Lake District: Boat Safety Scheme not ‘comprehensive’
The National Park has decided against the MAIB's recommendation to implement the boat safety scheme.
In an authority meeting yesterday, the Lake District National Park declined to adopt Boat Safety Scheme (BSS) standards.
The standards, set out by the Canal & River Trust and the Environment Agency, were recommended for implementation in the park by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB).
Mark Eccles, Head of Park Management for the Lake District, said the authority believed education was the best means of ensuring boater safety.
“As part of our lake management, we believe the best way to ensure boat users understand how to stay safe on a boat is through the education rather than enforcement,” Eccles said in a statement.
Eccles said the National Park will continue to share the BSS’ safety campaign information and will run their own promotional campaign beginning this spring.
“Although we will not be adopting the BSS, we will be ensuring boat users on LDNP property have third party liability insurance prior to setting out onto a lake,” he continued.
Eccles said insurance checks would cover Coniston and Ullswater moorings but not Windemere’s, which are managed by district council authorities or are privately held. Many of those moorings have an insurance requirement already in place, according to the statement.
In April 2013, Kelly Webster and her 10-year-old daughter Lauren Thornton died of carbon monoxide poisoning when a generator was left running on board a private boat in Windemere.
Matthew Eteson, the boat’s owner and Webster’s partner, was found to have been grossly negligent by an MAIB report into the incident.
The MAIB report found that the generator was running without exhaust exiting the boat, without adequate ventilation and with no power supply to the boat’s carbon monoxide alarm.
Eteson was charged with two counts of manslaughter and given a two-year suspended sentence in South Lakeland Magistrates Court in November 2015.
Eteson, according to the court’s ruling, was a registered and experienced Gas Safe installer. He fabricated an exhaust system for the generator and used the generator to power a fan heater in the passenger quarters while he, Webster and her daughter slept. The generator was not secured or anchored to the floor and joints in the exhaust pipework were poorly fabricated. The temperatures generated caused the pipework to fail as soft soldered joints melted, and as a result the exhaust gases containing carbon monoxide were discharged into the boat.
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