rushing to one side of the boat.

Early in my career at sea I had a similar experience & got away with my life, because, I had just enough of knowledge to do the right things, in the available time.


The poor folk who died at Thekaddy, did not have an idea & the guys who were expected to take care of them were pathetic.


That to me is murder of the first degree!


The responsibility eventually rests with the top management who recruited, poorly trained people with even more abysmal levels of commitment.

Eventually, it is simbly, Human Resource Management!