Speed, small talk led to oil-tanker crash, inquiry finds

A tanker transporting liquefied petroleum gas was coming in too fast and at too steep an angle when it crashed into a wharf at Cherry Point, Washington, north of Bellingham, the National Transportation Safety Board has found.

It didn’t help that the captain and the pilot of the Levant engaged in two minutes of “non-pertinent conversation” on the bridge as the 741-foot-long ship bore down on the dock.

Federal accident investigators released their findings on the December 2019 crash on Thursday.

The tanker Levant had come from South Korea to load up on liquefied petroleum gas – a pressurized mix of propane and butane – at the Petrogas export terminal in Ferndale.

According to Alberta-based Petrogas, it is the only LPG export terminal on the west coast of North America.