Burn Victim Alerted Crew to Fire

Becky Haase wasn’t even supposed to be at the Christmas party thrown by her employer aboard a boat in Marina del Rey on Saturday night.

Haase, who was invited because she had missed an earlier party, became a part of a near tragedy, however, when the boat went up in flames. She was forced to swim to safety and suffered second- and third-degree burns on her hands and forehead as a result of the accident.

But because she was on board that night, some of her co-workers may have been spared injuries--or even worse.

Haase, 54, of Glendale, was the first to notice sparks flying from a funnel of the chartered 70-foot Sundowner yacht, aboard which she and 63 other employees of Trust Company of the West, a Los Angeles money-management firm, were celebrating Christmas with dinner, drinks and dancing.

About midway through the four-hour party, Haase and her husband, Sheldon, alerted crew members about the sparks, and within minutes, it seemed, the entire boat was in flames and her co-workers were jumping into the water, she said.

“They told me that it may have made a difference, it may have helped [the crew] get everyone off the boat in time,” Haase, the most severely injured of all the party-goers, said Tuesday at the Grossman Burn Center, where she is being treated.

Coast Guard investigators said crew members tried unsuccessfully to put the fire out with an extinguisher, but flames surged rapidly through the roof of a dining room, and fire erupted on all sides of the boat.

The captain maneuvered the boat toward a floating dock about 60 yards offshore as the crew assembled all the passengers on a lower deck. But when the boat somehow drifted away from the dock, the passengers were forced to jump to safety, with the crew tossing life jackets to them, Haase said.

None of the passengers came in contact with the flames, but the fire was so intense that Haase was burned even while she was in the water, said Dr. Peter Grossman, director of the burn center.

“As she was reaching for the dock, there were portions of her hands that were not covered by the wet clothing or by the water,” Grossman said. “And when she turned to look back at the boat, which was fully engulfed, her face was burned. It seems to have been a very intense fire.”

Haase was released from the burn center Tuesday but will probably return for one or more outpatient reconstructive surgeries, Grossman said.

The cause of the fire is under investigation by the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board.

Haase said it was pandemonium as the boat was being evacuated, but said somehow she was not afraid.

“I really never was frightened. I personally had the assurance that I was going to get out of there,” she said. “What I was really worried about was my purse. I thought, ‘what’s going to happen to my coat, my shoes,’ ” she said, laughing.