Deaths Prompt Suit : Weather: Accuracy Put to the Test

When the fishing vessels Sea Fever and Fairwind left Hyannis Harbor near here late on Friday morning, Nov. 21, 1980, the weather forecast called for what are fair conditions in the world of lobstermen--25-knot winds and 5-to-10-foot waves.

But, early the next morning, when they reached their lobster traps 100 miles at sea on the southeast slope of Georges Bank, the lobstermen found themselves in the grip of a monster storm, with winds raging up to 80 knots and black waves cresting at more than 50 feet. Within hours, four crew members in the two vessels were thrown overboard to their deaths.

For commercial deep-sea fishermen who regularly must test the harsh vagaries of nature, it was an all-too-familiar tragedy. But, this time, it drew an unfamiliar response.

Rage at Weather Service

The grieving families of the dead fishermen chose not to rage at the cruel seas but, rather, to rage at the National Weather Service for failing to predict the storm accurately. The families filed lawsuits charging negligence and asked $3.2 million in damages. Last Dec. 21, after a seven-day trial here, U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro, in a precedent-setting decision, ruled that the federal government was liable for damages. Tauro will decide the dollar amount within weeks.

The matter of Honour Brown et al. vs. United States of America is a singular portrait of the way in which modern technology can affect those as tradition-bound as lobstermen, empowering and enslaving them at the same time. For, according to Judge Tauro’s ruling, the lobstermen were doomed not by fate or nature’s caprice or their own mistakes but by the trust they placed in a broken wind sensor atop a solitary buoy, bobbing on the open sea 100 miles from shore.

State-of-Art Equipment

There was a time, just 15 years ago, when veteran New England lobstermen such as Robert Brown still put to sea much as they had for decades, relying on instinct, experience, their barometers and the collective wisdom of fellow skippers. Even then, aware of nature’s sudden swings in mood, they never strayed more than 15 miles from shore, close enough to retreat to land if the weather threatened.

But, when Robert Brown’s son Peter, 28, guided the Sea Fever toward Georges Bank for one last fishing trip before Thanksgiving in 1980, he was equipped with state-of-the-art VHF radios, radar, depth sounders and Loran navigational position finders, which allow masters to plot their course through satellite readings.

Most important, he had a special single-sideband radio capable of receiving weather broadcasts more than 100 miles out to sea, much farther than the normal VHF radio’s range, which stops at the horizon. With the guidance provided by the powerful new radio, lobstermen could venture far past the old 15-mile limit. They could follow their prey as the lobsters migrated in winter to the Continental Shelf.

The forecasts Peter Brown could hear on the single-band radio were also far more sophisticated than in the past.

As a result of projects adopted in the mid-1970s by the weather service’s parent, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the forecasts were generated by a complex national computer guidance system that draws information from all manner of sources. These include high atmosphere balloons, satellites 22,000 miles above the earth, ships at sea and 38 special buoys that transmit to the computer hourly reports on wind speed and direction, sea-level pressure, air temperature, sea surface temperature and wave height.

As it happened, the particular sensor that measures wind speed and direction on a single North Atlantic buoy had been having trouble for much of 1980. It stopped reporting in the spring, and then the buoy was hit by a vessel in August. At-sea repairs were made on Aug. 11, but the wind sensor failed again on Sept. 6. The troublesome buoy was located at station 44003--Georges Bank.

Three Strongly Worded Memos

During 1980, Rodney Winslow, then the meteorologist in charge of the Weather Service office in Boston, wrote three strongly worded memos to his superiors, reporting the problem, warning of the buoy’s importance, and urging repair.

“This buoy is extremely important to us. . . . It serves as one of the few reliable observation points in an area where a tremendous number of fishing vessels operate daily . . . ,” he reported. “I urge every effort be made to bring and maintain these buoys on continuous operational status. Must we once again open ourselves to political repercussion because of the failure of an important piece of equipment?”

But NOAA officials were faced with considerations about budget and manpower limits. A buoy costs $200,000 to install and maintain for a year. During the hostile winter weather season, an average of three of the National Data Buoy Program’s 38 buoys need repair at any one time. Rather than replace or repair the broken device on the Georges Bank buoy immediately, NOAA officials decided to wait until January, when the buoy was already scheduled to get a new, improved type of wind sensor.

Neither Skipper Aware

Peter Brown knew nothing of a faulty wind sensor when he prepared the 46 1/2-foot wooden-hulled Sea Fever the morning of Nov. 21. Nor did Bill Garnos, master of the 52-foot steel-hulled Fairwind.

Their custom was to monitor continuous weather service forecasts on Channel 16 of their VHF radios. Once past the VHF range of 40 to 50 miles, they would switch to the single-sideband radios, which provide forecasts on a fixed schedule every six hours. The fishermen customarily listened to the 5 a.m., 11 a.m., 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. broadcasts out of Portsmouth, Va., which were repeated 20 minutes later on another broadcast out of Boston.

