| They had email onboard, so I suppose they had access to the internet. How hard is it to pull up the NHC's website? I don't understand why data is old: "The Weather Service takes hours to assemble its forecast models. After AWT takes time to analyze and pass along information to subscribers, the data is nine hours old, AWT officials acknowledged Wednesday when questioned by an attorney." Weather models, sure, but what about the NHC forecast track? I don't see why a private forecaster would have to do anything to that data other than process it to be sent out by their system. It takes seconds to process once you receive it. The entire process of getting the data ready to be sent to the ship shouldn't take that many minutes, though I don't know how long it takes for the data to actually get to the ship from the private weather forecaster. If a private weather forecaster wants to come up with their own track forecast, fine, but provide the NHC one too as soon as possible. I don't know what they did in this case though. I don't know why the track would be so delayed. (And then sending out an old one too, which they call an anomaly? Does no one work at this company?) Someone on a ship, sailing near a hurricane, should also be monitoring things constantly themselves. On a ship like that, if you go half an hour or an hour past the advisory time from the NHC without a current update from the NHC, however you get it, you need to work to get one. Contact someone on land and get them to read it to you if you have to. Obviously being near the storm was failure one, they should have turned around, or perhaps not even ever left the port. I guess private weather forecasters, at least some of them, are a lot worse than I thought. Though in this case, it seems there is uncertainty about what data they were getting from them, if any. It doesn't seem like AWT is that great, but it also doesn't seem like current weather data is a top priority to Tote, even now. The captain should have made sure he had up to date data. I believe I had read previously that it is standard practice to have someone on land that the captain could have contacted. I hope other shipping companies, and any other boaters, learn from these mistakes. "The ship did have access to information from the National Weather Service while on the northern portion of the route to Puerto Rico. The crew watched the Weather Channel." Perhaps that just means out of range you don't get it directly from the NWS. But it almost seems to indicate that you don't get NWS data from AWT, just their interpretation of it. |