Sunk immigration boat `a floating death trap'
26.02.2007
THE Immmigration Department vessel Malu Sara, which sank with the loss of five lives in the Torres Strait in October 2005, was ``a death trap in which those aboard did not stand a chance''.
Boating magazine publisher Peter Webster said the Australian Transport Safety Bureau report into the Malu Sara ``was ridiculous and obviously done by people who had no experience with boating''.
``The Immigration Department and the Queensland Transport Department must take a lot of the responsibility for this tragic incident which claimed the lives of innocent people,'' Mr Webster said. ``The problems began with the construction of the vessel, the fact that it was never checked or properly surveyed, and then to send an untrained, unlicensed skipper on a 74km open-sea voyage with no navigation equipment made it all unbelievable,'' he said.
``This boat would have sunk in a normal tropical rain storm. That is no exaggeration -- there was nowhere for the water to run out as the scuppers were below the water line.''
Two Immigration Department officers, two women and a four-year-old girl drowned when the Malu Sara sank near Badu Island at 2.15am on October 15, 2005.
The skipper, Wilfred Baira, 35, used his satellite telephone to advise his superior officers on Thursday Island at 4pm on the previous afternoon that he was ``lost in fog''.
The vessel was not equipped with a radio, and for the next 10 hours Mr Biara made scores of calls telling how he did not know where he was, ending at 2.15am with the message they were ``taking water and sinking fast''.
His senior officer on Thursday Island, former federal police officer Garry Chaston, manned the phone until 6pm, when he handed over to a junior officer and left to take his wife to dinner at the local lawn bowls club.
Mr Webster said he had checked the route taken by the Malu Sara, as tracked later by the satellite phone call positions.
``The safety bureau report does not say this, but there is no doubt in my mind with the weight they carried, the heavy seas and the time travelled, this boat ran out of fuel,'' he said.
``They have then anchored, and with all the people, the motors and the water congregating at the back of the boat, it sank -- and it would have done so very quickly,'' he said. ``They had no chance at all.''
Rescue authorities did not get a boat out to the site of the sinking for another five hours, and all that was found was the emergency position indicating a radio beacon floating in the rough seas whipped up by 20-knot winds.
Federal Opposition transport spokesman Martin Ferguson said yesterday that Labor had asked more than 100 questions of the Howard Government.
On July 31, 2006, in answer to a question on notice from Tasmanian Labor senator Kerry O'Brien, Environment Minister Ian Campbell said he would not direct the Australian Rescue and Co-ordination Centre to transcribe the telephone conversations between the stricken vessel and rescue authorities.