The weather forecast on the 11 a.m. broadcast Friday, Nov. 21, predicted that a low-pressure area off the South Carolina coast would intensify and move northeast to a position south of Nova Scotia. A marine warning might be needed south of Nova Scotia for Friday night and Saturday. But the Georges Bank area, adjacent to this region, would get nothing more extreme than showers. So the vessels went to sea.

Acceptable Weather Predicted

Twelve hours later, when they approached the Georges Bank buoy, Brown listened to the 11 p.m. forecast, which still predicted acceptable weather. Brown later said he would have turned back then if he had heard a storm warning. Instead, he went to sleep.

The 5 a.m. forecast Saturday morning for the first time predicted gale force winds for the Georges Bank area. The on-duty crewman awakened Brown with the news. The vessel’s master needed no forecast, though, to see that the winds were already at 40 knots, with waves up to 25 feet and heavy rain. By late morning, the winds were howling at 80 knots, with waves reaching 50 feet.

Brown headed his vessel into the wind, trying to maintain stability. So did Garnos on the Fairwind.

At 11:30 a.m., as the Fairwind tried to ride up a giant wave, the storm forced the vessel around and down the slope. When its bow hit the trough, the boat somersaulted end over end. Only one of four crew members, Ernest Hazard, survived by reaching an inflated life raft.

At 1 p.m., the Sea Fever found itself also surfing down the face of a 60-foot wave. When the vessel reached the trough, it veered broadside to the wind. The wave broke on the boat and flooded the pilothouse, washing crew member Gary Brown into the sea and to his death.

Three Other Vessels Sink

Besides the Fairview, three other fishing vessels nearby that morning sank. The Sea Fever, in the eye of the storm, managed to ride out the tumult, heading home Sunday morning.

“If anyone knew it would be so bad out there, we never would have gone out,” Brown said when he reached shore. “None of the fishermen had ever seen anything like it.”

The decision by the grieving families to blame the government rather than nature for the tragedy began with the brother of the crewman washed from the Sea Fever. He called Michael Latti, a lawyer for whom he sometimes works as an investigator. Latti’s specialty is admiralty law.

When Latti first filed a negligence suit under the federal Suits in Admiralty Act on behalf of Gary Brown’s widow, Honour, in February, 1981, Judge Tauro said he privately thought the lawyer was crazy. In chambers, the judge asked Latti if he was being requested to rule that the weather can be predicted, and that the weather service has a duty to get it right.

But Latti had something else in mind.

Through sources at the National Weather Service, Latti had learned quickly about the problem with the buoy at Georges Bank. The Indian Towing case was immediately brought to mind.

Indian Towing Co. vs. United States was one of the landmark cases in maritime law. A Coast Guard lighthouse broke down, and a tug with a barge in tow ran aground without the lighthouse guidance. The barge company sued, charging negligence. The Supreme Court in 1955 ruled that the government had no obligation to provide a lighthouse at all. But by providing one, the high court said, the Coast Guard had made skippers reliant upon its guidance, so the agency then had a duty to keep the light in good working order.

Latti felt he had a comparable situation.

“It was only in the past 10 years that offshore lobstermen started going past the 15-mile limit,” Latti said recently. “They did this because of the special radios and forecasts. The lobstermen came to rely on that, and the government by providing the service, induced this reliance. So the government then had a duty to keep the service in good working order.”

Charges Breach of Duty

By failing to repair the broken wind sensor on the Georges Bank buoy, or at least give warning that it was not functioning properly, Latti reasoned, the weather service had breached that duty.

To make that point in court, though, he would have to prove that the faulty sensor was one reason why the forecasters had failed to predict correctly the monster storm. It need not be the only cause--just a substantial factor.

So it came about that the trial of Honour Brown vs. United States did, indeed, become in part a heated inquiry into how accurately weather can be forecasted.

Latti made much of the three memos written during 1980 by meteorologist Winslow about the urgent need for repair of the Georges Bank buoy.

He also called to the stand as an expert witness William Haggard, a consulting meteorologist who had spent years working for the Navy and NOAA in the field of marine and aviation forecasting.

Haggard testified that the weather service’s tracking of the storm had been off 90 to 150 miles throughout its journey, because the forecasters did not have the Georges Bank buoy data on wind direction and speed. With that data, he said, the weather service could have issued a storm warning in its 11 p.m. broadcast Friday, in time for the vessels to turn back.

Weather Map Lines Skewed

The failure, he said, came not from the lack of one particular reading at a single moment in time, but rather, the absence of information over many hours. Without this flow of data, the isobars, or lines of pressure, that the forecasters plotted on their weather map were skewed.

“Had they had the wind direction and speed at the buoy . . . “ Haggard said, “they would have realized that a piece of their jigsaw puzzle was turned at a wrong angle. And if they believed that piece was significant, then they would have to rearrange the puzzle to fit that piece.”

To David Hutchinson, the U.S. Department of Justice trial attorney defending the government, Latti’s entire case seemed nothing less than ludicrous.

Hutchinson advanced a number of arguments:

It didn’t matter whether or not the Georges Bank buoy wind sensor was working, he contended, because when the doomed ships passed nearby at about the time of the 11 p.m. broadcast on Nov. 21, the weather there was just as it had been forecast. If working, the wind sensors would simply have confirmed the forecast, and what the lobstermen could see firsthand.

