It’s a problem that, in the scope of things, is a mere drop in the vast waters of greater Puget Sound. But if you’re the one left high and dry, it’s still frustrating.
Pamela Sipe, of Clinton, commutes by ferry each weekday via Mukilteo. She typically catches the 5:05 a.m. sailing, the first of the day for the Tokitae.
Lately, though, she’s been hitting the road earlier to catch the 4:40 a.m. sailing on the Kittitas after getting emails three days in a row about the 5:05 being canceled “due to a shortage of Coast Guard documented crew.”
It’s a troubling pattern, Sipe said. “Is there a corrective action being implemented or is this just something we can expect from now on?”
Missed sailings are a perennial problem, and state leaders list them as a top priority, wrote Ian Sterling, a Washington State Ferries spokesman.
“Missed sailings due to crew shortages are hands down the most frustrating thing that we deal with at Ferries,” Sterling said. “While we’ve made great strides in the last year and a half in reducing the number, they still do occur more than we would like..”
Of Washington State Ferries’ roughly 84,000 trips so far this year, 28 have missed sailings due to crew, according to Washington State Department of Transportation figures. That’s 0.03 percent.
By comparison, in all of 2013, staffing issues caused 95 cancellations, out of a total of 162,897 sailings, or nearly 0.06 percent.
System-wide, about 99.5 percent of scheduled sailings are completed.
The ferry system has an on-time rate of about 94 percent, which has slipped in recent years. Meanwhile, ridership is the highest it has been in many years — up 3 percent system-wide in the past year.
Missed sailings can occur for a variety of reasons, including poor weather and maintenance projects.
Port Townsend-Coupeville sailings were missed July 10 after the Hood Canal Bridge was closed for seven hours because of a mechanical problem.
Union officials report dispatch errors for some recent cases.
Yet quite often a run is canceled because of a lack of personnel. People get sick. People oversleep. And Coast Guard rules prohibit a vessel from sailing without a certain number of crew members on board.
“We’re stretched thin all the time, but especially during the summer,” Sterling said.
This is not a new problem, of course.
In 2012, then-Gov. Chris Gregoire told ferry employees to “go to work” after a spate of 37 missed summer sailings.
Early-morning runs are at particular risk of being canceled.
The only true solution would be to over-staff the boats, which would come with significant costs, Sterling said.
Instead, on-call deckhands are getting a lot of phone calls this summer for overtime shifts because of “the extreme crewing shortage,” according to the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific.
The union is negotiating a new contract with the state. Past negotiations have left workers feeling sour.
Workers took a 3 percent pay cut during the Recession. That’s since been made up, but wages remain a sticking point, said Alan Cote’, union president.
Attracting people to maritime careers is a challenge across the industry.
Yet the state is at a further disadvantage when an on-call worker can take a job — that pays below the industry average — only to see the work disappear after the summer rush is past, Cote’ said.
“You have to pay to play. I know people are going to say ‘these union guys are always going to ask for more money,’ and that’s probably true,” Cote’ said. At the same time, there has to be some kind of enticement for workers to take on these jobs, he said.
Ferry deckhands do more than direct traffic, he added. They fight fires, give CPR and follow strict security protocols in an era of terrorist threats.
In the meantime, “a special communication” was to go out last week to the entire fleet about sailing on schedule, said Sterling, the Ferries spokesman. “Literally tens of thousands of sailings go as planned, and to have this issue with a fraction of them is very frustrating to us and remains a top priority.”
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