Capsized Boat Carried Twice Its Load Limit : Tragedy: Designed for 10, it was carrying 19 passengers when it overturned, killing a 3-year-old. The owner may have been unaware of safe capacity.

A 24-foot-long pleasure boat that capsized Sunday outside Los Angeles Harbor, killing a 3-year-old child and injuring several others, was carrying twice the number of passengers considered safe by boating standards, experts said Tuesday.

The vessel--crammed with 19 passengers, most of them children--should have been carrying no more than 10 people, according to Coast Guard safety officials and local boating experts.

“We were all talking about it today,” said Mike Mutter of Dick Sherrer Marine in Norwalk. “That boat was awfully overloaded.”

Coast Guard officials, however, have yet to state that the number of passengers was the main cause of the capsizing, saying their investigation is still under way.

Anthony Romero of La Puente, who had owned the craft for more than a year, may not have known its passenger limits because there was no capacity information displayed inside, officials said. Under federal law, boat manufacturers were not required to post such signs until 1982. Romero’s boat was built in 1973, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Peter Rennard said.

“There was no way for the operator to know,” Rennard said.

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Investigators believe the boat, carrying three families on a fishing trip, took on water after it was slammed by a wave, possibly from a larger vessel passing by.

The water flooded the boat’s hull through holes for electrical cables in the deck. That, coupled with the frantic movement of the passengers, may have overturned the vessel, investigators said.

“There was water coming in, and there were people moving around,” said Rennard. “The vessel rolled over with very little advance notice to the passengers.”

Adam Romero, 3, who was trapped in the boat’s submerged cabin, was killed. Three other children required medical treatment for hypothermia.

On Tuesday, one of the young victims was released from Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. A 4-year-old girl and a 10-month-old girl remained hospitalized at St. Mary’s Medical Center. The older child was listed in fair condition and the baby was in serious condition.

The survivors, five adults and 13 children, were in the 65-degree water more than five hours Sunday night before they were rescued by the Coast Guard. The adults protected the children by placing them on the overturned hull of the boat. All of the youngsters were wearing life jackets.

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Although limits vary according to the type of boat and the weight of the passengers, nine or 10 adults is usually the maximum for a 24-foot vessel similar to Romero’s, said Anthony Sederstrom, a Coast Guard chief warrant officer.

“Twenty-four-feet is not a real large boat,” Sederstrom said. “Nineteen people is a lot of people, granted a lot of them were children. It was pretty crowded.”

Sederstrom said the Coast Guard boarded Romero’s boat in February during a routine at-sea safety check and found no violations.

“If the Coast Guard were to have boarded the boat (on Sunday), we would have probably escorted it back to the dock and terminated its use for unsafe conditions,” Sederstrom said. “From the information I have, it was overloaded.”