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The multi-day Seacor accident search and rescue effort by the U.S. Coast Guard and others will come to a solemn end on Monday at sunset, with eight of the 19 original crew members left unaccounted for and presumed dead. Six of the Seacor Power crew members were rescued directly following with capsizing of the oil rig lift boat. The remains of five crew members were retrieved from the waters of the Gulf but not from inside the overturned watercraft. As…

News regarding the Seacor accident has taken an even grimmer turn over the weekend. On Saturday evening it was learned that the owner of the Seacor Power, an oil rig lift boat, ordered the watercraft to take to the sea despite perilous warnings from the National Weather Service that tropical storm strength winds and “suddenly higher waves” were imminent. A few hours later and a mere eight miles from the shore, catastrophe struck. Hurricane strength wind gusts combined with crushing…

The Seacor Power left Port Fourchon on Tuesday, heading for an oil drilling site off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. The Seacor Power is what in the oil industry is known as a “lift boat” or a “jack-up boat.” In simple terms, a jack-up boat is something akin to a mobile oil rig platform. In the case of the Seacor Power, the craft and mobile oil rig was headed to a point in the Gulf located…

Two Iowa State University students are dead after a drowning accident on Little Wall Lake north of Ames, Iowa, the home of the school. The two deceased young men were among five members of the Iowa State University crew club who were rowing on the lake in near-freezing temperatures and at a time when wind gusted up to 30 miles per hour. The boat, technically known as a shell, carried four rowers and a coxswain. Emergency services were immediately called…

A federal grand jury in California handed down a 34-count indictment for manslaughter against Jerry Nehl Boylan, the 67-year-old captain of the dive boat christened Conception. The indictment, stemming from the deaths of 34 people on the pleasure watercraft, was announced overnight December 1-2, 2020, on a statement from United States Attorney Nick Hanna. The catastrophic blaze that destroyed the 75-foot dive boat and took the lives of 34 people occurred late in 2019 off the California coast, near Santa…