An accident which caused the death of a fisherman who was “catapulted” overboard while working on a trawler off the coast of Aberdeen was “entirely foreseeable”.
Annang Nuertey was a crew member the Banff-registered Aquarius when he was thrown overboard and drowned in August last year
Now the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) has revealed the 47-year-old Ghanaian was standing inside a slack part of rope which “snapped tight with a loud bang, striking Annang and catapulting him backwards over the boat’s port side and into the water”.
The report concludes the fisherman was standing in this “danger zone” as a result of a lack of deck space.
Investigators found a catalogue of 20 faults on board the Aquarius, including that the work Mr Nuerty was carrying out was “unnecessarily hazardous” and that the failure of the rope stopper which resulted in him going into the North Sea was “entirely foreseeable”.
He was last seen shortly before 2am on August 17, 2015. His body has never been found.
The MAIB report reveals that the crew struggled to pull Mr Nuertey – who was not equipped with a life jacket – back on to the Aquarius because neither they nor the vessel were adequately prepared to deal with the emergency.
The boat did not carry a dedicated means of recovering a person from the water, and man overboard drills were not practiced.
Dangerous tasks on the trawler had not been risk-assessed and crew members worked long hours without the minimum legal amount of rest or leave.
Steve Clinch, chief inspector of marine accidents, said: “This is yet another tragic example of a crew member losing his life after going overboard from a fishing vessel.
“The crewman did not wear a personal flotation device when working on the open deck and his crewmates were not able to recover him before he was lost to the sea.”
Mr Clinch said the investigation found that needlessly dangerous working practices on Aquarius were “considered to be the acceptable norm” by the owners and skippers of the boat.
He added: “Aquarius had been issued with multiple safety-related deficiencies by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) prior to the accident, however these appeared to have made little difference to how the boat was operated.”
The MAIB has issued recommendations to the boat’s owners, the staffing agency and the MCA.
