Originally Posted by
Nick Salvador
While I can understand the reluctance to have some "outsider(s)" come in to assess this accident, I personally believe some measure of organizational independence is necessary. If we don't have that, we risk drinking our own bathwater. There might be a reluctance to ask the difficult questions, or make difficult decisions if we self analyze. We're too close to the accident, to the people involved, and to the local culture to be truly unbiased.
Now, does this mean that US Sailing won't send us the chumps that blamed the Wingnuts accident wholly on the boat design? Who can say. @Kimmy, that's why the USCG is hauling in sailors to do the investigation rather than running the investigation themselves. I personally believe that they're much more comfortable if we police ourselves. I suspect that they don't think we were doing that in this incidence, because we were rolling from an accident/loss of life, to a memorial, to another race on Saturday with no obvious change in procedures. Hence the call for outside assistance.
At the end of the day, they're just going to come up with recommendations anyway. It will eventually be up to us what measures to implement and how to do so in an effective manner. That's what the USCG wants from us...they want to understand the root causes of the accident, and they want to know if there was anything that we as a community could have been done to prevent the losses or at a minimum mitigate the risk while still conducting the event. Bottom line: they want to see that we're not sloughing this off as "one of those things that happens when you race".
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