Photo: US Coast Guard
You can’t make this stuff up. A container ship owner and ship manager are suing a California pharmacy for selling prescription drugs to a harbor pilot prior to an allision with a bridge five years ago.
On a very foggy morning in November 2007, the container ship M/V Cosco Busan, outbound from Oakland, struck the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, ripping a 212-foot-long by 10-foot-high by 8-foot-deep gash in side of the ship in way of two fuel oil tanks, spilling over 1,250 barrels of oil. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reported that one cause of the allision was the “the pilot’s degraded cognitive performance from his use of impairing prescription medications.”
The pilot, Captain John Joseph Cota, was sufficiently impaired by prescription drugs that he could not read the ship’s radar, nor effectively communicate with the ship’s officers. (Language issues also contributed to the failures in communication.) Captain Cota was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for negligence.
The total cost of the environmental cleanup from the spill was roughly $70 million. Ultimately, the ship owner, Regal Stone Ltd. and the ship manager, Fleet Management Ltd., agreed to pay a total of $44 million dollars for their part in the oil spill.
Now, in an attempt to recover some those millions, Regal Stone Ltd. and Fleet Management Ltd.have filed a lawsuit against Longs Drug Store in Petaluma, arguing that the pills dispensed by pharmacists at a Longs Drug Store in Petaluma clouded pilot John Cota’s judgment and led the ship to slam into the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
Thanks to Phil Leon for passing the story along.
This is quite interesting and a clever use of the United States legal system. A pharmcist has a legal responsibility to check that there is no conflict between medications, also that the patient is not getting the same medication from mulitiple sources, if at all possible. Since various Agencies now board and arrest Masters and Officers from their ships, regardless of Flag State, it is nice to see the tables turned!!
Perhaps this may cause a much needed review of protocols and procedures by various Federal, State and Local Agencies who it seems have to learn to pay their overnight sexual companions properly ( my Dad gave me that lecture when I was fifteen!!) and not make the U.S. look like totally idiotic internationally.
Good Watch.
Ignoring for a moment the pilot’s individual culpability, the NTSB report points out the Coast Guard’s failures in renewing the pilot’s license despite the number of health and psychiatric problems on the pilot’s record. The pilot, nevertheless, had a “fit for duty letter” from his physician. The ship owner and operator can’t sue the Coast Guard, so they are going after the pharmacy which apparently provided the pilot with legally prescribed drugs.
Let us not forget the deplorable behaviour of the U.S. Agencies towards the vessel’s Master at the time. Also of further interest the single descenting opinion in the NTSB Report was written by the lady who had refused to sign the Report and later, on the change of Administration, became Head of the NTSB.
Good Watch
and of course it is DISSENTING not ‘descenting’, sometimes my English escapes me!!
Good Watch