Dismissed Effect on Map

To Hutchinson, the idea that the lack of data over many hours had skewed the forecasters’ isobar map seemed absurd, an obscurely indirect cause not at all comparable to the lighthouse breakdown in the Indian Towing case.

Besides, Hutchinson argued, the fishermen were not out 100 miles because of the Georges Bank buoy. That buoy had not been installed until 1977, some time after lobster vessels had first started venturing far from shore. The introduction of the sophisticated Loran navigational system was what empowered the lobstermen to pursue their catch in the dead of winter.

But above all, the government’s lawyer repeatedly advanced the fundamental point that weather forecasts simply cannot be relied upon. He observed that the lobstermen in their own testimony had acknowledged they knew this all too well.

Second Storm Implicated

To underscore this point, Hutchinson produced his own expert witness, meteorologist Frederick Sanders, a retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, who testified that the killer storm was not the low-pressure center tracked from the Carolina coast at all, but rather, a second low that formed suddenly in the Georges Bank area early Saturday morning.

This second low, Sanders said, absorbed the Carolina low that forecasters had been watching and exploded in what he called a “weather bomb.” The weather service’s computer guidance could not have predicted the weather bomb, Sanders said, and the Georges Bank buoy data would not have helped.

The lobstermen were lost, Hutchinson concluded, “as a result of a risk fishermen fishing in the offshore waters of New England have been exposed to for years, an ‘Act of God.’ ”

Those most caught in the middle in the matter of Honour Brown vs. United States were the weather service forecasters.

On the one hand, they were on record as greatly valuing the data provided by buoys. But the meteorologists’ testimony also reflected both a cautious protectiveness about their agency and an acute sense of the limits of their craft.

Concur With Witness

The forecasters were not at all sure they could have predicted the storm even with the buoy data. Winslow and Dave Feit, who issued the Friday morning forecast, agreed with the government’s expert, saying that a new low formed and explosively deepened in the vicinity of Georges Bank.

“I would have to say that it (buoy data) probably would not have changed the forecast because of the way this storm developed . . . “ Feit said. “We did not consider the possibility of a new low off Georges Bank. . . . The explosion of this storm, I did not believe then and I do not believe now, was forecastable.”

The surprise storm, Feit said, “was not the first and it won’t be the last. People must always be prepared for the weather to go sour.”

In court, the meteorologists’ efforts to explain how they work provided revealing insights that seemed to stun the judge.

Buoy data, they said, was one part of the puzzle among many that they put together to formulate a forecast. Its importance varies depending on how much other data was available. Without the Georges Bank information, for example, the forecasters had used data from the Nantucket Light wind sensor 40 miles away. Moreover, different forecasters rely more on one element of the puzzle than do other forecasters.

‘Not Total Subjectivity’

“It’s not total subjectivity,” Winslow said, “but each forecaster has all the information at his disposal and he uses it as he deems necessary. . . . The puzzle may not fit exactly the same from one forecaster to another.”

Judge Tauro was nonplussed. While being trained, were not all forecasters instructed in certain basic procedures? he asked.

“No sir,” Feit said.

Tauro: “Are you telling me that meteorologists are free to follow whatever course--whatever design they feel is appropriate on an individual basis in determining what the weather is?”

Feit: “Yes, sir.”

By the end of the seven-day trial, Tauro could not disguise his impatience with what he saw as inconsistencies in Feit’s testimony. The meteorologist had seemed both to blame the lack of buoy data and to say the data would not have helped. Tauro also made clear he found the testimony of Latti’s expert, Haggard, the most persuasive. In a 40-page decision issued Dec. 21, the judge embraced Latti’s case in its entirety.

Hails Ruling as ‘Landmark’

Latti called Tauro’s ruling a “landmark” and happily told reporters that the decision “is very significant because it’s the first case where the United States was held responsible for basically an inaccurate forecast.”

The judge noted that the government’s duty recognized in his decision was a limited one, owed not to the general public but to an identifiable group of mariners who place particular reliance on special forecasts, a group with whom the weather service had met to encourage daily forecast monitoring.

Moreover, once Tauro rules on damages, the government will appeal the case, and even Latti acknowledges “ours will be the laboring oar” before the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.

Technology Significant

However the courts resolve the case, it does not appear that Honour Brown vs. United States will affect the ways of New England lobstermen as much as has the last decade’s technological advances.

Peter Brown, the Sea Fever’s master, appeared in court only for his one day of testimony, then promptly returned to the sea, where his father before him had toiled for 25 years and where he has spent much of his life since finishing high school in 1975.

Lawyers scrambling to prepare for the damages portion of the litigation during a February snowstorm in Boston vainly tried to reach him, but he was working his lobster traps, 100 miles from shore.

“What can you do about it?” Brown told a local reporter before departing. “Maybe it was one of those things that just come up, or maybe they missed it. Either way, Gary and the guys on the Fairwind are still dead.”